Title: Intelligent Landscapes: From Doxiadis to Spatial Ecologies
Chair:
Prof. Alcestis Rodi & Prof. Vassiliki Petridou
Department of Architecture
University of Patras, Greece
Abstract/Description:
The technocratic synchronisation of smart - green dominates contemporary discourse on urbanism. Smartness pursues efficiency through data and algorithmic control while greenness claims legitimacy through climate adaptation and energy transition. Their convergence promises balance yet ultimately reproduces the same technocratic logic it seeks to transcend.
Long before the discourse of “Smart–Green” Cities, Constantinos A. Doxiadis advanced a new epistemology of design—a landscape intelligence informed by the study of nature: its terrain, climate, and geography. Yet Doxiadis’s ecological thinking remains underexplored. His projects, from the Developing Urban Detroit and Aspra Spitia to analyses of vernacular settlements and the planetary vision of Ecumenopolis, embodied a synthesis of technology and ecology grounded in a systemic understanding of human–environment relations. His methodological application of aerial mapping, cartographic overlays, and layered data analysis anticipated today’s geospatial smart tools and environmental big data, enabling him to read and to understand landscapes as dynamic systems and to articulate a symbiotic relationship between human and ecological processes.
This panel situates Doxiadis’s work within a genealogy of ecological intelligence as both a precursor and a critical counterpart to today’s prevailing urban models. It aims to
• Examine how Doxiadis integrates nature as formative element of design.
• Investigate the relationship between landscape and intelligence and how this continuum informs current understandings of ecological urbanism.
• Reassess the ecological dimension of Ekistics, situating nature as an active agent within the built environment.
• Discuss the use of technology as environmental reasoning, considering how non-algorithmic modes of intelligence might guide more sustainable and adaptive urban futures.
• Trace the genealogy from Doxiadis’s systems thinking to contemporary resilient paradigms
• Re-read of Doxiadis’s collaborations (for example with Jaqueline Tyrwhitt) that bridge humanistic and systemic approaches to planning and design.
• Shift emphasis from optimisation and control to regeneration and planetary care.
Through these discussions, the session invites scholars, designers, and planners to reconsider Doxiadis’s legacy as a living framework for ecological urbanism. It calls for a rethinking of spatialised intelligence from data and optimisation to forms of knowledge that sustain life within planetary limits.