Articles

From BRITANNICA Book of the year 1968, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

ECUMENOPOLIS: Tomorrows
City
INTRODUCTION
Man is beginning to understand that he is confused about
life in his cities and worried about the path he is following
into an unknown future. This confusion started some
generations ago when man moved from the countryside
and the small traditional cities into the large cities and the
metropolis, but the understanding and the worrying began
only very recently and in official circles only in the present
decade. This is why man is not prepared to face the
problems of life in his cities in a systematic way.
The time has come, though, for man to try to understand
the great confusion that surrounds him in his city and to
solve the problems that he himself has created during the
last few generations. He cannot achieve this if he thinks
that he will change the cities of the present-- it is too late
for that. He can achieve it only if he thinks of the cities of
the future, for what we conceive today can be a plan
tomorrow and a reality in the future.
To achieve this we must clarify what we mean by cities. If
we have the wrong conception -- for example, that cities
are all like the City of London, densely built, small,
traditional central parts of urban areas, or like the city of
New York, multimillion people agglomerations with many
skyscrapers-- we cannot go very far. We will progress
even less if we think that they are like the ancient city of
Athens or the Renaissance city of Florence, small cities full
of monuments that we admire. In all these cases we fail,
not because the cities of the future may not be like these
prototypes, but because we approach our subject with
preconceived ideas about numbers of people, physical
size, buildings, and styles which are a major hindrance to
the conception of the cities of the future. In order to
approach our subject with an open mind, we should
employ the term cities, which we like and use so much,
only in its broadest sense of all urban human settlements,
regardless of population, size, function, structure, and
form. Furthermore, since we do not know what kind of life
the future rural dwellers employed in agriculture would like
to have, we should use the term cities as meaning all
sorts of human settlements in the sense that ekistics, the
science of human settlements, studies them.
To be sure of our subject we also have to define the term
future. Very often it is interpreted as meaning any year,
day, or moment following the present, and this is certainly
perfectly correct unless we are referring to cities and want
to conceive of them properly, since cities are known for

Preston in Lancashire presents the

confusion created by the random
development of cities in the 19th century.

their longevity. The city of tomorrow morning will be like

the city of today, with a few more people born during the
night and a few more automobiles and dwellings. Even ten
years from now, most of the city's streets will be the
same; with normal growth, it will have extensions with
new neighborhoods quite similar to the present ones and a
few alterations in the built-up areas. If we want to speak
of the cities of the future in a way that can help us to
conceive of them properly, we must think at least a
generation ahead and as far beyond that as we can. This
should be from one century, when most of the existing
streets -- though not the buildings -- will be the same, up
to a few centuries, by which time the pattern of existing
streets may well be changed also. I do not believe that we
can reach meaningfully beyond this limit -- and why
should we, after all? No action of the present can commit
man so far into the future.
Man does not think of the cities of the future for the first
time today. He has always been doing so, from ancient
Greek days to the Renaissance to our times. He was
concerned with Utopias and ideal cities and he even
thought of the bad places, the dystopias (sometimes
wrongly called the anti-utopias).i What characterizes our
efforts today is that they are no longer as satisfactory as
the conceptions of the past; and the reason is that in the
past both Utopias and ideal cities were dealing with
communities of a certain size, the size of the existing cities
which had economic, social, political, and physical
dimensions known to everyone. Plato was thinking of a
city of 30,000 to 50,000 people like his city of Athens, and
Thomas More of a city of 60,000 to 90,000, like many of
his contemporary cities. Today we live in cities of millions,
which grow into tens of millions, and we dream of isolated
islands as did Aldous Huxley or of garden cities such as
those proposed by Ebenezer Howard. We feel that
something is wrong, we become dissatisfied, and in the
end we are even more confused.
The reason is that humanity has never before had to deal
with such forces of change as exist at present -- a growing
and aging population; rising incomes and an increasing
economic, social, and technological gap, especially
between rich and poor nations; rapidly changing social and
political conditions; changes in science and technology
that make the impossible possible and previously nondangerous situations and conditions explosive. We have
not managed to conceive the totality of the problems we
are facing and, as a result, we have lost the ability to think
about our future in a systematic way so that our
projections and dreams can be meaningful and, therefore,
satisfactory.
To achieve meaningful projections and dreams, we must
now try to look at our problem in a way that will be as
dispassionate and objective as possible. We must try to
see that, because of lack of understanding and

imagination, we continue to build the cities of the future in

a way that will make our life less human inside bad cities,
the dystopias. We have to understand that we are fighting
this danger with unrealistic dreams, the Utopias, for which
there is no place. If we understand these types of actual
and imaginary cities of the future, we can try to conceive
and build the ones we need. First, we must understand the
real forces that condition the cities of the future, the
framework within which we are going to live and the
problems created by it. Second, we must re-examine the
type of life we want to live in these cities, their human
content and human goals. Only then will we be able to
conceive of them, not as we build them today, blindfolded,
but as we can build them; and if we do this, we can trace
the road leading to their realization, connecting the
present with the future, making the conception and the
dream come true.
This is what I am trying to achieve with this article,
through a systematic approach toward the cities of the
future and the methods by which we can build them. This
is not an easy task -- the present lack of a systematic
approach toward this problem in its real dimensions makes
it very difficult -- but it must be undertaken because we
badly need to conceive of the kind of cities of the future
which, by trial and a minimum of error, will gradually take
their final shape. I am not trying to achieve this as a
philosopher or social reformer, which I am not, or as a
political leader, which is a title that can only be given by
others through proper democratic processes. I am trying
to achieve it as a bricklayer, mason, and builder, which I
am by profession, with the full knowledge that the
structures I can help build do not alone condition our lives
but, if properly studied, can help us toward a happier life.
This can happen if the builders firmly believe that their
structures can serve only if they are conceived, not in the
abstract, but as shells -- buildings of all sorts -- and
networks of roads, railroads, and other facilities that serve
man and can be justified only by his complete satisfaction.
This I firmly believe and in this I can only feel myself to be
a servant of a cause, a cause to benefit mankind.

CHAPTER I
When man moves in the streets of a city
with polluted air, he cannot know how
great the pollution is and only becomes
aware in moments of crisis. Fog and
smoke create smog such as this in the city
of London.

WE BUILD THE WRONG CITIES FOR THE FUTURE

With every house that we build, every road we pave, every
piece of land we buy, we make urban decisions that
commit us for the future. In this way we build the city of
the future without even thinking about it, without
understanding it; and this city, if we think about what is
happening around the world, is the wrong city, worse than

the present one, much worse than the city of the past.
The usual statement, that we do not think about the future
and do not do anything about it, is only half right when we
apply it to cities. We do not think about them in the future
sense, but we do a lot about them; we actually build them
the wrong way. This is how we create the wrong and the
bad cities that Patrick Geddes, at the beginning of the
century, called cacotopias; that were later called antiutopias, where utopia was considered synonymous with
the ideal place, the good place; and still later were called,
by V. L. Parrington, Jr., dystopias, the bad placesii.

Man, for the first time in his history, is no

longer free to walk in his city and cross his
streets. He must wait for a great number
of automobiles to pass by. He cannot
confront them; they are big and hard and
travel at high speeds. He is small, soft,
and slow.

The reason I am so positive that we are building the bad

city of the future is that we can see we are creating worse
situations for man in our cities by examining all five
elements of the city, nature, man, society, shells and
networks, and by thinking of the conditions created for
man.
We use natural resources in ways that do not serve man at
all and sometimes we spoil them in an irreversible way.
Whereas in the past man built small and compact cities, he
now lets his settlements spread so that many important
rural areas and beautiful landscapes are lost. In most
parts of the world man wastes land, using greater areas
per capita than at any time previously. Over the last
generation the amount of land per capita that is used for
urban purposes has doubled and in many cities, especially
those of the rich countries, it has tripled. Together with
land, we eliminate many elements of the flora and fauna
because we allow the forces of civilization and
technology to spread without control. Similarly, we pollute
the water of streams, lakes and seas, and we eliminate
minor sources of water and even whole rivers by lowering
the water level near major settlements. We contaminate
the air and our cities are now submerged in a layer of
polluted air that frightens us when we see it from outside
but does not seem to bother us when we live inside it.
Inside the cities we build, man is losing his importance in
many ways. He has to wait for crossing at automobile
intersections; he waits longer every day and things will
become even worse as we try to crowd more automobiles
into the same old streets. In such cities, children are
gradually going to be forbidden to enter any street, and
finally they will have to be taken from place to place in
special security cars.
Because of these traffic problems, society will operate less
and less satisfactorily and people will devise ways -- as
they are already beginning to do -- to avoid going to
central city areas. They will try to do their work at home,
4

learn their lessons at home, stay at home for long periods

or forever. Society will operate only through the use of
mechanical means of transportation and communications.
What kind of man this type of city will shape we do not
know -- he could not, in any case, be a very human man.

The landscape of the modern city is

becoming extra-human, even inhuman. An
idea of such landscape is given us by the
highways built to decongest the central
city. This highway into San Francisco
brings even more automobiles into the city
and illustrates the type of landscape we
are creating.

The houses and buildings of the future will be very

satisfactory inside, with all sorts of mechanical installations
and devices, but people will be isolated from nature by the
air conditioning that protects them from the contaminated
air, by the heavy curtains that close the windows against
vistas of unattractive parking lots and highways. All sorts
of networks, from streets and highways to tubes
transmitting packages of goods and people, will create a
jungle-like urban landscape that will turn the cities into
completely inhuman areas where man will not be
interested in living, much less in creating works of art or
expressing himself in any creative way. By then, perhaps,
the works of art of the past will be protected inside plastic
domes like strange plants from forgotten civilizations. The
Plazza di Campidoglio, that masterpiece by Michelangelo in
Rome, may well be moved into a museum in the same
way that the great altar of Pergamum has found its place
inside the Pergamum Museum of Berlin. If present
conditions continue, this will be the only way to protect it
from automobiles and fumes.
These are the cities we are building for the future and
there is very little protest against what we are doing; most
of it is directed against the continuing contamination of the
air and the pollution of the water. But while the first voices
are raised against the bad city we are building, we
continue on the wrong path and the situation becomes
worse with every day that passes. Such a situation, in
turn, intensifies the forces establishing the bad city. There
are many more forces working for an escape from the bad
city rather than for the creation of a good and satisfactory
one. We first build the bad city and then we perpetuate it
and turn it into a consistent system, not by forgetting the
need for the good city but by trying to avoid the most
obvious problems or by tackling them in. a piecemeal way.
And thus the unsatisfactory, the inhuman city becomes an
institution, leading to more and more escape devices but
never to solutions.
We can understand how well established this situation has
become when we realize that some thinkers tried to warn
us of the great dangers such a city of the future creates
for man, but we did not respond. This movement started
at the end of the 19th century, in 1895, when H. G. Wells
wrote his The Time Machine and described the city of the
future as consisting of an Upper World of ruins and an
Under World where people lived permanently underground
in the bowels of the earth. Anatole France described his
city of the future, in 1908 in Penguin Island, as a city of 15
million people, covered by smoke so thick that the
5

population was forced to breathe artificial air.

Characteristically, the warnings came from the inhabitants
of London and Paris, the two cities that a century earlier
had reached the one million mark and whose industries
provided an advanced view of what was coming.
A generation later, in a world that saw the rise of Nazism
and World War II, the warnings covered not only the
physical aspects of the cities of the future, but
concentrated on the type of society that we are creating
inside them. These warnings began in 1932 with the Brave
New World of Aldous Huxley, who presents a static society
with a static culture where science has led man to the
point of complete loss of his freedom and turned him into
an object. They continued with the Star of the Unborn by
Franz Werfel (1946), where a new world of cities built
below ground is described, in which everything has been
standardized and yet there is no dissatisfaction because
man's ingenuity has already been exhausted.
Two very important contributions in the same vein
appeared in 1949 and 1953. They are Nineteen EightyFour by George Orwell and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray
Bradbury. In the first, we see a society in the city of the
future where total control has been established over man
by a party that can listen to every word he utters and
watch every gesture he makes throughout his life. This
ruling party is not interested in man, his happiness, or his
long life; it does not care to build (all buildings with the
exception of the ministries are old ones) or to allow any
travel and communication. It is only interested in power,
and thus it establishes extreme centralization of control so
that it can reshape people. In the second, the title of
which refers to the temperature at which book paper
catches fire and burns, we visit a world without real cities,
inhabited by a nomadic society of people living in cars and
in houses with four walls of television, whose cars are
sealed tight with little seashell thimble radios, who cannot
hear normal speech, who cannot see normal forms
because of the speed at which they travel -- a place where
nobody knows anyone, where highways are full of crowds
going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere.iii
It would be natural perhaps to assume that following such
warnings, mankind has changed its attitude and the bad
cities are no longer under construction. But this is not at
all true; we do not get results that quickly. On the
contrary, we still build the bad cities, the dystopias, and
the forces that shape them are beginning to distort our
minds also -- at least some of them--so there is a grave
danger that we will never recover and change our course.
Such an opinion is justified by two phenomena. The first is
the existence of a school of thought supported by many
experts who base their beliefs on the sanctity of existing
trends. They argue, for example, that if man is spreading
around his cities in low densities, this is what he wants
and we should not try to change the trend. The fact that
6

he may spread into the countryside because he is trying to

escape from the overcongested, contaminated, and
inhuman city is not taken into consideration. Neither is the
fact that in the outskirts man may have less security and
his wife and children fewer opportunities for indispensable
social contacts, and that this leads to many social and
psychological problems. Such a school of thought does
much harm.

