Ashwin Kanodia.- M.

arch – Seminar Rizvi college of architecture - sem

III

EKISTICS STUDY QUESTIONS

Q. What are the quality of life which is used as a basis of modern examples?
There are five basic principles which guide Man's relation to space, as
per doxiadis. As per his experience ,he list down the following 5 principles for
quality of life.
THE FIRST PRINCIPLE is Man's desire to maximize his potential contacts. He therefore
looks for a location that maximizes not his actual contacts (he may not want to visit anyone
at all) but his potential contacts.

Maximization of potential contacts. Given certain conditions

in a certain area, man will select the location which permits

a maximum of potential contacts.

THE SECOND PRINCIPLE is that Man always tries to do with a minimum of effort.
When he encounters a physical obstacle, such as a mountain, he does not cross it by the
most difficult route.

At a minimum of effort in terms of energy,

Time and cost man selects the most convenient routes.

THE THIRD PRINCIPLE is the optimization of Man's protective space. Man does not
like to be squeezed, either as an individual or a group unless for very short periods and for
special purposes. Only in moments of great love or great danger do we willingly squeeze up
close to one another.

Optimization of man’s protective space

Ashwin Kanodia.- M.arch – Seminar Rizvi college of architecture - sem
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THE FOURTH PRINCIPLE is the optimization of Man's relation to the ekistics

elements: Nature, Man, Shells, Society, and Networks.

Optimization of the quality of man’s relations

With his environment

THE FIFTH PRINCIPLE is the synthesis of all previous ones, which we will be able to
see operating in the case of the room

Optimization of the synthesis of the four

previous principles.
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Q. What are the Basic principles of the ekistics as a contribution to its development?

There are several basic principles on which ekistics are based, some of the more
important ones being:

A. Human happiness: The main purpose of a human settlement is to satisfy its inhabitants that
are to satisfy man. Human happiness is the ultimate goal in the creation of human
settlements.

B. Unity of purpose: We cannot achieve our goals unless we understand that we should
achieve a unity in the economic, social, political, administrative, technical, and esthetic
senses. Unless we understand the necessity of achieving such a unity, we are doomed to
failure as we cannot have a settlement satisfactory from the esthetic point of view but being
uneconomic, or vice versa. If so, we do not serve man.

C. Hierarchy of functions: To achieve proper solutions within our settlements, we should

understand that there is a hierarchy in all functions. A settlement for a few people has
different functions and requires a different conception from that serving a much greater
number of inhabitants. On every occasion, we must understand the place of our settlement
within the scope of the entire hierarchy of functions.

D. Four dimensions: It is wrong to consider a settlement as a static organization. Many times

the mistake of looking at settlements as two-dimensional phenomena is made. They
certainly have three physical dimensions, but even to limit ourselves to these only, will mean
that we do not understand that the settlements and the communities they serve are
constantly changing. They are only the cells of a living organism. As such, they have the
fourth dimension of time which, together with the other three, conditions the functions, the
conceptions, and the solutions to be given at every specific moment.

E. Many scales for many masters: In the past, human settlements were inhabited by man
only, thus they were built on the basis of a human scale. Now human settlements should
also accommodate cars, trains, and all types of machines which are serving or will serve
man. Without letting the machines become the masters of settlements, the latter should
accommodate machines as factors indispensable to human life. In order to achieve balance
between the human forces, man who should be served and machines which must serve
him? Human settlements should be based on the principle that we have several merits
requiring number of scales.

In other words, across the world and cultures the variables that are drawn into
achieving the five principles result in a variety of settlement solutions which may
have the potential to be described as “humane habitats”. Consequently we should
not be searching for a single answer in our quest for a sustainable humane habitat.
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Q. How Ekistics contributed to the human settlements?

The subject matter of the science of ekistics is human settlements. These comprise all
settlements, from primitive to most elaborate, from old to new, from small to big, from temporary to
permanent, from single to composite. Or, in other words, the whole spectrum from the first
settlement of man on this earth to the present-day megalopolis and beyond it.

Human settlements consist of several elements: Nature, the earth and the natural site on
which they are built; Man who creates and inhabits them; Society which is formed mainly in them
and whose Networks functions allow them to survive and grow; and Shells (structures), which are
built to transform the first and to house the other three elements. Man, Society and Networks are
the contents of human settlements; Nature and Shell forms the container. While our subject matter
cannot exclude any of these elements, it cannot be limited to any one of them. It is the interrelation-
ship of the five elements which forms the human settlements. This is the content of ekistics proper.

