Ashwin Kanodia.- M.

arch Seminar III

Rizvi college of architecture - sem

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 mans protective space

Ashwin Kanodia.- M.arch Seminar III

Rizvi college of architecture - sem

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 mans 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.

Ashwin Kanodia.- M.arch Seminar III

Rizvi college of architecture - sem

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.

Ashwin Kanodia.- M.arch Seminar III

Rizvi college of architecture - sem

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 interrelationship 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. b. c.

Study the whole subject of human settlements; Conceive their future;

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 III

Rizvi college of architecture - sem

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 globeonly a small part of the globe can and will be coveredbut 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

Ashwin Kanodia.- M.arch Seminar III

Rizvi college of architecture - sem

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.

Ashwin Kanodia.- M.arch Seminar III

Rizvi college of architecture - sem