Confused by the ugly and inhuman

landscape that he is creating, man
gradually tends to forget the human
content, the human scale of his city. A
sign of this is the conception of a city
consisting of monsters which look more
like warlike machines than buildings
containing human beings. These machines
allow no space for man, and when on the
move, will crush man

The second phenomenon is not as deep-rooted or

widespread, but it is quite characteristic also. Several
technical experts who are supposed to know how to build
cities propose -- quite seriously and not at all as a
warning, as is the case with the literary men -- the
creation of cities which, if ever built, would mean the
degradation of our lives and of man himself. Some
propose solutions that are technologically interesting, such
as covering our cities with air-conditioned structures; but
what would happen outside such structures with the
spread of contaminated air (who would care about these
areas?), perhaps not only from internal-combustion
engines but also from nuclear explosions. Some go much
further and design cities where the automobiles run on the
roofs of houses, shaking the structures and filling the city
with noises, creating a moving cityscape and spraying man
and his gardens day and night with contaminated air.iv
The worst example of all, however, appeared at a 1963
London exhibition where a walking city was shown, with all
buildings conceived as steel tanks moving mechanically
and certainly crushing, as tanks do, nature and any person
outside them.v The example is appalling, not only because
it represents an inhuman conception of the city of the
future by a small group of people, but because it received
wide publicity without, as far as I know, any corresponding
protest.
The cities of the future that we are building are bad cities.
We are gradually becoming adjusted to the idea that they
are going to be bad and we build escapes from them, for a
short part of our lives, in certain places only. In this way
we establish the bad cities on a permanent basis.
Eventually we begin to institutionalize them, we justify our
lack of proper action and courage theoretically, and at the
very end we design cities to crush nature and man.
CHAPTER II
THE CITIES WE DREAM OF DO NOT SOLVE OUR
PROBLEMS
Although we can state that humanity as a whole does not
recognize how grave our problem of life in the cities is,
and does not react by creating the new type of cities that
we need, there are some people who do react and dream
of better cities for the future, who even try to build them
on a small scale. Whether only dreamed of by thinkers,

designed by experts, or even built to a certain degree,

these cities do not solve our problem, which is far larger,
more complex, and more challenging than our conceptions
of it permit us to think.
There are many types of dreamers and dreams, of
designs, and of actual cities that try to guide us into the
future. The most important of them can be classified as
Utopias, ideal cities, and escape cities, and we will
examine them in that order.
Utopias. Since ancient days, when the Chinese sage Laotzu dreamed of a small country where people could see
the nearest settlement but would not trouble to go there,
and when Plato expressed his thoughts about the ideal
state in the Republic and the Laws, mankind has struggled
with the concept of an ideal place for the future without
giving a name to it. The name was provided in 1516 by Sir
Thomas More in his Utopia. With this term a confusion was
created; some people thought it meant the city that does
not and cannot exist (from the Greek ou-topos, noplace), others took it for the good or ideal place (from the
Greek eu-topos, good place), and still others interpreted
it to mean both. It is useful to separate these two notions
and I, therefore, will use utopia in the former sense of noplace, leaving the good place to be called eftopia, which is
a clearer phonetic spelling of eutopia.
Many authors dealt with Utopias for the future, treating
them as the good places, the eutopias, while at the same
time allowing themselves freedom by interpreting Utopia
to mean no-place, a conception that has not been or
cannot be realized. Interestingly enough, there have been
very few conceptions of Utopian cities in the 20th century,
when mankind needs them most. This can probably be
explained as a result of the prevalent confusion of ideas
about cities, which does not even permit dreams to be
made or conceived in any way.
The 19th century gave birth to many Utopian dreams; the
20th century has produced only a few, but they have been
quite successful ones. The most characteristic are Men like
Gods, written by H. G. Wells in 1923; the Unknown Land
by Viscount Samuel (1942), in the line of Bacon's New
Atlantis; and perhaps the Shangri-La described in 1933 by
James Hilton in his Lost Horizon. All of these authors deal
with the human and social problems in the good city of
their dreams.
The two most recent utopias, which come closer to the
conception and description of the dream city of the future
from the social and the physical point of view, are Walden
Two by the sociologist B. F. Skinner (1948) and,
interestingly enough, Island (1962) by Aldous Huxley, who
after traveling to the Brave New World in 1932 and
warning us of its dangers, and after revisiting it in 1959,
closed his literary career with a Utopian dream of the good

city. Both Utopias are typical of a desire for escape into a

world free of pressures, and both depict very small
settlements of less than a thousand people. The fact that
they are typical Utopias, no-places, is proved by the
existence in both of them of automobiles, even if old and
inexpensive ones, and of scientific research. Automobiles
and modern science cannot exist without the big cities that
create them in their big institutions, and, therefore, both
Utopias represent only ideal places of escape, giving no
advice about life in the real city or the happiness of its
inhabitants.
Utopian thoughts about the cities of the future have not
led us very far --rather they have confused the issue of
the city of the future for the uninformed reader by
focusing on the small size of the dream place and the need
to escape to it. Their value, which has been missed by
most of us, is not that they show where we should go -they do not -- but that they dramatize the need of man to
live without pressures, as he does in small settlements.

The city of the future as conceived by Le

Corbusier in 1922 illustrates his belief that
man should live in a human scale in spite
of the great buildings that were the main
characteristic of his city. Le Corbusier's
scale was at ground level where man
could walk in green areas. Yet man does
not need to walk in parks; he needs to
walk inside a well-developed area that
enables him to move in space he controls
in safety. Green spaces are needed by
man, but he must not be restricted to
them.

The city of the future as conceived by

Frank Lloyd Wright is a combination of
built-up areas and cultivated landscapes.
In part, it is a negation of the city as it
does not provide for continuously built-up
areas, but for an interplay of machines
and buildings. It is clear that there is no
distinction between the human and the
machine scale, as we can see flying
vehicles landing on a terrace occupied by
people.

Ideal Cities. We use this term to classify the attempts to

conceive the cities of the future usually made by
architects, engineers, and planners -- attempts that are
expressed by specific physical plans and designs. Unlike
the Utopias, which usually deal in great detail with social
problems, the ideal cities overlook such considerations and
present the views of their authors in the form of proposals
about shells, that is, houses and buildings and networks of
facilities ranging from streets to telephones, all interwoven
with nature into a new physical city.
Although there have been few utopias in the 20th century,
many experts have expressed their views about ideal cities
through all sorts of designs and plans. This tendency
gained prominence after the Russian Revolution, when it
was thought that socialism would give rise to new types of
revolutionary cities, but it did not lead far. It was soon
discovered that cities are very complex organisms that do
not change because part of one of their five elements -- in
this case one part of the social organization -- changes.
Characteristically, after the first ideas were expressed,
many Soviet cities remained more conservative as
conceptions than corresponding cities in non-socialistic
countries. A second wave of new proposals followed World
War II, the destruction wrought by it, and the great
increase of urban population in the more developed
industrial nations and those that became independent.
Out of the many efforts to provide a conception of the
ideal cities of the future, it is worth concentrating on those
of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, not only because
of the personalities of the authors, both of whom were
leaders of the great revolution in architecture, but because
these men put such serious and extended effort into
elaborating and presenting their ideas, which are given in

greater detail than any corresponding efforts and allow

better understanding and comment. Le Corbusier
presented his ideas in a series of books and publications
that included La Ville Radieuse (1935) and L'Urbanisme
des trois tablissements humains (1959); Frank Lloyd
Wright set forth his mostly in The Disappearing City
(1932), giving the plans of Broadacre City.

Welwyn Garden City outside London as

conceived and built in 1919-20.

Hampstead, one of the garden suburbs of

England.

The garden cities were created outside the

built-up area (a) in order to avoid its
pressures, but later were absorbed by the
dynamically expanding city (b).

Le Corbusier was perhaps the first architect to accept the

dimensions of the contemporary city when he designed the
Paris of the future for a population approximating that of
his time; that is, more than two million people. However,
though he made the great step of avoiding the Utopian "let
us escape back into the small city," he did not recognize
that even the Paris of his days was very small in relation
to the Paris of the future. Today the metropolitan area of
Paris has a population of 9 million and plans are being
prepared to accommodate 1 million. Thus Le Corbusier
deprived his plans of a fourth dimension, that of time, and
conceived static cities that belong to the distant past,
while the cities of the future will grow dynamically.
Otherwise, his city combines realism with ideals and
romantic ideas. It is realistic when it accepts all sorts of
buildings, from the skyscrapers of its central part to
multistory and other types of buildings in residential areas.
It is romantically idealistic when it brings natural
landscape back into all parts of the city and tries to
reestablish human values and recreate an artistic
environment. In many ways Le Corbusier opens new
avenues for thought about a better city for the future; in
others he fails, as when he allows airplanes to land in the
heart of the city. Those who have to live and work near
the Pan American Building in New York City, where
helicopters land on the roof, know how unreasonable it is
to bring machines right into the heart of human space.
Frank Lloyd Wright went to great pains to describe and
design his Broadacre City as an interplay of green and
built-up areas.vi Some of its features are of interest to
those seeking guidelines for the future, but his city cannot
be built because he makes the grave mistake of not
recognizing one very important characteristic of any
successful city, whether past, present, or future -compactness. For economic, social, and political reasons, a
city must be as compact as possible; otherwise it cannot
operate normally. People come into the cities to be
together for the same reasons that they go into office
buildings to be together. We cannot design the latter as a
compact building and the former as a loose city, for this
does not correspond to our needs.
The ideal cities of our century have not taken us very far
in conceiving and building the cities of the future. But a
study of all these proposals is quite helpful, for it shows
why we have failed to prepare ourselves for the cities to
come and, therefore, what we have to do to be more
successful.

10

The New Towns were conceived as an

escape from the growing urban areas of
London, Liverpool, and Manchester. When
the Ecumenopolis phase is reached, the
New Towns will be absorbed into the
urban mass.

Escape Cities. Unlike utopias and ideal cities, which have

not been realized, escape cities have been built, and this
occurred in two waves during the 20th century. The first
wave began in England with Ebenezer Howard's ideas on
garden cities (1898);vii spread around the world; and even
now has some validity in several countries, although the
idea is no longer as fashionable as it once was. The second
wave, the so-called "New Town" movement, began in
Western Europe -- especially England and Sweden -- after
World War II and is today spreading in the United States
and some other countries. Both waves are characterized
by the desire of people to solve the problem of the big,
uncontrollable cities of many millions through the creation
of new cities with populations ranging from a few thousand
(the garden cities) to a few tens of thousands (the New
Towns).
The garden cities were quite successful for their
inhabitants, especially at the beginning. Built outside the
compact metropolis, they provided their inhabitants with
more land per capita, better gardens, and healthier
surroundings. But the metropolis could not stop
expanding, and eventually many of the isolated garden
cities were absorbed by the growing organism and
surrounded by exactly the type of urban area they had
been designed to avoid. Finally, the garden cities, when
successful, managed to provide healthier immediate
surroundings for small groups of people, but they did not
save the big city, nor did they create the city of the future.
The New Towns are now repeating the same experiment,
only on a different scale. Several of them are quite
successful as design conceptions of the inner town, and
their marketplaces pave the way for better community
centers in the cities of the future. But there is no reason
why these same advantages could not be achieved if the
New Towns were much closer to the great urban
agglomerations than they are at present; then their
inhabitants would not be deprived of all the advantages of
the big city. It is also reasonable to assume that many if
not all of them are going to meet the same fate as the
garden cities by being absorbed into the dynamically
growing big cities within the megalopolises of the future.

Future population of the earth shown in

projections of 20,000,000,000,
35,000,000,000, and 50,000,000,000
people based on estimates made by the
City of the Future research project at
Athens Centre of Ekistics. Right, future
urban world population estimate.

Both garden cities and New Towns take us one step

further than Utopias and ideal city conceptions, because
they provide an experiment from which we can learn.
However, having been inspired by escapist desires, like
the Utopias, they do not lead to experiences that would be
useful in planning the cities of the future, much less lay
foundations for them. They help us to understand the
problems of communities of very minor size, equal to only
one-thousandth of the big cities that already exist and to a
much smaller proportion of those to come.