Studies of the different elements, as such, are the subject of other disciplines from
geography, through biology and anthropology, to social and political disciplines, technology,
architecture and art. All of these contribute to the understanding and development of ekistics. They
form its contributing disciplines.

Ekistics has first to be descriptive in order to allow us to learn and to digest the human
experience of thousands of years during which man was learning (mainly through trial and error)
how to conceive, build, maintain and operate human settlements. Ekistics has also to be
prescriptive, as its only justification is to lead to an understanding which can guide the creation of
new human settlements and the amelioration of existing ones.

When we talk about the prescriptive aspect of ekistics, we are obliged to define the goal of
ekistics. This cannot be anything else but human happiness, leading to the evolution of better
human species by the formation of appropriate human settlements achieved through the best
combination of the five elements of ekistics.

In order to attain the goal of ekistics, we must be aware that we can only act in the following
ways:

a. Study the whole subject of human settlements;

b. Conceive their future;

c. Act to shape the physical habitat; that is its nature, its functions and its shell, in order to
implement the image we have conceived.
Ashwin Kanodia.- M.arch – Seminar Rizvi college of architecture - sem
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Q. What is meant by human bubble and Ecumenopolis, how important are they in
ekistics?

Anthropos

Man is usually presented with his body surrounded by a circle. Leonardo da Vinci showed
him this way and many other cultures have also done so. This is the visual aspect of Man and this
type of presentation is very natural, but at the same time it is confusing because it concentrates our
attention on the body of Man. Recently Edward T. Hail had the idea of a human bubble reaching
beyond the body .This was a step towards a better understanding of Man. But in reality Man
transcends his bubble, or first sphere, by many other concentric spheres defined by his senses. No
sensation can be overlooked: a sweet or a bitter taste, caressing a marble carving or a loved one,
walking on sand with bare feet; smells, sounds, sights and all physical sensations; and then all
metaphysical ones like science, faith, religion and imagination which can take Man beyond even the
Cosmos. The mind of Man carries him into areas which cannot be reached through the senses. So
does his soul by way of feelings and sentiments, for emotions are also shaping factors.

Fig. 15: The human bubble as drawn by Leonardo da

Vinci. The body defines the bubble.

The body of knowledge which makes up Ekistic theory and practice is voluminous,
as one would expect for a trans-disciplinary field of study covering human settlements. It
has been necessary to narrow down the body of theory and practice to fit this paper. The
first important part is Doxiadis’ development of five Ekistic Elements (Fig. 1). These
elements represent by the use of keywords the contributing components of human
settlements; that is, NATURE, ANTHROPOS (Individual Person), SOCIETY, SHELLS,
NETWORKS. They cover the natural and built environments and the society which inhabits
them, each one influencing the other.

Ecumenopolis.

“The realistic view of the City of the Future16 accepts that it will be a global city.
This does not mean, that it will cover the whole globe—only a small part of the globe can
and will be covered—but it will be a system of human settlements encircling the whole
globe, made up of several types of cities and other settlements of all types interconnected
into broader urbanized areas like the ones we today call megalopolises, It will consist of
parts with very different densities from very high to very low, and of continuous built-up
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areas as well as separate areas interconnected by several types of transportation and
communication lines. The global city of anthropos is the ecumenopolis or the city of the
inhabited globe”.

The unprecedented growth of metropolitan areas all over the world, the population
explosion and migration to cities, the merging of metropolitan areas into continuous
settlements such as the American eastern seaboard stretching from Boston to Washington,
induced Doxiadis to conceive of a comprehensive model of urbanization which covered
entire regions, countries and continents. Studies of J.Gottmann (1961) and others identified
a trend of cities within large regions to become interdependent and to grow together into
contiguous patterns along transportation networks, a settlement form, which they called
megalopolis.

Doxiadis predicted that this type of pattern would stretch across entire
countries and continents and over time would form the unavoidable city of the future
called ecumenopolis. Doxiadis presented his concept of ecumenopolis in a 200-page
report in 1959. This document already contained the major points of the project in a mature
form with their conditions and far-reaching consequences, reflecting Doxiadis’ many years
of experience and thinking on the subject. In 1960 research began in a systematic way at
the Athens Center of Ekistics under the leadership of John G. Papaioannou.

C.A. Doxiadis founded Ekistics as a science of human settlements, with a book on the
subject published in 1968 (Doxiadis 1968). It has become recognized as trans-disciplinary
because, with its development of overarching concepts like Ecumenopolis and Human Community,
it goes beyond the idea of inter- disciplinarity. Today we are familiar with another trans-disciplinary
term to which many disciplines relate, namely Sustainability.
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