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| Constantinos Doxiadis and the Evolution of Concepts and Practice for Low
Income Housing: From Reconstruction To Self-Help By Way Of Slum
Clearance
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| Abstract for the Athens Conference On Doxiadis And The Post World War II Planning
Context, December 2006
Anna Hardman
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This traces the evolution of concepts of housing, low income housing, and housing policy
in the early post-colonial era of the 1950's and 60's. The paper looks at how urban
housing policies changed as they were applied by designers, scholars, politicians and
officials engaged in planning for urban settlements in developing countries. It explores
roots of those policies in post World War II reconstruction and rural development
programs .
Constantinos Doxiadis was an early proponent of planning as a global activity. His
planning work began in Greece in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the
country's civil war. Over the next twenty five years the firm he headed became one of the
first global planning enterprises, working in over fourty countries (Bromley, 2003;
Beauregard, 2005). He and his firm then contributed both to the design of new cities in
nations emerging from the colonial era in the 1950's. The new cities and neighborhoods
his firm planned (or tried to plan) now shelter hundreds of thousands if not millions of
households.
Doxiadis, an innovator as well as an entrepreneurial planner, coined the word 'ekistics' to
describe the principles he identified as guiding his and his firm's work. The concept of
ekistics ('the science of human settlements') was grounded in concepts of community far
removed from Corbusiers's modernism and arguably embracing precursors of today's
sustainability (Pyla, 2004). He was an advocate of inter-disciplinary work and
implemented 'networking' long before it became a catchword of social scientists.at his
summer Delos Symposia that brought together contemporaries such as Margaret Mead,
Barbara Ward, Buckminster Fuller, and Arnold Toynbee (Sarkis, 1998; Bromley, 2003).
The paper is grounded in research on the extensive documentation in the Doxiadis
archive in Athens. It will trace the evolution of Doxiadis's ideas and of housing policy in
a period of signal change: as Harris (2003) notes, the ideas that John F.C.Turner brought
to the fore in the early 1970's about self help and the importance of informal sector
housing had their origins in earlier ideas of Jacob Crane, Charles Abrams and others
working on housing in poor countries earlier in the post war era. Crane was acquainted
with Constantinos Doxiadis and became a senior consultant for Doxiadis's firm in 1955.
The archive also records interactions between Doxiadis and Turner and between Doxiadis
and Abrams. It is also noteworthy that quite early in his career Doxiadis worked on post
both urban and rural areas; in many developing countries in the post-colonial era
'reconstruction' was a term used to denote ministries and offices responsible for housing
and planning.
Doxiadis's career parallels the evolution of housing policies for both developing and
developed countries. The quarter century between 1945 and 1970 was one during which
the world experienced major political, economic and social transformation. European
cities were devastated by the war. Replacing housing lost was an early priority and
planning policies developed in that context were exported to colonies and then to former
colonies. Both suburbanization and planned interventions to renew existing city centers
changed - and in some cases transformed - both US and European metropolitan areas.
Cities in much of the developing world started to grow at an accelerating rate while most
public policies still focused on rural development. Planned housing provision in the
Latin American cities that were among the first to grow was overwhelmed by less formal
self-provision of shelter on the urban periphery. By the early 1970's, Europe had largely
recovered from the destruction of World War II. The World Bank started to commit
resources to urban development while planners drew attention to the contributions of the
unregulated informal sector in the urban economy and in housing the urban poor in
developing countries. John Turner and others were attracting interest in their portrayal of
self-provision of housing as a positive not a negative feature of the housing sector in third
world cities.
Bibliography
Beauregard, Robert A. 2005 "Writing Transnational Histories" Review Essay. Journal
of Planning History Vol. 4 No. 4, pp. 392-402.
Bromley, Ray. 2003. "Towards Global Human Settlements: Constantinos Doxiadis as
entrepreneur, Coalition-Builder and Visionary" in Urbanism Imported or Exported?
Ed. Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait. Wiley: Chichester and New York.
Doxiadis Archive
Harris, Richard. 2003. "A Double Irony: The Originality And Influence Of John F.C.
Turner" Habitat International
Ladas, Diana. 1978. "Rural House Types for Greece, 1948-1977" Ekistics Vol 45 No
287, pp. 70-71.
Pyla ,Panayiota 2002. "Ekistics, Architecture, and Environmental Politics, 1945-
1976: A Prehistory of Sustainable Development" PhD Thesis, MIT
Sarkis, Hashim. 1998. "Dances with Margaret Mead: Planning Beirut since 1958" in
Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of the Modern
City ed. Peter G. Rowe and Hashim Sarkis, Prestel, Munich.
Sarkis, Hashim. Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos
Doxiadis, foreword by Roger Owen, (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 2003)
Turner John F.C. (1976). "Approaches to government- sponsored housing". Ekistics,
242, January 1976: 4-7.
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