11

CHAPTER III
THE CITIES OF THE FUTURE WILL BE EXTRAHUMAN IN DIMENSION
Studying the cities that we are building for the future,
we find that they escape from mans control because of
their unprecedented dimensions and growth. Studying
our dreams about the cities of the future, we find that
they fail to provide us with satisfactory solutions
because they are still related to the small, static cities
of the past. To understand the real conditions that will
shape the cities of the future, and to conceive the cities
properly, we have to start by studying their dimensions,
first in terms of their content, that is, their population,
and then their physical extent. These two factors are
the most important; they define function, structure, and
form, and finally the very essence of life in the cities.
Both of them require careful study, for the dimensions
of our cities in the future will be extra-human, beyond
man's present capacity to control them; and because of
this we may be led to inhuman conditions and to
disaster.
Population Size. There is a tendency to speak about the
population size of the cities of the future using the size of
the cities of the present as a measure. But this is wrong,
for our cities no longer have static populations. They grow
4% a year on the average; some of them grow by as
much as 6 or 7%, and some even more than that. At the
same time they expand and form greater groups of
settlements, changing from the size and form of a city to
that of a metropolis and then to a megalopolis. This is
why, if we wish to speak about the future, we should
speak about the total urban population of the earth first.
To do this we must first understand the general evolution
of the total world population.
There are now approximately 3,500,000,000 people, and
the number increases by about 2% a year. If the
population continues to grow at the present rate, there will
be about 7,000,000,000 by the year 2000,
14,000,000,000 by the year 2040, 28,000,000,000 by
2080, and so on. If so, it becomes apparent that very soon
we will be faced with problems of supply for all sorts of
goods, especially food and space. (There are good reasons
to believe that our needs for water and power can be met
for quite a number of generations to come; problems
involving other materials that may run in short supply may
be solved by replacing these materials with new synthetic
ones.) Estimates of food and space resources indicate that
the population may grow as high as 20,000,000,000
without encountering difficulties that cannot be met, but
from then on we should be prepared for increasing

12

problems, depending on the type of assumptions we

make. There are several schools of thought and, using the
projections of the most optimistic ones, the population
may reach a maximum of 50,000,000,000 people some
time around the beginning of the 22nd century.
Using the estimates made by several experts, the Athens
Center of Elastics made a number of calculations about
minimum, medium, and maximum projections, leading to
the conclusion that the total population of the earth may
stabilize, one or two centuries from now, at levels of
20,000,000,000, 35,000,000,000, or 50,000,000,000
people. On this basis, the corresponding urban population
will reach levels of about 17,000,000,000,
32,000,000,000, or 46,000,000,000. The rural population
will be able to produce food for a much larger urban
population. Thus, even under the minimum assumption of
20,000,000,000 people, the urban population will reach at
least 18,000,000,000 people -- or 15 times that of today - occupying an area 30 to 45 times larger than at present.
This means that the greatest part of the whole urban
population will live in interconnected cities forming huge
urban complexes of many tens of millions of people.
It may be argued that birth control or war may limit the
number of people. The first assumption is a Utopian one,
for even if we decided to adopt universal birth control
today, the population would still reach at least
20,000,000,000 people. It would take 30 to 40 years to
implement this decision in all corners of the earth; by then
the population would have reached more than
7,000,000,000, and it would not stabilize below the
12,000,000,000 level. The second assumption will, I hope,
remain Utopian. If it does not, we will not have to worry
about cities -- those who survive will have other problems.

Growth of the urban Detroit area from

1900 to 1959 shown by the change of the
cultivated farmland into urban land.

Physical Size. To conclude that if the urban population is

going to grow at least 15 times larger the physical size of
cities will grow correspondingly is wrong. There are cities
today where physical size, in terms of area covered, grows
as much as three times faster than the population. This
trend is especially apparent in high-income countries,
although the growth of the urban area exceeds the
population increase even in very low-income countries. We
estimate that for the average city the area increases twice
as fast as the population, and this means that even if
present trends continue, the total area of cities will be 30
times larger than at present. The very great problems of
space resulting from this may become the primary factor
in limiting the cities and their population, but this is a
factor for the more distant future. The immediate result
will be the interconnection of many cities into broad urban
complexes. Already the growth of population has tended to
move in this direction, and a careful study of the patterns
of spatial growth shows how the cities of the past have
become interconnected into the metropolises of the
present, and how they are gradually being amalgamated
13

into much larger complexes, called megalopolises,

containing tens of millions of people.
This trend was first noticed by Jean Gottmann (1961) in
his study of the eastern megalopolis of the U.S., extending
from Boston in the north to Washington, D.C., in the
south.viii It was then studied in the Great Lakes
megalopolis in North America. Subsequently, in a study
directed by John Papaioannou of the Athens Center of
Ekistics, this phenomenon was found in 14 areas around
the world.ix Many more megalopolitan areas are going to
be born, so that within a few generations the great
majority of the world's urban population will live in them.
Even in the less developed areas of the world, the same
phenomenon is going to occur; settlements may not
merge into a megalopolis, but they will form many major
concentrations comparable to the present-day metropolis
of many millions of people.
At this stage we may ask ourselves whether we can
calculate the number of cities of all sizes and their
corresponding populations in order to have an idea of the
sizes of cities we will deal with and live in. This is
impossible, not because the calculations do not lead to
probable figures, but because there is every sign that, as
seems to be happening in the Great Lakes megalopolis and
the megalopolis in England and Wales, all cities will be
interconnected in major urban complexes where no
distinction between large and small will be possible; they
will all have become one.
Structure and Form. This last statement opens the
question of the structure and form of the cities of the
future. If they are to be interconnected in major
complexes, does this mean that they will grow into vast,
continuous built-up areas covering whole regions and
gradually the whole earth? Not at all. First, to ensure the
biological survival of the city itself we need much more
open space (provisioned with food and other goods) than
we need built-up area. Second, there are important
economic and geographic forces that will shape the cities
of the future into continuous but not compact complexes,
looking very much like huge networks woven in branches
of different shapes, dimensions, and importance.
It is already quite clear, and our research has confirmed,
that three great forces will shape the cities of the present
into the cities of the future. These, in order of importance,
are the attraction of existing urban centers, the attraction
of major lines of transportation, and the aesthetic forces
attracting people to the sea, lakes, rivers, and other places
of scenic beauty. In addition to these forces, other factors
that will influence the formation of our cities include the
existence of open plains, indispensable for industrial plants
and major institutions; the existence of ample resources of
fresh water; and climate. Shaped by all these forces, the
structure and the form of the cities to come will differ from

14

Great Lakes megalopolis from Wisconsin

to northern Pennsylvania and eastern
megalopolis from Boston to Washington,
D.C. Dark areas indicate a density of more
than 100 persons per square mile, lighter
areas indicate the link between the two
megalopolitan areas.

place to place. The projected cities of the future in Greece

include some major concentrations, especially around
Athens, and many elongated strips, especially along the
beautiful coastal areas. In other Mediterranean countries
we see similar phenomena on a large scale, and in central
Europe the valleys of great rivers such as the Rhine and
the Rhone play a major role. Thus the basic structure of
the cities of the future, which conditions their general
form, depends on the landscape they occupy.
Toward Ecumenopolis. Such cities, growing dynamically
over the next two or three generations, will finally be
interconnected, in one continuous network, into one
universal city which we call the ecumenic city, the city of
the whole inhabited earth, or Ecumenopolis. If we speak,
therefore, of the cities of the future one century from now,
we can state that they will have become one city, the
unique city of mankind.
This evolution corresponds to an age-old dream of man
who, very early, started thinking of cosmopolis -- not as a
physical entity, but as the ideal state in which all people
will be equal and united into one world. In the Greek
tradition, cosmopolis, unlike paradise, was on the surface
of the earth, and unlike Utopias it had a specific place and
in some vague way was supposed to be a good place for
man, an eftopia. The idea of cosmopolis has been
important throughout human history. In the West it
began, in the first half of the 4th century B.C., with the
Cynics in Greece, who did not believe in the world-city (as
their word cosmopolis has gradually come to imply) but,
on the contrary, believed that man should have no city of
his own -- the whole cosmos should be his dwelling place.

Ecumenopolis on the earth in the year

2120, by which time it is expected that
the population of the earth will have
leveled off at a minimum of
20,000,000,000 people, and the
population of the definitely urban areas at
a minimum of 18,000,000,000 people.

At the same time, other Greek philosophers were trying to

find a meaning in the whole cosmos. The Stoics in the 3rd
century B.C. connected the concept of a world state with
the external universe of man.x Similar ideas were
developed during the period of the Roman Empire,
although nobody regarded the empire itself as cosmopolis.
In China, where philosophers dreamed of a universal
state, a great empire was created in the 3rd century B.C.;
another appeared in India at the time of the great
Buddhist Emperor Asoka (3rd century B.C.) when,
according to W. Wagar, Utopia and Cosmopolis merge in
a single splendid image.xi In the Christian West the idea
of a universal state was as appealing as the idea of
paradise: during the period of the Roman and Byzantine
empires it coincided with political goals; during feudal
times it was related to the notion of one church. Similarly,
the Arabs were moved to create their empires by the
dream of an Islamic world.
In the modern world, several proposals for a unified
Europe appeared in the 17th century, and the 19th
century produced more prophets of world integration than
15

any other in history, but more than ever they were voices
in the wilderness, scattered and impotent.xii This was true
in many countries, especially in Europe and Russia, and it
is useful to remember that the greatest number of Utopias
was produced in the same century. In the 20th century,
which begins with H. G. Wells and his "world brain," Arnold
Toynbee, Lewis Mumford, Aldous Huxley, and Erich Kahler,
among others, have defended the necessity of a world
order and a world state, that is, of a cosmopolis. Teilhard
de Chardin speaks of the noo-sphere or sphere of ideas -in a different sense, the brain of cosmopolis.
By now we can see that the idea of cosmopolis tends to
take on a physical expression as the Ecumenopolis of the
21st century. This city already exists in terms of the
transmission of news, which has reduced the earth to the
dimensions of a city; it is gradually coming to be
expressed in terms of air transportation, as the major
airports become the busy squares of Ecumenopolis; and it
tends to be expressed in many other ways.
There is no doubt about it, this city of the future is already
under construction. The big question that arises is not
about its dimensions, structure, and form, but about the
function of Ecumenopolis, the type of life that will be
created within it, and the quality that Ecumenopolis will
offer to man. This cannot be foreseen, because we do not
know what kind of imagination and courage modern man
will have to develop in order to create a high quality of life
within an Ecumenopolis of such dimensions.
What we can foresee is that if the existing forces continue
to develop as they do at present and if man reacts as he
has so far, Ecumenopolis with its extra-human dimensions
will turn into an inhuman city where all the weaknesses of
today's cities will be multiplied manifold. Under such
conditions, Ecumenopolis will choke itself -- and man as a
civilized being -- to death. Ecumenopolis will then turn
into the city of death or, as Lewis Mumford called the city
in such situations, into the Necropolis.
It now becomes clear that man is facing two alternate
roads: either to allow the extra-human Ecumenopolis to
become inhuman, leading to its virtual death; or to turn it,
in spite of its extra-human dimensions, into a very human
city. This is his great challenge and he can meet it if he
takes it seriously.
CHAPTER IV

THE CITY OF THE FUTURE SHOULD BE HUMAN IN

CONTENT
In the previous chapter we described the coming
Ecumenopolis, or the sum total of all cities of the future,
16

as a phenomenon almost independent of human decisions.

These decisions, even if they can be taken (which may be
possible a few generations from now but is very
improbable in the immediate future), cannot be
implemented because of ongoing biological, economic,
social, and political forces. Unlike these major forces which
define the dimensions and extent of Ecumenopolis,
however, its content, its function, and texture can be
decided by man who builds it. This is why, when speaking
of content, we have to consider not what is happening on
the basis of existing trends, as described in Chapter I, but
what should happen in order that the city can make man
happy and safe, as Aristotle prescribed. This chapter and
the ones that follow are based on the realistic hope that
man, at least when confronted with a crisis -- if not before
-- can take and implement the decisions needed to avoid
that crisis, which may mean his extinction. It is the same
hope that makes us believe we are going to avoid a major
war and that we can feed those who are now underfed.
Human Scale. When we speak of the human content of
our cities we immediately think of a human scale, but we
seldom define what this scale is. To do this is as
imperative as defining how our clothes should fit our
bodies -- they must correspond to certain measurements,
and their flexibility and texture must be such that they will
fit our bodies in repose and motion and feel comfortable
against our skin.
Central mall in a recently built shopping
centre outside Los Angeles where
pedestrians are able to move free of
automobile traffic.

Man who, as an animal of given dimensions defines the

human scale, consists of and can be seen in his different
aspects of body, senses, mind, and soul. The human scale
can only be defined by correspondingly definite
measurements. To find them, we can rely on the
experience gained so far in the huge laboratory existing on
the surface of the earth where man for thousands of years
has been both the guinea pig and research director. From
this we can learn the dimensions and shapes that are best
for rooms, streets, and squares, if they are used by man
only. If we are careful students of past and present cities,
we can define with great certainty, for example, the public
square in a human scale as being the one that does not
create optical distances greater than 600 ft., or we can
define the maximum distance of a central square from the
farthest residence as 3,000 ft., since the average person
does not want to walk longer than ten minutes. Similarly,
we can define the maximum distance from a monument in
a city as 6,000-7,000 ft. The creation of the big axis of the
Champs Elyses in Paris proves this, because, beyond this
distance even the Arc de Triomphe loses its three
dimensionality and becomes a small frame on the horizon.
This is why the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde was
needed to cut the longer axis from the Palais du Louvre to
the Arc de Triomphe to human dimensions.
Thinking in these terms, we can define the spaces that are
conditioned by the natural human dimensions of how far

17

man can see or walk or, for smaller distances, hear and
smell, and decide on the structure and form of the minor
units of our cities, from rooms to major neighborhoods.
This can be done if we make the assumption that all these
spaces are going to be inhabited, as in the past, by man
alone and not by elephants or automobiles, which impose
a different scale. This brings up the question of the public
space used by man and automobiles together. It is here
that contemporary man has failed completely by allowing
new animals, the automobiles, to enter his scale and
shatter it. Man and automobile do not fit together in the
same space; man is small, slow, and soft and the
automobile, large, fast, and hard. One can use the other
but they cannot coexist next to each other.
We have reached the point of saying that if we want to
create a human scale, we must keep the automobile out of
it. If we want our children to grow up safely, we must
create streets and neighborhoods where they can run
freely to the corner shop, the playground, and the school.
If we ourselves want to enjoy a walk and really see
beautiful streets and squares, to create art again that is
not only for museums, we must not separate man from
the car (how could we and why should we?); rather, we
must separate the paths of man from those of the
automobile. We therefore reach the conclusion that we can
once again create a natural human scale in our cities if we
measure our animal carefully and if we create spaces
where he can be the sole master.
The Human Community. If we define the human scale
as one conditioned by natural human dimensions, then we
can proceed to the definition of the human community that
we would like to see created as the fundamental physical
unit of the cities of the future. It is here that the utopian
dreams of small communities merge with our historical
experience. The successful cities of the past very seldom
had more than 50,000 people, and with the experience
gained by the analysis of the human scale we can discover
certain maximum dimensions beyond which man feels
uneasy.
Housing development in Denver, Colo.,
with shopping centre surrounded by
parking lots.

On the basis of this experience and knowledge, we can

define the fundamental community -- which, because it is
derived from measurable human dimensions, can be called
the human community -- as one that should be not larger
than 7,000 x 7,000 ft., should contain no more than
50,000 people, and should permit man to use public as
well as private spaces with no interference (or as little
interference as possible) from the automobile. This is also
the unit where man should be able to breathe clean air,
live without noise, and have contact with nature in small
planted squares and small parks.

18

Some of these principles are beginning to be understood,

and to a minor extent they are beginning to be
implemented. When, for example, the shopping centers of
the United States allow for pedestrian malls between their
buildings and the marketplaces of the British New Towns
do not permit automobiles to enter, a great step has been
made in the right direction. These are harbingers of the
new human community. But much more work needs to be
done. Pedestrians should be completely separated from
automobiles. This can be achieved in three ways. The first
is the creation of minor streets and squares where no
automobiles are allowed, so that people will have to leave
their automobiles in special parking lots. This is feasible in
low-income communities, such as one built in Iraq in the
1950s. The second, if and when we want every family to
keep its automobile on its own lot, is to allow cars to enter
the community by dead-end streets, from the other end of
which people can walk into public spaces. In this way
people would not have to cross the car paths unless they
wanted to visit the neighbors on the opposite side of the
street, and this would only mean crossing a small street
with very few automobiles, driven slowly by friendly
persons. Such an arrangement permits the infiltration of
the automobile scale into the human one with a minimum
disturbance, and it has been used in several places,
including the Eastwick development in Philadelphia. The
third is to separate pedestrians from automobiles by
separating the levels at which they move; that is, by
placing the automobiles on an underground network. This
is being done within some single buildings, but it has to
take place on a larger scale. This will be the ultimate
solution.

Human scale re-established within the

human community as in this one in Mosul,
Iraq.

On the basis of such considerations, we now reach the

point where we can define the human communities of the
cities of the future to some extent, and even build some of
them, thus acquiring experience and laying the
foundations for the city of the future. Islamabad, the new
capital of Pakistan, is an ample of a city built according to
the principle of communities in the human scale. Its
fundamental unit is a square of 0 x 6,000 ft., containing all
the facilities needed by a community of 30,000 to 50,000
people, plus several light industries so that many
inhabitants do not need to travel far for their jobs.
Shopping and other facilities are located in the center and
industries at the periphery. The square is surrounded by
high-speed expressways, but cars are permitted to enter it
only at 25 mph and may travel in the residential streets at
no more than 10 mph. Each of these communities is
subdivided into four communities of a lower order, with
corresponding facilities that can be reached by
pedestrians. Every resident can reach a small landscaped
square on foot in one minute and a green strip of the city's
system of parks and rivers by walking for no more than
three minutes. These Islamabad communities demonstrate
how easy it is to start, once again, building human

19

communities in our cities, which in physical dimensions

can be compared with the best cities of the past. If we
concentrate on such communities, we will be able to
create human conditions for our life and, gradually,
surroundings of high quality where social contacts between
people and their best physical expressions, the arts, can
flourish.
The Human City. The question now arises whether we
can reconcile the description of the very large dimensions
of the city of the future given in Chapter III (covering the
earth in urban areas hundreds of miles long) with our
desire to build natural human communities whose length
just exceeds one mile. How can we build communities of
no more than 50,000 people when we recognize the
existence of Ecumenopolis with billions of people, each
part of which contains tens of millions? Even more to the
point, can we have a human city consisting of billions of
people if the human community can only contain tens of
thousands?
Street for pedestrians only in Islamabad,
Pakistan.

The answer to all these questions can be a very positive

one.
The fact that the frame is extra-human does not mean
that we cannot create a human scale within it. Man has
often been faced with extra-human habitats. In the jungle
he had to protect himself behind the fences of his villages;
in the polar zone the Eskimo had to create a warm shell of
skins to protect his body and an igloo out of ice blocks for
the night; and in modern airplanes man enters a human
scale within a machine flying at inhuman speeds. Man will
have to create once more a human scale within an extrahuman frame, which has many inhuman parts.
The key to the solution is the creation of the human
community as a part of a much larger city. The problem,
therefore, is reshaped as a problem of an organized
Ecumenopolis, consisting of many human communities
that will be its fundamental cells, interconnected by the
tens, hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands into
major urban complexes that will be the parts of
Ecumenopolis. This problem could not be resolved without
modern science and technology, but without science and
technology the problem itself would not have existed.
There is a solution for our problem, based on the same
forces that caused the problem. We have only to catch up
with them.
Is it now possible to create such a human city, consisting
of many of the units that have been defined as human
communities? At this point we should remember that what
we termed a human community is based on natural
human dimensions (for example, how far man can see or
walk), but modern man has many artificial extensions; he
can see by television and drive or fly instead of walking. In
20

this way, what was a natural human community can be

immensely enlarged into a human city. With proper
organization of transportation and telecommunications
networks, the extra-human scale of the large city can be
turned into a human one and the inhuman conditions now
existing in many parts of the city can be eliminated.
To achieve this, man will have to understand that he has
the ability to connect artfully many small communities into
major ones; for example, by walking a maximum of ten
minutes and then driving for ten minutes, he can cover not
3,000 ft. but 10 or 20 mi. today and many more in the
future. In this way technology can be developed on the
basis of the specifications written by man for his city, and
the city will not "happen" because of coincidental
inventions and random action. We have reached the point
where, knowing how the city will be shaped and how we
want it to serve man, we can conceive, design, and build
it.
CHAPTER V
ECUMENOPOLIS, THE REAL CITY OF MAN
Ecumenopolis, which mankind will have built 150 years
from now, can be the real city of man because, for the first
time in history, man will have one city rather than many
cities belonging to different national, racial, religious, or
local groups, each ready to protect its own members but
also ready to fight those from other cities, large and small,
interconnected into a system of cities. Ecumenopolis, the
unique city of man, will form a continuous, differentiated,
but also unified texture consisting of many cells, the
human communities.

Ecumenopolis at night, as seen from a

satellite. Against the dark seas and
continents on a moonless night, the
lighted parts show the universal city of
man with the white parts being completely
and densely developed and the less
lighted ones being less so. This is a
projection of the night side over a 24-hour
period. Below, Rio de Janeiro at night with
populated areas outlined in lights.

Depending on how well these cells are formed, we can

have a very human or an inhuman city at the level of
greatest interest of man, the place where he spends most
of his time. Depending on how well these cells are
interconnected into an organic whole, we can have a
successful system that will provide man with much greater
facilities and benefits than his small cell, opening new
horizons for him and giving new dimensions to his life.
Depending on how well man can understand that he
belongs to all units of Ecumenopolis, to himself, his family,
his cell, his region, and to the whole, we can have a happy
man or not. Unless we achieve this last goal; unless
everybody understands that he belongs to all scales, to
the whole, that no matter where he lives he is responsible
for famine in Bengal; that at the same time he belongs to
himself, with all the rights and privileges of a free citizen,
we cannot have a successful city of man.

21

Physical Appearance. If we fly high above the earth in a

satellite, Ecumenopolis will appear as bands of built-up
areas crossing the open landscape, which will be cultivated
or left in its natural form. Probably 5% of the habitable
part of the earth will be developed as urban areas, 4,5%
will be cultivated, and 50% will be natural. At night,
against a dark background, we will see several tones of
lighted areas, depending on the degree of their
development. Electricity will light the world.
When our satellite begins its descent, we will be able to
recognize the branches of Ecumenopolis along the coasts,
spread around the big port, along the valleys and the
rivers and then in different, much thinner bands over the
mountain passes. Descending even farther, we will
recognize the major sectors of Ecumenopolis, those parts
that correspond to present-day metropolises, with the
major urban center in a key location, near the center of
gravity; with a major axis of development serving the
whole urban region with all its sectors and subsectors.
From even lower altitudes, and before turning in the
direction of the rocket port where we will land, we will be
able to recognize the typical cells of the huge
Ecumenopolis, which each one of us will call his city; these
will be the units where the family will grow and live until
the time when its component members become
independent.
Ecumenopolis, in order to operate properly, will be
structured in a hierarchical way: from the family house, to
the small and large neighborhoods, to the human
community or basic cell or city, to the metropolis, to the
megalopolis, and the other consecutive units that will form
the whole systemxiii. Such a hierarchical structure will be
imperative for the correct functioning of the parts and the
whole. It should be physically expressed so that, by
looking at the whole, we can recognize its organization
and find our way through it, just as we found our way in
the small, well-structured cities of the past, the spirit of
which, though not the form, will be retained in
Ecumenopolis. The main structure of Ecumenopolis will be
universal in expression; neither the rocket ports nor the
highways or seaports can have anything local in their
general conception and design. But the farther down we
go in the hierarchical scale, the more international
universal expressions defined by technology will yield to
national and local expressions defined by the local natural
and cultural values, by topography and climate, by
traditions, customs, and habits. Ecumenopolis will be
universal in its content and general frame, national or local
at its city level, and personal in expression in its homes.
Transportation and Communications. The systems of
transportation and communications will be the circulatory
and nervous systems of Ecumenopolis. More than anything
else, they can unify the universal city or break its
inhabitants. The question is often asked whether people in

22

the cities of the future will fly, sail, drive, or walk. The
answer is that they will do all these things, in a balanced
way. The basic principle will be for man to walk over short
distances (not losing this natural ability and what goes
with it), to drive over the longer ones, to sail for pleasure,
and to fly -- by new planes and rockets -- over the longest
distances. The second principle is that the interconnections
between the systems of walking, driving, sailing and flying
should be such that no time is lost at all. The third
principle is that the different lines of movement should not
cross, except in the case of pedestrian paths; pedestrians
are self-regulating organisms of the highest flexibility, and
not only do they find no need to avoid crossing each
other's paths, they want to, for they are social animals.
Such principles mean that only pedestrians will move on
the surface of the city, walking in safety on its clean and
natural streets and squares and enjoying their art and
architecture. Every machine, be it personal or for public
use, an automobile or a new sort of train, will move in
underground tunnels. Everyone will be able to walk within
his city and as far as he wants, but if he is in a hurry he
will walk down a flight of stairs, enter his personal bubble,
and drive it to its destination -- either by himself for short
distances or by turning the dials to point where he wants
to go and allowing an automatically operating system to
take him there. In the same way, he can dial his rocket
and then his destination rocket port on another continent,
as well as the number of the city he wishes to visit and the
address of his final destination; after he reaches it, he will
walk up one flight of stairs into the lobby of the institute
where he wishes to attend a meeting or into the San
Marco Square arcades in Venice. How long it will take him
will depend on the importance of the interconnection, but
ideally every distance could be covered in ten minutes, so
that cost rather than time would decide the selection of
the connections. In any case, when our citizen of the year
2117 returns to his home he will find his account
automatically charged with the cost of his trip, plus the
fine for any traffic violation; electronic eyes will have
recorded his itinerary and, if necessary, photographed any
traffic disturbance, and this information will be inscribed
simultaneously on his files at the bank and the taxation
department.
The only driving or sailing done on the surface of the land
and water will be for sight-seeing, sports, and leisure, and
this will be done in special areas at very low speeds.
Moving simply for the sake of going somewhere will be
automatic and underground. For the same reasons, goods
will be transported completely automatically through
tubes. Newspapers and packages of all sorts will be
available in every house or office simply by asking for
them by telephone, and in this way a great deal of
unnecessary movement will be avoided. This does not
mean that shopping will be eliminated, however. There will
be special markets for those many people who enjoy

23

shopping and window-shopping, but there is no reason to

force those who simply need to shop to go through the
same process.
Communications will be developed to the maximum,
passing all information to every home, giving everyone the
chance to read books from the most remote libraries on
his special television table. But these devices will not be
used to give people free time to meet with others for
profitable social, scientific, and political contacts.
Energy. More and more, man will use the natural, primary
resources of energy upgraded into secondary energy,
mostly in the form of electricity. No action that can be
carried out by electric power or any other type of
secondary energy will be carried out by man unless it is
necessary for his satisfaction and development. Man will
still walk and climb mountains, take part in sports for
exercise, and build his small houses with gardens -- not
because he has to do it, but because he enjoys it; children
will still run -- not to sell newspapers on the city streets,
but because they like it.
More and more, man will do all the tasks that present an
interest and a challenge and leave everything else to
automated process.
Such an evolution will mean a great network of electricity
infiltrating every single part of the inhabited space, with
lines located underground and beneath the surfaces of
walls and machines so that they can never hurt man, but
only provide him with all the energy and power that he
needs, where and when and how he needs it.

