Man in the city of Future

By: C.A. Doxiadis

Review By: Dated: 19.08.2018

Viplav Arora
M.Arch (Ekistics)

A hard-hitting article in simple and narrative English on what would be the role of
man in the city of future?

Doxiadis used a sense of sarcasm when it took a lot longer to reach city Urbana and
said the new law of transportation was ”the shorter the distance, the more time it
takes to cover it” and continues his whole article with examples and small stories
which keep the reader intact to the article.

He took himself 100 years ahead and took a virtual tour of a city which is spread
among continents now and named it as the universal city or Ecumenopolis. To
study how a man reaches here he decided to do the pathology of the city and tried
to flown over the same city in 17th & 18th century and discovered that growth in terms
of industrialization, railways, automobiles, roads & highways leads to shifting the
center of cities over the period of time which results in more construction all around.
Better transportation system with increase speed created to get the traffic out but
instead it allows people from even greater distances to come into cities, hence city
expanded.

Then he talks about how it leads to suffering of five elements of Ekistics and started
critically analyzing each one of them. After arguments on expansion rate and
parameters of cities he concluded that we are heading towards a very big ‘universal
city’ or ‘Ecumenopolis’ which is going to be much larger than the present ones and
which is, by necessity, going to eliminate and kill man and civilization, because this
city is not under the control of man.

Now, he decided to do a systematic diagnosis of the situation and the best way is to
start with an effort to inscribe all the phenomena we are talking about on a proper
scale and called it as the Ekistic Logarithmic Scale which presents the relationship
of man with all the units he is dealing with, to himself, to the room, to city and goes
on till unit 15, which is the whole Earth. With the help of this scale, Doxiadis
developed human scale and stated the human scale is where a man gets to with
his own natural forces. He feels that we have overlooked the impact of
technological progress on the city that we have gained in the big scale but we have
lost in the small (human) scale. For the first time in history, man is not free in his own
cities.

He is pretty convinced himself and tried to convince readers that highways do not
lead to any solution and underground networks are the most natural solution. It will
decrease the transportation time and compares it with the network system of our
body and the speed of blood flow in the capillaries, the higher the speed, the deeper
they are placed. He is in point of view to place our networks below the surface and
keep the surface of the Earth free for man. And this is possible not only
technologically but also economically.

He also insists on keeping proper goals to achieve from the cities and what can the
proper goals be? Man is interested in being free, happy and safe. So to goals is to
be happiness and safety. Next question is how we could achieve it? Doxiadis
coined here a term Anthropics – the science of Anthropos, of man, which will study
him as a whole and will help him to set goals and then form his habitat accordingly.

After all this analysis and critical thinking he understood that the best solution does
not come with imagination and bright ideas about our cities rather it must be
designed by facts and study of all possible alternatives and to critically eliminate
which doesn’t fit in the cities of future. The city of future has to be built on a
human scale.

This is our great task, the establishment of human values, of a human way of living
within the universal city, which by nature will be inhuman in its size. He ends his
article by putting up a question among readers, is this going to happen? And if
readers come up with an answer, which they will that ‘it is a difficult task’! He quoted
Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis words, “reach where you cannot”.

Overall, an impactful and thoughtful article to read.

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