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Ekistics is thescience ofhuman settlements[1][2] including regional,city,community planning and dwelling design. Its major incentive was the emergence of increasingly large and complexconurbations, tending even to aworldwide city.[3] The study involves every kind ofhuman settlement, with particular attention togeography,ecology, humanpsychology,anthropology,culture,politics, and occasionallyaesthetics.
As a scientific mode of study, ekistics currently relies onstatistics and description, organized in five ekistic elements or principles: nature, anthropos, society, shells, and networks. It is generally a more scientific field thanurban planning, and has considerable overlap with some of the less restrained fields ofarchitectural theory.
In application, conclusions are drawn aimed at achieving harmony between the inhabitants of a settlement and their physical and socio-cultural environments.[4]
The termekistics was coined byConstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis in 1942. The word is derived from theGreek adjectiveοἰκιστικός more particularly from the neuter pluralοἰκιστικά. Theancient Greek adjectiveοἰκιστικός meant'concerning the foundation of a house, a habitation, a city or colony; contributing to the settling'. It was derived fromοἰκιστής (oikistēs), an ancient Greek noun meaning'the person who installs settlers in place'. This may be regarded as deriving indirectly from another ancient Greek noun,οἴκισις (oikisis), meaning'building, housing, habitation', and especially'establishment of a colony, a settlement, or a town' (used byPlato), or'filling with new settlers, settling, being settled'. All these words grew from the verbοἰκίζω (oikizō),'to settle', and were ultimately derived from the nounοἶκος (oikos),'house, home, habitat'.
TheShorter Oxford English Dictionary defines an ecist, oekist or oikist as: "the founder of an ancient Greek ... colony". The English equivalent ofoikistikē is ekistics (a noun). In addition, the adjectivesekistic andekistical, the adverbekistically, and the nounekistician are now also in current use.
In the context of outdoor recreation, one's relationship with the natural world and how one views the resources within it is an ekistic relationship.
The notion of ekistics implies that understanding the interaction between and within human groups—infrastructure, agriculture, shelter, function (job)—in conjunction with their environment directly affects their well-being (individual and collective). The subject begins to elucidate the ways in which collective settlements form and how they inter-relate. By doing so, humans begin to understand how they 'fit' into a species, i.e.Homo sapiens, and howHomo sapiens 'should' be living in order to manifest our potential—at least as far as this species is concerned (as the text stands now). Ekistics in some cases argues that in order for human settlements to expand efficiently and economically we must reorganize the way in which the villages, towns, cities, metropolises are formed.
As Doxiadis put it, "... This field (ekistics) is a science, even if in our times it is usually considered a technology and an art, without the foundations of a science - a mistake for which we pay very heavily."[2] Having recorded very successfully the destructions of the ekistic wealth in Greece during WWII, Doxiadis became convinced that human settlements are subjectable to systematic investigation. Doxiadis, being aware of the unifying power ofsystems thinking and particularly of the biological and evolutionary reference models as used by many famous biologists-philosophers of his generation, especiallySir Julian Huxley (1887–1975),Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–75),Dennis Gabor (1900–79),René Dubos (1901–82),George G. Simpson (1902–84), andConrad Waddington (1905–75), used the biological model to describe the "ekistic behavior" of anthropos (the five principles) and the evolutionary model to explain themorphogenesis of human settlements (the eleven forces, the hierarchical structure of human settlements, dynapolis,ecumenopolis). Finally, he formulated a general theory which considers human settlements as living organisms capable of evolution, an evolution that might be guided by Man using "ekistic knowledge".
Doxiadis believed that the conclusion from biological and social experience was clear: to avoid chaos we must organize our system of life from anthropos (individual) to ecumenopolis (global city) in hierarchical levels, represented by human settlements. So he articulated a general hierarchical scale with fifteen levels of ekistic units:[1][5][6]
The population figures above are for Doxiadis' ideal future ekistic units for the year 2100, at which time he estimated (in 1968) thatEarth would achievezero population growth at a population of 50,000,000,000 with human civilization being powered byfusion energy.
TheEkistics and the New Habitat, printed from 1957 to 2006[7] and began calling for new papers to be published online in 2019.[8]
Ekistics is a 1968 book byKonstantinos Doxiadis, often titledIntroduction to Ekistics.