The centre has to grow within the built-up

area, and the dynamic city is choked to
death.

Residence and Employment. These are the two primary

needs of every individual, in the past and in the future,
and they must be properly served and properly
interconnected. Residences of all sorts will exist, from
single-family houses, mostly for families with children, to
multistory apartment buildings. The great difference
between these dwellings and the ones existing at present
will be that each single-family house will have a garden
surrounded by high walls, so that residents can have
complete privacy in the open, and their picture windows if any - will overlook their own courtyard, swimming pool,
tennis court, or thickly planted garden instead of streets
leading to small squares, planted, paved, with statues and
ponds designed or selected by the inhabitants of the
neighborhood, rather than by a distant metropolitan
authority. Here the new generations of children can grow
physically, intellectually, and morally, in accordance with
the ideals of the democratic society inhabiting
Ecumenopolis.
The great difference between the multistoried blocks of
flats in Ecumenopolis and the present ones is that those of
the future will have many terraces and roof gardens

24

incorporated into them, as Le Corbusier predicted. Unlike

his blocks of flats with no social life in them, however,
those in Ecumenopolis will have 200 to 300 units per floor,
so that at every level there will be a small but full
community with shops, playgrounds, coffeehouses, and
kindergartens. In this way people will be known to each
other and, unlike apartment dwellers of the present, they
will form communities of interest.
The number of days worked per week will be reduced,
hopefully only after everyone on this earth is properly fed
and housed. In the meantime, employment will be the
most important time-consuming effort of adult men and
women and the most important generator of trips. For this
reason every human community or cell will have as many
services and as many industries as possible, so that people
can be served better and travel less. Places of employment
will be as pleasant as those of residence, since the really
unpleasant types of jobs will be in automated industrial
plants, which will have to be reached by only a few people
who could, therefore, be taken there easily over long
distances even if the cost is high.
Great production and consumption of electric energy per
person, a well-organized system of transportation and
communications, and well-operating water- and heatsupply systems and drainage and sewage networks will
make it possible to locate places of high-density
employment, from computer centers to laboratories and
specialized shops, not on the present basis of where they
hurt less -- because of noise, fumes, and smog generation,
traffic problems, and similar considerations -- but on the
positive basis of where man wants them more. Thus
people will spend only a short time daily on the road and
will have free time for what is more important, their
education and leisure.
Education and Leisure. While the ancient Greek city
gave only its free male citizens freedom for their education
and leisure, Ecumenopolis will tend to give it to everybody,
regardless of sex, race, religion, nationality, or beliefs.
Education and leisure, separately and combined, will
absorb a large part of the time of its citizens who, in this
way, will be further developed, especially when they
understand that they do not need a society of leisure but a
society for their development and evolution through
education and leisure.
To achieve this, Ecumenopolis will not rely merely on
special institutions and areas for education and leisure,
labeled as such, surrounded by compound walls, and
charging entrance fees. Education and leisure will start in
every home. They will continue through the street and
square, where people will learn what nature is and how to
live in it; through the nursery, primary and secondary
school, college, university, and research institution;
through the mosaic pavements of the streets, the statues

25

in the small squares, and the series of art galleries in all

sorts of public buildings; and finally through the corner
jukebox, the restaurants, theatres, and nightclubs.
Ecumenopolis will provide facilities for education and
leisure at every level of its hierarchical structure. We will
never bring art to the people through museums alone. We
can achieve this only by a network of artistic expressions,
from the home to the great monuments. Museums will
become scientifically organized archives of art designed for
students and for the preservation of masterpieces that
may be spoiled or stolen if left unprotected. In the same
way, walking leisurely in a natural surrounding cannot be
meaningfully achieved in a big park approached after
hours of driving. What is needed is a small garden for
every family and the opportunity for everyone to walk
from his front or back door along a small path under apple
or cherry trees, along a river lined with poplar trees to the
small natural park from which he can reach the big natural
park, the rivers, canyons, and mountains.

In spite of the continuing surgery, the

dynamic city cannot be relieved of
pressures; with more roads, more
functions move in.

In this way, by the creation of systems for education and

leisure that will infiltrate all parts of the big city and create
opportunities for education and leisure in every cell, in
every home, for everyone -- just as oxygen is not limited
to the lungs but is taken into all parts of the human body - will the society of Ecumenopolis be benefited. In this way
society can profit from those values we believe in and
speak about, but that we have seldom been able to
realize.

CHAPTER VI

BUILDING THE CITIES OF THE FUTURE

No matter what the pattern of growth, the

dynamic city is choked to death.

By describing Ecumenopolis as the city that will have been

built 150 years from now, we leave ourselves open to
questions about what will happen before and after that
period. I will start with the latter because the answer is
easier. Ecumenopolis will be a city of equilibrium between
man and terrestrial space, just as in many cities of the
past -- such as several city-states in ancient times, feudal
cities in medieval times, and Renaissance cities -- the
population was static, in balance with its own land. Many
things are going to change in Ecumenopolis, but not its
size. This is one of the reasons why it has to be
successfully built -- the chances of change due to growth
will be limited from then on, and they will occur only when
another unpredicted revolution in science and technology
takes place, perhaps after a contact with extraterrestrial
intelligent life. The situation will be entirely different

26

before we reach the complete Ecumenopolis stage, that is,

in the next 150 years. During this period, and especially
during its first half before the slowing down of growth
becomes apparent, humanity will multiply more than at
any time previously, more than at any conceivable future
time. The urban settlements will grow even more rapidly
as humanity, in its attempt to house and accommodate
these people, commits itself to new projects in the cities
and to the settlement of new areas in a way that may lead
to disaster or to a great improvement of our life. The
urban decisions to be taken in the next two generations
will commit civilization further than the sum total of
everything humanity has ever done.

The ideal Dynapolis is a city with

unidirectional growth which prevents any
of its parts from suffering from pressures
by foreseeing and planning for growth in
time.

Thus we see that what happens during the next two

generations is of the greatest importance, not only for us,
our children, and our grandchildren (who after all matter
most to us), but also for Ecumenopolis and the millions of
millions who will inhabit it. Ecumenopolis will be completed
in the future, but it is already under construction; with our
everyday actions we are already building it. It is time for
us to look into the question of what we can do for our life
and the lives of those who will follow. We must look at our
different types of cities and think about their future and
decide how we can guide them properly. Unlike the static
Ecumenopolis, most of our cities are growing dynamically
and they have to be seen as the dynamic cities they are.
The Large Dynamic Metropolises. These are the areas
of the great crisis where man is losing the battle for a
better life and where he is going to lose the final battle if
he does not change his attitude. This is because all the
forces that shape Ecumenopolis are strongest around
these cities, and their growth is more important there than
anywhere else. These are the dynamic metropolitan areas
(Dynametropolises), which are attracting more people
than any other areas and thus are choking themselves to
death. The new areas growing up around the city stifle it
so that it cannot breathe. Where we need more space for
new functions we have less. In order to avoid this
phenomenon we begin to cut through the city, increasing
the pressures instead of decreasing them.

The ideal Dynametropolis provides for

growth in one direction if it consists of a
concentric system, no matter what its
shape is.

The reason this happens is that we deal with our cities as

if they were static, whereas they are dynamic; the answer
to our problem is to recognize the dynamic nature of our
cities and to deal with them accordingly. The city or polis
has been turned into a dynamic city or Dynapolis, and we
have been slow to realize it. It is time that we did so. By
allowing for the dynamic growth of the whole organism of
the city, we can prevent its central and older parts from
stifling.
The situation is much more complex when we deal with
city complexes instead of single cities, because rather than
growing dynamically they grow into each other. In such
cases, a proper analysis would show that what is needed is
27

a new center -- perhaps one of an equal or even higher

order, because one of a lower order than the existing one
would not ease the pressures in it, whereas an equal or
higher one could relieve the existing center of additional
pressures and give it a chance to be remodeled and to
operate properly again. This process has nothing to do
with decentralization; it is based on the creation of new
centers and we call it new-centralization.
The implementation of these principles of Dynapolis
through proper study and the analysis of specific situations
shows that we are led to various solutions. An example of
such a solution is the one for the greater Athens area that
led to the proposal for a new heart for the metropolitan
area. The population of that area -- 2.5 million people
today and 5 million at the end of the century -- could not
possibly be served by the present city of Athens, which
was planned for no more than a few hundred thousand. An
analysis of the problems in the second case shows that the
situation is more complicated. An analysis of the greater
Khartoum urban area in Sudan has proved that of the
three cities forming it-Khartoum, Khartoum North, and
Omdurman -- lying on three sides of the shores of the
Blue and White Nile, the two smaller ones should turn into
static cities, leaving most of the growth to Khartoum itself
toward the south. A similar growth on all the shores would
create such a need for crossing the great rivers that the
whole annual budget would have to be allocated for the
construction of bridges and nothing else.

In a system of cities, some of them may

grow into the others and create problems
of confusion and over congestion.

In a different situation, in the coastal area of Ghana near

its capital of Accra, a study has proved that the only
reasonable solution is the dynamic parallel growth of the
old city of Accra, of a new port town of Tema, and of a
third, entirely new city between the two. Cities belonging
to major metropolitan areas have to be prepared for all
sorts of future developments -- static ones must protect
themselves from growing cities around them, while
dynamic ones must fit into the expanding organism by
planning their own dynamic growth. In either case these
cities can be very successful -- the attainment of a better
life in them does not depend merely on the size and
growth of their own areas, but on how well they fit into the
broader successful city of man.
The situation is much more complex when we deal with
city complexes instead of single cities, because rather than
growing dynamically they grow into each other. In such
cases, a proper analysis would show that what is needed is
a new center perhaps one of an equal or even higher
order, because one of a lower order than the existing one
would not ease the pressures in it, whereas an equal or
higher one could relieve the existing center of additional
pressures and give it a chance to be remodeled and to
operate properly again. This process has nothing to do
with decentralization; it is based on the creation of new
centers and we call it new-centralization.

28

The implementation of these principles of Dynapolis

through proper study and the analysis of specific
situations shows that we are led to various solutions.
An example of such a solution is the one for the greater
Athens area that led to the proposal for a new heart for
the metropolitan area. The population of that area-2.5
million people today and 5 million at the end of the
century-could not possibly be served by the present city
of Athens, which was planned for no more than a few
hundred thousands. An analysis of the problems of the
urban Detroit area-which has 7.5 million people today
and will grow to double that figure by the year
2000based on a recently developed systematic
approach called the Isolation of Dimensions and
Elimination of Alternatives (IDEA) method,xiv led to the
conclusion that Detroit needs a twin center. Together
the two centers could create the major urban axis of
growth, in somewhat the same way that the big
avenues of New York City became the axis of this great
metropolis, leading to the creation of a new center
between 40th and 60th streets which, up to a point,
provided a satisfactory solution. The Rio de Janeiro
urban area, with a population of 7 million today, is
expected to reach almost 20 million people by the end
of the century. Studies show that nothing less than a
continuous, dynamically growing center to the west and
a completely new harbor can save the city.

If, in the same system as the preceding

figure, we create new arteries and new
cities, we can avoid all problems of
abnormal growth.

The city of Hamah in Syria is a typical

example of a formerly static city now
growing dynamically along the national
axis toward the south and, in this way,
becoming a part of Ecumenopolis.

