Doxyadis, Konstantinos

Doxyadis was born in 1914 in the Thracian city of Stenimahos (now Asenovgrad ), which still had a significant Greek population at that time. The exodus of the Greek population from the Bulgarian Thrace and the Black Sea region began after the annexation of Eastern Rumelia by Bulgaria and the subsequent pogroms of the Greek population ^[1] , but ended after the First World War by the Greek-Bulgarian population exchange, according to the conditions of the Neuilly World and the “ Politis- Kalfov Protocol”, signed 29 September 1924 Having left for Greece, his father, a pediatrician by education, later on and for a short period of time, became the Minister of Health of Greece .

Doksiadis graduated from the Faculty of Architecture of the Athens Polytechnic University in 1935, and received his doctorate from the University of Charlottenburg (today's Berlin Technical University ) a year later. In 1937, he was appointed Head of the Greater Athens Urban Planning Service.

During the triple German-Italian-Bulgarian occupation of Greece and retaining the post of head of the regional and urban planning service ^[2] , Doksiadis led the resistance group Hephaestus . It is noteworthy that Doksiadis simultaneously published the only technical content magazine in the occupation, entitled "Planning - Urban Planning - Architecture". For its participation in the Resistance, Doxyadis was awarded the Greek and British governments.

Doksiadis and his employees, to the best of their abilities, kept records of the enormous human and material losses suffered by Greece during the Second World War throughout the war. At the end of the war and leading the Greek delegation at a peace conference in San Francisco, Doxyadis presented his report on the casualties suffered by Greece. The report was published in English the following year, 1946, by the Ministry of Reconstruction of Greece (Doxyadis, Konstantinos, Victims of Greece in the Second World War [The Sacrifices of Greece in the Second World War] (Athens: Ministry of Reconstruction, 1946) ^[3] .

Doksiadis was appointed Deputy Minister of Reconstruction and proved himself in this post, and it was this experience that enabled him to receive large contracts for housing construction in dozens of countries in the 1950s. As deputy minister, he led the Greek delegation at the 1947 UN Conference on Urban Planning and Development. He also led the Greek delegation in negotiations on the payment of Greek Italian military reparations.

In 1951, he founded Doxiadis Associates, a privately held consultancy-engineering firm that quickly became a huge firm with offices on five continents and with projects in 40 countries. In 1963, the company changed its name to DA International Co. Ltd. Consultants on Development and Ekistics ^[2] . One of the most famous urban works of Doksiadis is Islamabad . Conceived as a new city, his plan was fully implemented, unlike many of his projects in existing cities, where the changing political and economic forces did not allow the full implementation of his plans. Islamabad’s plan separated cars and people, which allowed easy and inexpensive access to public transport and utilities and ensured low cost gradual expansion and growth without losing the human scale of its “communities”. Doxyadis was awarded in 1965 by the Society of Industrial Designers of America (IDSA) with a special Prize "for outstanding results, creative and innovative concepts and long-term benefits for the industrial design profession, its educational functions and society as a whole."

Ecology

Doksiadis proposed ecology as the science of human settlement and outlined its goals, intellectual framework and relevance. The main stimulus for the development of science was the emergence of larger and more complex settlements, with a tendency to regional agglomerations and even to a global city (Doksiadis used the word " Ecumenopolis "). Nevertheless, ecology aimed to include all the scales of human habitation and sought to obtain information and learn from archeology and historical records, paying attention not only to large cities, but as much as possible, to general settlement models.

Ecumenopolis

In the theory of Ecumenopolis, the city was considered as a dynamic phenomenon, developing in space and in time, since its development is continuous and inevitable. Thus, the general organization of space should be such as to allow the development of the city without destroying the urban "fabric" and without losing human scale. Among other things, the city is organized by degrees (communities of different levels). The degrees increase with a parallel population growth, that is, the 1st degree refers to the quarter of 100-200 inhabitants, the 2nd degree to 500-600 inhabitants (like a small village), etc. The scheme ends with the 10th degree quarter, which is "Ecumenopolis." The 4th degree community is a closed cell, where traffic is organized along the periphery and its penetration into nodes is avoided by nodes and dead ends (“internal traffic cells” Colin Buchanan report 1960).

In the 1960s and 1970s, city planner and architect Konstantinos Doksiadis was the author of books, studies and reports, including regarding the growth potential of the Great Lakes metropolis ^[4] . At the peak of his popularity, in the 1960s, he turned to the US Congress about the future of American cities, his portrait was illustrated by the cover of Time Magazine , his company Doxiadis Associates implemented large-scale housing projects, urban and regional development in more than 40 countries, his computer center (UNIVAC-DACC) was at the forefront of computer technology at that time, and its annual Delos Symposium ( Delos Island Symposium) of the World Society of Ecology attracted prominent thinkers and experts from around the world. In Greece, he was faced with well-established suspicions and opposition and his recommendations were largely ignored. Having won two major contracts (the National Regional Plan of Greece and the General Plan of Athens) from the Greek military junta ( Black Colonels ), he was criticized by competitors after the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, portrayed as a friend of "Black Colonels." His proposal was to build a new Athens airfield on the nearby island of Makronisos , where during the civil war in Greece (1946–1949) and in subsequent years there was a concentration camp for communists and other left-wing political prisoners, together with a proposal for the construction of a bridge, railway and port in Lavrion has not been implemented.

His influence was already weakened by 1975, when he died. Over the last three years of his life, Doxyadis has been struggling with a rare disease of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , which led him to speech loss, complete paralysis, and finally death. Doxyadis struggled with his disease with dignity and kept records of his illness until the last moment, in order to help future researchers of the disease.

His company, Doxiadis Associates, changed ownership several times after his death; the heirs of his computer company no longer referred to Doxyadis planning and ecology. Delos symposia were interrupted and the World Society of Ecology today is an organization with an unclear status.

• Greek Military Cross for participating in the 1940 Greco-Italian War .
• Order of the British Empire for participation in the Greek Resistance and cooperation with the Allied forces of the Middle East (1945).

• Lebanese National Order of Cedar for Merit in the Development of Lebanon (1958).
• Order of the Phoenix (Greece) for services to the development of the country (1960).

• Abercrombie Sir Patrick Abercrombie Award , Leslie Patrick

International Union of Architects (1963)

• Gold Medal of the Union of Architects of Mexico "Cali de Oro" (1963).
• US Design Award of the Award of Excellence Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) (1965).
• Aspen Award from the Aspen Institute of Humanities (1966).
• Order of the Yugoslav flag with a golden wreath (1966).
• In 1976 he was posthumously awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of Canada ( Royal Architectural Institute of Canada ).

• Ekistics: An Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
• Anthropopolis: City for Human Development, New York: WW Norton, 1974.
• Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future. With JG Papaioannou. Athens: Athens Center of Ekistics, 1974.
• Building Entopia. Athens: Athens Publishing Center, 1975.
• Action for Human Settlements. New York: WW Norton, 1976.
• Κωνσταντίνος Δοξιάδης: κείμενα, σχέδια, οικισμοί, εκδ.Ίκαρος, Αθήνα, 2006

• Ecology

• Wikidata
• Doxiadis foundation
• Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science
• An arieal view of a portion of Islamabad whose planning Doxiadis was involved with.
• Doxiadis on youtube
• Doxiadis Associates home page: