Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis
26 quotes
Biography
Constantinos A. Doxiadis, often cited as C.
"We need to understand what we can do and how. Otherwise we will never do it."
"The realistic view of the City of the Future accepts that it will be a global city."
"The real city is the whole territory within which people move every day."
"Conclusion: Because humanity has entered a new era of science and industry, Ecumenopolis is as inevitable as the village after the agricultural revolution."
"Dimensions are not connected with the efficiency of the system; they simply make it more difficult."
"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."
"When we build a city we must answer the most basic question as for any type of project: who is the master whom we have to serve?"
"When we speak of quality and desirability it is not the question of one unit, but of the whole system."
"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 social aspect in city building is now completely overlooked."
"From the balance of the past, we have been lea to the great injustice of the present."
"If we do not understand furniture we cannot understand the city,"
"We should never forget that values of the past are first overlooked when a change is necessary, but later they are understood and re-established."
"We should not forget that the value of seeing lies in the information capacity of vision."
"At present the machines are in control and no human values are respected."
"The fact that the super-markets and super shops have developed and serve wider areas of tens of thousands of people does not mean that we do not need smaller ones."
"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."
"We now have several hundred metropolises and they all suffer in many ways from many problems because they have not been foreseen and properly conceived."
"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."
"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."
"If we have the most perfect neighborhoods without proper connections between them we do not have a city, but nomadic life in a jungle."
"I begin with the clarification that I consider Society as a total system of relationships between people which are either visible or invisible and which form networks."
"Our Networks are not unified."
"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."