The Dynamic Cities. The dynamic cities face the same

type of problem as the dynamic metropolises, although
often the problems are not as apparent because cities may
have greater margins of growth within a given structure.
The solutions, of planned dynamic growth and the
formation of new centers, are also similar. However,
policies for such cities depend on whether they are
completely independent, in which case they can form their
own independent plans for growth, or whether they belong
to a major urban area. In the first case the situation is
simpler and a proper analysis usually leads to the form of
an ideal unidirectional Dynapolis, as in the case of Hamah
in Syria.
In the second case the situation is more complicated. An
analysis of the greater Khartoum urban area in Sudan has
proved that of the three cities forming it-Khartoum,
Khartoum North, and Omdurman-lying on three sides of
the shores of the Blue and White Nile, the two smaller
ones should turn into static cities, leaving most of the
growth to Khartoum itself toward the south. A similar
growth on all the shores would create such a need for
crossing the great rivers that the whole annual budget
would have to be dedicated to the construction of bridges
and nothing else.
In a different situation, in the coastal area of Ghana near

29

its capital of Accra, a study has proved that the only

reasonable solution is the dynamic parallel growth of the
old city of Accra, of a new port town of Tema, and of a
third, entirely new city between the two. Cities belonging
to major metropolitan areas have to be prepared for all
sorts of future developments -- static ones must protect
themselves from growing cities around them, while
dynamic ones must fit into the expanding organism by
planning their own dynamic growth. In either case these
cities can be very successful the attainment of a better life
in them does not depend merely on the size and growth of
their own areas, but on how well they fit into the broader
successful city of man.

The urban area of the cities of Khartoum,

Khartoum North, and Omdurman grows
dynamically to the south between the two
Niles.

Chandigarh, the new capita! of the Punjab

in India, designed by Le Corbusier in the
year 1950. The drawing shows the initial
master plan by Le Corbusier with the city
divided into major sectors within which
the human scale is reestablished.

Brasilia, new capital of Brazil designed in

1957 by Lucio Costa.

The New Cities. The study of the dynamic growth of

metropolises and cities proves that, apart from the ideal
Dynapolis solution of unidirectional growth, there is a need
for new cities and new centers of great importance. A
more general study of trends of urbanization leading
toward Ecumenopolis proves that humanity cannot face
the crisis unless it creates, in time, many new cities of all
sizes. In this way we enter an era of colonization, with one
difference from the past -- this time the colonization must
be an inner colonization, leading to the opening of new
frontiers inside the old. After the eras of colonization of
foreign lands, or of new frontiers, we enter the period of
inner colonization of our own countries for our own benefit
without harming anyone.
The new cities now being built are on a very small scale in
relation to our needs. There are only a few exceptions,
created mostly by the administrative needs of relatively
new countries. The three most recent and probably most
interesting cases are three new capitals: Chandigarh of the
Punjab in India, Brasilia of Brazil, and Islamabad of
Pakistan. This last, being the largest new human
settlement ever planned in advance and having been
inspired by the principles of the cities of the future,
deserves further mention.
Pakistan had to meet the need for an administrative
capital. It had first used the existing city of Karachi, which
at the time of independence (1947) was a provincial town
without any of the facilities needed for the capital of a
nation of 90 million people. A feasibility study proved that
if the indispensable facilities were created in Karachi, more
than 50% of the budget would be required for the
acquisition of urban land and the widening of streets to
accommodate the traffic. Furthermore, the city of Karachi
would have been choked to death.
The creation of a new capital, on the other hand, would be
much cheaper for the government, would lead to
productive expenditures, and would create a new pole for
urban development, completely controlled by the
government and, therefore, operating for the benefit of
the nation. To facilitate the process, the area of an

30

existing city, Rawalpindi, was selected, since this city had

road and rail connections and an airport. In this way, the
birth and growth of the new city imitated the biological
process of birth and growth. Rawalpindi acted as the
mother, feeding the child until, one day, it grows enough
to act as its mother's protector. Islamabad is conceived as
a dynamically growing area, starting from the hillsides and
developing into the plain, turning into a metropolitan area
incorporating the Rawalpindi Dynapolis, and eventually
connecting with the national axis of Ecumenopolis in
Pakistan, running along the Grand Trunk Road, the age-old
transportation axis of this part of Asia.
The Static Cities. The dynamic growth of most of our
cities should not mislead us into believing that all our cities
are going to grow dynamically and forever. Some cities,
off the main axes of development, are already static or
even depressed, and others will become so when the
potential of their area for dynamic growth is reached.
Some cities will even remain static because of the many
pressures of the surrounding dynamic areas. This static
situation is not one to be deplored. Static cities can be
very successful -- one day the whole Ecumenopolis will be
static -- and life in them can be very happy. In this
respect, static cities are in some ways the forerunners of
Ecumenopolis; in them we can test the possibilities for
growth in quality instead of in numbers and area,
increasing our productivity, our services, and the quality of
life.

The birth and growth of Islamabad repeats

the natural process of childbirth. First, the
mother feeds and protects the child; then
they both grow independently; and finally,
the child becomes able to take care of the
mother.

Action for such cities can be easier in many respects than

for dynamic cities, since they do not suffer from
continuously increasing pressures. The whole difference
between successful and unsuccessful action will depend on
whether we understand the static role of our city in time
and consider it as an opportunity rather than as a calamity
-- an opportunity to create quality --and whether we act
accordingly. In the cities of the future, people will not be
satisfied by dynamic growth or by the static situation
alone, but only by the quality of life.
EPILOGUE
We can now ask ourselves whether Ecumenopolis will ever
be built. We have already given the answer: it is under
construction. We can then ask ourselves whether it will be
built for man's benefit, his freedom, safety, and happiness,
or for his slavery and extinction. We can only answer that
it all depends on two things: first, on man's ability to
conceive with reason and to dream the cities of the future,
or, as Dennis Gabor has defined it, to invent the
futurexv; second, on man's courage not only to invent but
also to build the future. Imagination and courage are the
two prerequisites. We have signs that the first is starting
to operate; the present article, born out of interest in the
fate of our cities, is one proof. For the second, every
31

reader must ask himself. My answer is that mankind has

such courage, even if it takes a great crisis to mobilize it.

GLOSSARY OF TERMS
Anti-Utopia: a 20th-century English word, created to
present the anti-ideal place. It is often used (incorrectly)
to mean dystopia, an evil place.
Cacotopia: a Greek word which is still in use and means a
bad place. It is used for mountain paths, passes, etc., and
also sometimes for a bad or doubtful situation. Patrick
Geddes used it in 1913 and Lewis Mumford used it in 1922
to mean hell. Others use it to replace anti-utopia-though
they do, on occasion, use anti-utopia as well.
Dynametropolis: a metropolis which exhibits continuous
growth like the Dynapolis. A Dynametropolis contains all
the phenomena that characterize a Dynapolis, only
intensified in scale and complexity. In some respects
Dynametropolis may, in addition to its major urban areas,
contain examples of all types of settlements, including
agricultural and nomadic. Term coined by the author.
Dynapolis: dynamic polis or dynamic city. The ideal
Dynapolis depends on the type of city we are dealing with.
Term coined by the author and used since the early 1950s
in teaching and writing; used in his book Architecture in
Transition (1963).
Dystopia: another and much more precise word used
instead of anti-utopia, means evil place, from the Greek
words dys and topos. Dys signifies difficulty or evil and is
the opposite of eu, good, while topos means place. V.
L. Parrington, Jr., uses it instead of anti-utopia in
American Dreams (1964).
Ecumenopolis: the coming city that, together with the
corresponding open land which is indispensable for man,
will cover the entire earth as a continuous system forming
a universal settlement. Term coined by the author and first
used in the October 1961 issue of Ekistics, published by
the Athens Center of Ekistics of the Athens Technological
Institute.
Eftopia: the same as eutopia, but with a different spelling
based on the phonetic principle, used in order to avoid
confusion between the pronunciation of eutopia and
Utopia.
Ekistics: science of human settlements. Term coined by
the author from the Greek words oikos, home, and oikw,
settling down; first used in his lectures of 1942 at the
Athens Technical University.
32

Entopia: place that is practicable-that can exist. Term

coined by the author from the Greek words en and topos,
in and place. First used in the Trinity College lectures,
Hartford, Conn., 1966, and published in his book Between
Dystopia and Utopia (1966).
Eutopia: from the Greek works eu and topos, meaning
good place. It is used by many writers as a more specific
term than Utopia since it does not connote impossibility or
unreality. Patrick Geddes used it first in Cities in Evolution
(1913) and it was used later by Lewis Mumford in The
Story of Utopias (1922).
Human Community: community in the human scale in all
its elements, with emphasis placed on the requirements of
man, his body, senses, mind, and soul without their
artificial extensions. Such a community is based on the
walking man who controls its inner part, while the nonhuman machine scale is restricted to the borders of the
community.
Ideal City: mentioned by several authors, especially in
relation to the physical aspects of the city and the
disciplines of architecture and physical planning, as
distinguished from Utopia which seldom refers to these
aspects.
Megalopolis: greater urbanized area developed by the
gradual merging of many metropolises and cities into one
urban system. Its population is calculated in the tens of
millions. It is distinct from the metropolis, either because
its population exceeds ten million people, in which case it
also covers a vast surface area, or because it has
incorporated more than one metropolis. Term used since
ancient Greece when a city called Megalopolis was created
in Arcadia; Jean Gottmann gives it a special contemporary
meaning in his book Megalopolis: The Urbanized
Northeaster Seaboard of the United States (1961).
Utopia: an imaginary and indefinitely remote place, a
place or state of ideal perfection, especially in laws,
government, and social conditions. First used by Sir
Thomas More for an imaginary and ideal country in his
book Utopia (1516); it is a Greek word, a combination o(
ou, not, and topos, place, meaning no-where or noplace. Later it was pointed out that Utopia is a confusing
term because it may mean no-place from ou-topos or a
good place from eu-topos

i
For a more detailed discussion of mans struggle to with ideas about the cities of the future, see the authors book
Between Dystopia and Utopia (Hartford, Conn.: Trinity College Press, 1965)
ii
Vernon, Louis Parrington, Jr., American Dreams (New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1964)
iii
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, (London: Corgi Books, 1956), p. 60.
iv
G. A. Jellicoe, Motopia: A study in the Evolution of Urban Landscape (London: Studio Books, Longacre Press, Ltd.,
1961)

33

Ron Herron, Walking City, Aujourdhui, no. 50 (June-September 1965), p.p. 46-47.
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958)
vii
Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1946)
viii
Jean Gottman, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: The Twentieth
Century Fund, 1961)
ix
John G. Papaioannou, The City of the Future: Population Projections for Ecumenopolis (Athens Center of Ekistics,
March 1964)
x
W. W. Wagar, The City of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963), p. 27
xi
Ibid., p. 24
xii
Ibid., p. 49
xiii
The Ekistic Logarithmic Scale classifies settlements according to their size on the basis of a logarithmic scale with 15
units. These are as follows: unit 1, man; unit 2, room; unit 3, dwelling; unit 4, dwelling group; unit 5, small
neighborhood; unit 6, neighborhood; unit 7, small town; unit 8, town; unit 9, large city; unit 10, metropolis; unit 11,
conurbation; unit 12, megalopolis; unit 13, urban region; unit 14, urbanized continent; unit 15, Ecumenopolis. The
Ekistic Logarithmic Scale can be presented graphically, showing area or number of people corresponding to each unit,
etc., so that it can be used as a basis for the measurement and classification of many phenomena in human
settlements.
xiv
Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Emergence and Growth of an Urban Region: The Developing Urban Detroit Area, vol. 1:
Analysis, part 1 of a study directed by the author in association with the Detroit Edison Co., Wayne State University,
and Doxiadis Associates (Detroit Edison Co., 1966)
xv
Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future (London: M. Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1963)
vi

34

Articles

From Impact of Science on Society, v.19, no.2, April - June 1969, p. 179-193: 8 fig.

The city(II): Ecumenopolis,

world-city of tomorrow

The trend of city growth must eventually lead from

megalopolis to Ecumenopolis, a single planet-wide city
including all Earth's inhabitants. This evolution is
inevitable, nor, says Dr. Doxiadis, is it desirable to avoid
it. Instead, we must plan now to make Ecumenopolis fully
livable and comfortable for man. Already the main features
of the world-city can be perceived: tentacles of nature
interwoven and reaching everywhere into built-up areas;
utilities lines, food transport tubes and high-speed
roadways all moved underground; and the vast population
living in easeful small-town-like units of 30,000 to 50,000
people.
WHY THE CRISES IN OUR CITIES
About thirty-five years ago, when one talked of cities, the
only questions raised were, as a rule, questions of the
aesthetics of buildings: whether a particular house or
monument was beautiful or ugly. Later, when the world
began to suffer severely from the poor state of
communications, all one heard on every hand was about
the crisis in urban communications, and more particularly
about too many motor-cars. Later still, social problems
arose in certain countries, and people began to view the
urban crisis from that particular aspect. In some countries,
the problems were specifically racial, as in the United
States, where the situation is more delicate than
elsewhere. And so the urban crisis then took on the
appearance of a social crisis.
Sometimes, also, the urban crisis was poorly understood,
because each person tended to regard it from his own
particular point of view. Certain people, in fact, referred to
it as a crisis in small-scale organic unity, that of the
family; others saw it as resulting from the disappearance
of small neighborhoods and towns, and yet others as
something inherent in large cities and big centres of
population. Each one, in fact, saw only a single factor of
the general crisis in space.
Actually, the crisis is nothing other than that of the entire
system. This is an essential principle we must understand:
it is the crisis of a system we commonly refer to as the
city, but which it would be more accurate to call the
human settlement.
The crisis is a general one. We shall understand this if we
consider the city from a rational point of view. To do so,
we must try to view it under three aspects.

