Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The Greek architect and urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis belonged to the group of professionals and thinkers who challenged the quality of urban environment and living, as it had been evolved up to the mid of the 20th century. Doxiadis identified the need for revisiting policies in modern urban planning and he mobilized any available means –theory, practice, education and communication- towards this end. Providing his services as a government’s consultant in several countries of the under-development world during the fifties and sixties, having established solid liaisons with distinguished Institutions in the U.S.A., having a remarkable portfolio of materialized projects with global impact and respectively a remarkable volume of written work, research and publications, having even created an Institute for postgraduate studies on the field, he went further beyond. He declared the necessity for a radical change in urban planning, by means of introducing a new scientific domain in the service of human settlements, that of Ekistics.
The proposed paper aims to explore the idea of Ekistics, through its implementation at the Master Plan of Islamabad, or otherwise the City of the Future. Doxiadis was assigned to design the new Federal Capital of Pakistan and he seized the opportunity to launch Ekistics with this project of global magnitude –both Islamabad and Ekistics could be benefited from such a gesture. Ekistics transcended the strict boundaries of urban planning, as social, political and economic factors were also involved. It constituted a holistic approach, which aimed towards the balance of the five primal elements of human settlements, namely Nature, Man, Society, Shells and Networks. And it is not the agenda pursued by means of the modernist functional city that is abandoned, it is rather that changes in the processes followed can be observed.
Description
Keywords
Ekistics Islamabad Internationalism Ecumenopolis
Pedagogical Context
Citation
SAKKA, Anastasia – Ekistics, or the Science of human settlements, through the paradigm of the Master Plan of Islamabad in REVISITING POST-CIAM GENERATION. Debates, proposals and intellectual framework. Porto: CEAA/ESAP-CESAP, 2019, p. 271-286