Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis Quotes

Ecumenopolis is under way, but we lack the overall concept and the courage to guide Ecumenopolis rather than just letting it happen by chance and necessity.

When we place all these extraordinary achievements together, however we can see where we have failed: by bringing together all the elements of progress into a meaningless and inhuman system of life.

The real city is the whole territory within which people move every day.

When people like Genghis Khan tried to speed up the rhythm and conquer and organize a continent in a few generations, they did not create a synthesis, they only courted disasters.

The big mistake most commonly made today is that when we speak of transportation we think only of persons and goods. We forget the existence of water, clean or otherwise, moving in pipes, of gas, oil, electricity, messages, the telephones etc. The result is that we waste a lot of space and Networks.

To the right I see the forces which lead to dystopia. It is the big corporation which built the tower on top of the small hill which tells me: "Fly ABC Fortresses!" Airplanes have to be built like fortresses to avoid skyjacking attacks by the passengers.

We need to understand what we can do and how. Otherwise we will never do it.

My conclusion is that today we are in chaos as far as the metropolis is concerned and do not do anything in the right direction.

When we speak of quality and desirability it is not the question of one unit, but of the whole system.

Conclusion: Because humanity has entered a new era of science and industry, Ecumenopolis is as inevitable as the village after the agricultural revolution.

Our Networks are not unified.

we forget that the polis, no matter whether old or new, has its own dimensions and its own scale; and if we impose on it solutions corresponding to larger scales, we do it a lot of harm and we destroy all its values.

Dimensions are not connected with the efficiency of the system; they simply make it more difficult.

If we have the most perfect neighborhoods without proper connections between them we do not have a city, but nomadic life in a jungle.

We now open our eyes, we see the explosion, we understand the confusion and its causes, we have an exact diagnosis of our disease and we can begin the therapy, not by nervous and uncoordinated magical solutions, but by properly conceiving and trying to build the Entopia we badly need.