The five elements

First we must try to understand of what it is composed.
Five elements enter into its composition (Fig. 1). The first
of these is nature, the soil which gave it birth. By not
taking this simple fact into account, our efforts have been
doomed to failure. We have, in fact, polluted the
atmosphere and the waters, destroyed beautiful countrysides, exhausted the natural resources, killed off the
animals, insects and plants in a word, annihilated the city's
natural setting.

Fig. 1. The five elements that compose

the city.

The second element is man, who is frequently left out of

the calculations. All we need to do is look at a city from
the air to realize that the most important place is allotted
to motor-cars, and man occupies only the second place;
that the city is covered with colossal buildings. We have so
completely failed to recognize man's existence as to
prevent our children from using the streets. In this way
man is left exposed to various forms of psychosis and
neurosis which are far more serious than the accidents
which stain our streets with blood, for they are the
diseases of a man who is no longer free to wander about
and grows up, for the first time in history, with the feeling
of being more at ease in the heart of nature than in the
city.
Thirdly, society, painstakingly created by man, and
producing, in turn, human settlements. We are incapable
of creating a society. All we can create are enormous
masses of people incapable of performing their normal
functions. Men are more and more separated in space
from each other; the necessary contacts between them
are lacking. The women, left alone in the suburbs without
a second car at their disposal become 'nervy', and the men
who have to drive for several hours back and forth also
become tense and nervous. It is curious to observe that
when men are scattered over vast tracts of territory they
lose contact with the small surface points of unity - the
family, the neighbors. In this way we create a city with
nothing human about it.
The fourth element is buildings in general, what the
architectural trade refers to as 'shells'. Technically, there
has certainly been progress. But does this progress serve
man's true interests? This cannot be proved. On the other
hand, we cannot help thinking that these great blocks
isolate men and turn them into cave-dwellers. And the
idea of wandering through car-choked streets admiring the
beauty of some of the buildings as you go along is, strictly
speaking, inconceivable.
The fifth and last element is the networks: highways,
railways,
water-supply
systems,
electricity
and
telecommunications. All these become more and more
technically perfect every day. If they are underground
systems, as in the case of water-supply, electricity and
2

telephone, they cannot possibly inconvenience men from

the technical or aesthetic point of view. If, on the other
hand, they are on the surface, such as certain electrical
and telephone systems, they can be disadvantageous, at
any rate aesthetically. But it is in the road system that
failure has been most marked. Motorways have the effect
of breaking up a city's continuity and preventing it from
functioning normally.
We therefore reach the conclusion that the failure of the
system is due to the destruction of its elements and of the
relationships between them. Because man cannot find joy
in his home, because his habitation cannot offer him a
better life, the entire city system suffers. Because the city
expands rapidly, thanks to the motor-car and other
centrifugal forces, it destroys the surrounding country-side
and the entire system goes slowly from bad to worse.
The five points of view
We can also regard this system in other ways, from the
scientific point of view, for example; or we can regard it as
an economic, social or political system or, again, as a
technological, civilizing or aesthetic one. From whichever
angle we look at it, we see that the city, the human
settlement, the system, instead of getting better is only
getting worse. Everything goes to show that the results
obtained bear no relation to the progress being made
nowadays in all the spheres of human activity.

Fig. 2. The five elements considered

from five points of view.

The problem becomes even more complicated when,

looking at these five elements from different angles and
from the five basic points of view -economic, social,
political, technological, and cultural- you arrive at a great
number of combinations, which show just how many
demands will have to be satisfied and how difficult it will
be to meet them all. Figure 2, just shows a simple
combination of these variables.
These problems become even more complex if we admit
that what we understand by the word 'city' is only an
extremely simplified term for a phenomenon of infinitely
greater complexity. The significant feature of the way in
which our life in space is organized is no longer the city
per se, but rather a system of human settlements. In
antiquity, at the time of the city-states, we could perhaps
have claimed that the system was composed of a city and
some villages. Such city-states varied neither in size nor in
the relationships between them; these latter were few in
number and often much more hostile than pacific.
In maintaining that the same is true today -which
unfortunately is what we do- we make a profound mistake,
for the city systems in which we live are not limited by
city's natural boundaries. No modern city could survive if
its exits were to be closed. If its conduits were to be cut
off, too, it would cease to exist, having neither water nor
3

Fig. 3. The fifteen space units.

electricity. Moreover, even if it were allowed to maintain

relations with the surrounding villages, the city, as we
know it, would still be unable to live. Its system of
communications is very extended; it imports goods from a
great distance and exports likewise to remote countries,
and as it functions at an intense rhythm it ends by
absorbing the neighboring villages. A village which has
radio and television is no longer a village; it has been
incorporated into the city network. It is ever receiving
orders, and little by little begins to obey them.
Hence the following conclusion: we should not hold the
concept of a dissociated 'city' -a concept which is,
moreover, impossible to define- but envisage it as a
system made up of many different units.
The fifteen space-units
If we closely and systematically analyze our living space,
we shall discover that we live in fifteen different space
units of increasingly greater dimensions (Fig. 3).
The first of these, and the smallest, is that of man himself
-it is precisely the space occupied by the human body with
all its limbs extended; the second is the room; the third,
the dwelling; the fourth, the dwelling group; the fifth, the
small neighbourhood. Leaping upward, we come to the
eighth unit, the traditional town of 30,000 to 50,000
inhabitants; then to the tenth, comprising the metropolis
with around two million inhabitants; the eleventh, the
conurbation with several million inhabitants, and the
twelfth, a new type of urban concentration going by the
name of 'megalopolis', like the one stretching along the
east coast of the United States or like those to be found in
the region of the American and Canadian Great Lakes, or
in the Netherlands, or along the banks of the Rhine, or yet
again in the area stretching between Tokyo and Osaka
which is known as Tokaido.
Finally, we come to the fourteenth and fifteenth units, the
urban continent and Ecumenopolis, the universal city.
These constitute a world system that we cannot, of course,
actually see because it remains to be created, but which
we should be able to visualize were we able to record the
total movements of aircraft in the sky, those of trains and
motor vehicles on the earth, and the torrents of news
circulating by telephone, telegraph and television. These
fifteen spatial units govern that total urban system which I
call the city.
If we now consider this system with its fifteen units, and if
we combine them with the five elements and five points of
view so as to form a complex of forces exerting their
influence on the city, we shall then realize that we are
talking of billions and trillions of aspects and problems Ian

enormously complicated system.

We might naturally ask ourselves if this is the first time
that the city has fallen sick. Obviously it is not. A city is,
generally speaking, always sick. Sometimes it is the
dwellings that are unsuitable for habitation and become
slums; in other instances service installations are faulty or
lacking, as in the past, when there were no town mains of
any kind. In certain cases, it is the people themselves who
are abnormal so that the community does not function
properly. Diseases peculiar to cities, just as human
diseases, have always existed. Sometimes remedies could
be found for them, sometimes not. But all these diseases
differed from our own in that they were restricted to a
single element, a single aspect.
Nowadays, the disease of the city is also that of the whole
system. It forms part of that system's very existence and
increases as the system expands. We can say today that
every city is, by definition, sick and that it is always
moving towards a crisis, because no single one of its
elements is immune from disease.
INTENSIFICATION OF THE CRISIS
If we have succeeded in understanding the exact nature of
the crisis and the reasons for it, we shall also be able to
realize easily enough that it can only get worse and worse
as time goes on, if things are allowed to remain as they
are. It is because we have been unable to grasp this state
of affairs that we find ourselves incapable of dealing with it
rationally and have no assurance that we will be able to
avert the worst.
Since the cause of the crisis in the system is essentially
the latter's size, obviously as the size grows, the problems
arising out of it will grow in the same proportion.
Assuming that the world population at the end of the
century will be double the present population of 3,500
millions, (and more likely it will be something more), that
means it will have reached 7,000 million. In the generation
immediately following, that is to say, by the year 2030,
the population will probably have quadrupled, but even if
this were not so, it is bound to be very much higher than
7,000 million. If this rate of increase continues, we shall
have reached a figure of over 20,000 million by the end of
the twenty-first century. Such a population increase will
call for a corresponding increase in the units which
compose
the
main
elements
of
the
city.
But population is only one aspect of the question. A city is
not composed only of human elements; there are others
besides, such as buildings and mains of various kinds,
which complicate the problem. To be able to deal with
questions of buildings and mains, we have to know
something about the economy. We know, of course, that
the economic potential of the population is expanding. We
5

may therefore expect per capita income to rise steeply, to

at least double the present one in the course of the
generation. This means that the gross revenue of a
medium-sized town will have quadrupled.
As a first approximation, as the population increases, the
need for surface space increases proportionately.
However, since incomes go up, people demand more
space for their dwellings and service networks. They also
have more cars at their disposal and they insist on more
room for them, too. And with rising prosperity, the
mileage covered by each car constantly increases, so that
new motorways have to be built. We can, therefore, say
that it is not just the city itself which needs more room,
but also every individual in it. This explains how it is that
in a good many urban centres, over the past forty years,
the surface area has multiplied twice or even three times.
We are led to face this additional problem: that the
demand for urban space is bound to increase at a faster
rate than the population and, in certain cases, will greatly
outstrip the growth of the economy.
We now see that, where we have a population with an
increased economic potential and therefore insisting on
more living space, our whole system of human settlements
is bound to become much more complex than the actual
growth in population would seem to justify. Likewise, the
whole body of problems increases at a faster rate than
does either the world population or the urban population.
ESCAPIST SOLUTIONS
Most people are not yet aware of the major problems. But
there are some who understand them because they think
and they make calculations, even though these may not
always be very accurate. Such people endeavor to find
solutions. At present these are, in fact, but escapist
solutions. I propose to enumerate the main ones in the
order of their appearance.
In the first category we can place solutions based on
various myths. These are, for example, the myth of
optimism, which foresees the solution of all problems in
emigration to other planets or in the abolishing of motorcars; the myth founded upon imaginary concepts, such as
the assertion that people are living today in high-density
urban agglomerations, whereas the medium-sized town of
today is in fact less densely populated than it was a
generation ago; the myth that our problems would be
solved by increasing the height of buildings, although, on
the contrary, these enormous constructions create new
problems without at all solving the human ones.
There is a whole series of other more realistic Utopias,
those which are based on some dream of reconstruction
which is entirely divorced from logic. According to these,

cities are no longer necessary.

There is still another form of Utopia based on the
application of the same abortive solutions to various
problems which were tried at the end of the nineteenth
century; these led to a host of Utopian groups which
founded Utopian communities. This is a typical escapist
solution.
Then there are escapist-motivated solutions which take
the form of ideal cities and technological Utopias. These
advocate the creation of parking lots on the flat roofs of
dwellings, or the construction of buildings shaped like
huge metal tanks capable of moving from place to place.
The most dangerous escapist solutions are those which
advocate a return to small towns. Actually, many of us
have been born and raised in such towns and we still see
them in our mind's eye and dream of going back to them.
This form of Utopia takes on different aspects, such as the
ideal little towns like those imagined by Skinner with his
Walden Two, or like those described in Aldous Huxley's last
book, Island, in which there is a small island where people
live in little towns.
Still more dangerous is the theory recommending as the
ideal solution the establishment of new satellite towns
outside the large cities. Yet do we not now possess the
evidence of experience, showing that the satellite towns
established sixty years ago have for the past thirty years
been urban sectors and that the same fate has befallen
those established thirty years ago?
THE PATH OF THE FUTURE
We have now reached the point where we must decide on
the future road to follow. The question is: are we now
capable of examining systematically the various
practicable alternatives for the future which are open to
us? I believe we are.
First among the roads we can follow is that of research
into basic causes, and the first among these to be studied
must be the world population increase. Even if a decision
on birth control could be adopted immediately, two
generations would go by before we could convince the
inhabitants of remote villages in India or South America to
apply it. This means that in all probability we will reach the
figure of 7,000 million and then 12,000 million before the
population increase can be arrested.
Given this increase in world population, it is permissible to
ask whether the urban population must necessarily rise
too. Could we not arrange to keep this population in the
countryside? That is something quite out of the question.
Man's belief in the freedom of the individual (which all
peoples are coming to hold as firmly as their belief in
7

human progress) makes it impossible for us to intervene

directly in a man's decisions. We cannot say: 'Live in the
villages, even if you are not needed for rural work to
produce food, which can today be produced by a reduced
number of people.'
The general increase in farm productivity will sustain the
swelling of urban populations and the decrease of the rural
population. The result will be that, in a world population of
7,000 million in the year 2000, 5,000 million will be city
dwellers. Consequently, the urban population will not
simply have doubled, as is sometimes naively thought, but
will have quadrupled. And when the world population
reaches 12,000 million, the lowest leveling-off point,
10,000 million people will be city-dwellers, six or seven
times the present number.
Let us now consider the third road open to us. Given the
fact of the increase in the urban population, might it not
be possible to restrict the growth of our cities by directing
the surplus population to new towns? We should give this
solution serious thought. We could, indeed, build new
towns to absorb that population if the necessary funds
were available; for such towns call for a bigger capital
investment per head for fewer services, especially during
the first few years, the first decades, the first generations,
until they reach the size of our present-day cities.
But why do we want the new towns to reach the size of
today's cities? The answer is that only towns of a certain
size can give men a greater number of options. Some
people will say that even a town of modest size can have a
theatre and a hospital, and, indeed, towns of 50,000,
80,000 or 250,000 inhabitants (this last being the
fashionable figure just now) will be attractive to a certain
proportion of the population.
The answer to this argument is simple. There was a time
when a man was presumably content in a village of 700
inhabitants, which could support a primary school. What
people forgot was that such a village could well have
insisted on having a secondary school, a vocational school,
and a university for its children.
Some will still argue that small towns like this can even
meet the cost of maintaining a theatre. But where is the
man who will be content with just one theatre, on the
model of the small cities of ancient Greece, where the
theatre was only obliged to open its doors during
important festivals? Might he not well prefer a city with
five, ten or twenty theatres, where he could choose
between various productions? And why would he be
content with a hospital with 200 beds if his disease calls
for the attention of a number of specialists, which only
university centres are able to provide? In fact, we cannot
logically conceive of a city of fixed size which can satisfy
our needs. The larger a city the more the needs it serves,
8

which is why people are increasingly attracted to cities.

Should we enlarge our present cities or should we build
new ones? The answer is that, theoretically, we could build
new ones, provided we make them at least as large as the
present ones. In view, however, of the fact that the
exodus is from small cities to large ones and that,
whatever the size of the new cities we wish to build, their
actual construction is bound to take a considerable number
of years -one, two or possibly three generations- the
population flow will obviously be away from them.
Consequently they will prove a failure, for we cannot
possibly force these generations to accept dictated
solutions to problems which involve their being told where
they are to live.
So the answer to this difficult question is as follows:
evolutionary and constructive forces will inevitably lead to
the growth of cities of the present type in response to the
need to satisfy all the requirements of the inhabitants.
This does not mean that a certain number of cities of a
new type will not be built, but the building of them will be
difficult, and will only affect a small proportion of the
population.
Thus we are led to the following conclusion: the most
probable, logical and practical solution among the three we
have been discussing is the progressive expansion of the
present type of city as a result of the massive influx of an
ever-increasing population.
TOWARDS ECUMENOPOLIS
Our present cities are developing into increasingly complex
systems. Starting with the city which develops in
concentric circles (see Fig. 4), we finally reach the one
which is strung out along the main artery linking it up with
the nearest town, port or coast. We thus pass naturally
from the city we are familiar with to a system of cities
linked together, forming an urban complex with great
numbers of inhabitants (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4. Cities initially expand in

concentric circles.

This brings us at last to the following conclusions: under

the growing pressures of these various forces -economic,
biological, demographic, etc.- we are gradually creating a
bigger and bigger system of settlements, a system which,
left to develop blindly, can only worsen daily and
eventually bring us to catastrophe. This system will very
quickly assume world proportions. From the megalopolis
we shall pass to cities extending over continents, and
thence to Ecumenopolis, or world city. Its advent is
inevitable. Any strict analysis reveals that there is nothing
logical, rational or practical we can do to avoid it.
Ecumenopolis will be shaped by the forces engendered in
cities of the present type as they attract huge populations
in the future; by great systems for transportation, the
9

inevitable magnet for industry and other activities; and by

forces of an aesthetic nature, such as the attraction
exerted by the seaboard on increasing numbers of people
(Fig. 6).

Fig. 5. An urban complex, formed as

population expands and cities become
increasingly linked together.

People will want to enjoy aesthetic pleasures at home;

they will want to be able to build their houses overlooking
an attractive valley, or along the coast with beaches
opening before them, even though the crowded city centre
is some distance away. At the same time, we must bear in
mind the attraction of the vast plains, where water
abounds, where the climate is mild.
All the above allows us gradually to form an idea of what
the universal city will look like. As a result of research
conducted by the Athens Centre of Ekistics we can already
imagine to some degree how it will appear within a
century or a century and a half (Fig. 7). (with refernce to
the Ecumenopolis in Greece, please see Fig. 9)
Ecumenopolis, this world-city that will en-globe the whole
of humanity, will be a frightening conurbation, but, as we
made clear earlier, we have no evidences that enable us to
conclude that a better sort of city can be created. Once we
are convinced that this city is inevitable, we can only form
one conclusion: if it is built on today's lines, according to
present-day trends, it will be a city doomed to destruction,
that which Lewis Mumford referred to some time ago as a
necropolis - city of the dead.

Fig. 6. The three forces which will shape

Ecumenopolis.

There is still, of course, another road that could be

followed: to avoid it altogether. But, as has been already
pointed out, this is not a logical or practical solution. I
would like to emphasize here that we have no reason to
claim today that we know any more about the reasons
why it would be a good thing to avoid establishing a
universal city than did the citizens of ancient Athens,
about 3,000 years ago, when Theseus decided to
concentrate the rural population in one town, the tiny city
of Athens, with only a few thousand inhabitants. How
could they tell then whether or not they should avoid
establishing this initial town in the plain of Athens?
Doubtless similar arguments were used then in favor of
the scheme and against it as are used today in the case of
the universal city.
It is high time we accepted our responsibilities and started
working toward something which must be done right. To
do this, we must understand that the real challenge does
not lie in whether or not to create the world-city; it lies in
creating it correctly, taking into account the human factor,
so that man who, at present, sees his values disintegrating
around him, may be able to find them again.
THE OUTLINES OF ECUMENOPOLIS
In the preceding sections of this study, I have tried above
all to clarify the problem so it can be fully understood, for
10

understanding is an essential condition for success. If we

fail today to deal with this problem, it will be because we
have not understood it.
In Athens we are presently applying ourselves to the
collection
of data on human settlements. This
systematized knowledge forms an organized discipline
which is becoming a science, called 'ekistics'-the science of
human settlements.
Fig. 7. Ecumenopolis, 100-150 years
from now.

Fig. 8. The interweaving of nature,

transportation networks and population
cells in Ecumenopolis. The cells have
from 30,000 to 50,000 people each.

We must realize that ekistics cannot be restricted merely

to understanding the problem; it must also lead to
solutions for tomorrow. How is it that man in the past
possessed the necessary strength, imagination and
courage to build permanent settlements when he was still
a hunter? How is it that he then went on to build villages,
towns, industrial cities and metropolises? Why shouldn't
we today have the necessary courage to conceive and
build the world-city? To do it, we need, in addition to
science, technology and art. Thus, we shall have to make
ekistics a science, a technology and an art, all in one.
If we set to work in this way, we shall come to realize that
we really can create Ecumenopolis. It is of no special
importance to us to know exactly what the size of the city
will be. For it will not make much difference to us that,
going in certain directions, we would pass through
hundreds of miles of urban centres. What will really matter
is to know that, after a journey of ten or twenty minutes
or of one to five hours, as the case may be, we can be
certain of finding the country-side.
When we see the problem in this light, we shall
understand that size and shape are of no special concern;
what matters is a proper balance between elements. We
shall then affirm this conclusion: that nature must be
converted into a gigantic network with tentacles
penetrating deeply into all parts of the universal city so as
to reach every residential area -a system of woodlands
transformed into parks, intersected by avenues and
gardens, within easy reach of our homes (Fig. 8).

Fig. 9.

The size of a city should not worry us if we know that we

can control the atmosphere and keep it unpolluted. There
are small towns where the atmosphere is contaminated by
a great number of cars and large towns where the
atmosphere is clean. What is important is to ensure that
pollution from industrial plants and vehicular traffic is
under control. Then we will be able to breathe better air in
a large city than we could in a small town without proper
pollution control.
Proceeding in this way enables us to understand, little by
little, how the elements of nature will penetrate the city. A
similar approach can establish the nature of the various
networks. Transportation problems have nothing whatever
to do with the size of a city. They are the result of lack of
11

organization and because we have not yet learned that

men and machines cannot exist on the same footing.
Urban transportation will function properly when it is
placed beneath the surface, like arteries in the human
body. As soon as we grasp this fact, we can take the first
steps in the right direction - indeed, we have already done
so. At one time, water was carried in surface conduits; the
same was true -and still is in many places- of sewage
drains; overhead electric and telephone wires are still a
common sight.
The day will come when all such installations will be below
the surface. Goods will be transported through
underground tubes. Some of these already exist. In
Canada, important Networks of the kind are under
construction for the transport of industrial products.
In the near future, no one will object to using underground
roadways, just as no one made objections when the
subways began transporting people at speeds of 15-20
miles an hour in London, Paris and New York, considerably
faster than they had been used to in their horse-drawn
cabs. Before very long, we shall be traveling underneath
our cities at speeds of 60-200 miles an hour, spending
perhaps between 5 and 10 minutes below ground, instead
of driving for hours on roads, constantly irritated by the
stop and go of traffic lights.
These new transportation networks will be much more
satisfactory and will make it possible to have cities spread
over very much wider areas while being much better
organized.
When this programme has been carried out, we will then
attain the solution which is of prime importance to us:
freeing the surface of the earth for man to enjoy and to
use for the development of his artistic gifts. In a word, the
earth's surface will be used in harmony with man's way of
life. We look back thus to the time, thousands of years
ago, when man was both a researcher and a guinea-pig in
the vast laboratory of life and did the experiments which
enabled him to build throughout the world those beautiful
cities which we still admire: ancient Athens Florence, the
old Paris and old London, as well as Williamsburg in the
United States. An intrinsic worth attached to these cities
because they had been built on a human scale, to man's
own measurements.
A careful study of the cities of the past shows that they
never exceeded more than about 1 mile in length or about
1.5 square miles in area, and included no more than
50,000 inhabitants, when they were at their most
successful. Cities which were much bigger were, in fact,
the capitals of large empires and were never able to retain
their organization for very long. They often deteriorated
into anarchy, as in the case of Rome and Byzantium. If
12

they hoped to sustain an organized and integral life of

their own, they had to be carefully planned from the start,
like Peking and Changan (modern Sian), two ancient
Chinese capitals.
Generally, then, any cities which exceeded the usual, the
reasonable maxima were doomed to fail, were short-lived,
and offer us no solution. Those that do offer a solution
were the small cities of 30,000 to 50,000 inhabitants,
covering an area of about 1.5 square miles. If we examine
their structure rationally, we shall realize that we must
return to something similar if we want to organize our life
properly.
We thus reach what seems to be a paradox: on the one
hand, the inevitable huge Ecumenopolis; on the other, the
absolute need for man to live in small cities. But this only
appears paradoxical. For following such reasonings to their
logical conclusion, we arrive at a gigantic city of
superhuman dimensions, made up of small units.
Thus, our thought processes have led us to the
construction of huge cities composed of small towns, of
vast
urban
complexes
served
by
underground
transportation systems, leaving the surface of the ground
free, at man's disposal, and supplied with every human
amenity. The conclusion we reach then is that
Ecumenopolis, the world-city, will be made up of cells of
30,000 to 50,000 people.
In practice, we are already beginning to build such cities.
Islamabad, the new capital of Pakistan, intended for 2.5
million inhabitants, has been laid out in this way. Before
such cities are even finished, life there is already in full
swing and anyone can go and study them in operation. It
is very important to keep on studying them until they've
been brought to perfection. Then by applying similar
principles, it will be possible to transform some of the
older cities.
Indeed, these principles have been applied to certain
limited areas or even to certain cities which are planning
the organization of the entire system on this sound basis.
One example is Philadelphia (United States), which is now
engaged in a gradual urban renewal project which will
house 10,000 families on ground once covered with slums.
There is also the immense urban region of Detroit, now in
course of development and planned to accommodate by
the year 2000 more than 10 million inhabitants enjoying
maximum amenities.

So, after examining the nature of the crisis of the cities

and the various escapist solutions, we have gradually
synthesized a solution. This solution enables us to
envisage the development of human settlements in a
13

practical manner and to build in such a way as to offer

men a much happier form of existence by combining the
advantages of the small towns of old -which were certainly
considerable from the point of view of a humane way of
life- with those of the large cities which alone are capable
of enlarging our freedoms and chances of development.

14