"Not many Detroit citizens are aware of it, but the way their city and suburbs will look to their grandchildren may have been shaped 2,400 years ago in ancient Athens.

"The connecting link is trim, silver­haired Constantinos H. Doxiadis, The Greek city planner's ideas of what a city should be grew out of pondering what had turned his ancient native city of Athens from a self­contained, livable town into a modern, sprawling, antihuman metropolis...

"Dr. Doxiadis sees the modern metropolis as a formless, ever­growing thoughtless happening. This distresses his Greek heritage of love for rationality, order, law, and democratic process. He insists that sprawl need not happen. While 'natural forces' determine the broader outlines of city development, men can and must control that growth before it destroys human values, he says. The key to such control he finds in ancient Athens: human scale.

"Interviewed in his New York City office, which looks out over the United Nations building, Dr. Doxiadis spelled out his views of what has happened in Athens and in every other great city of the world. Quick to illustrate his ideas with paper and pencil, he draws three small circles in a triangle. "This is the ancient city." he says in richly accented English. 'Each is independent and self-contained.' Then he draws series of concentric circles. 'Now we see what happens. The town grows outward, always getting bigger and bigger. Enormous pressures are exerted on the center, which then becomes suffocated and dies. This becomes a slum.' As this process continues, Dr. Doxiadis forecasts extinction of human values and of the good life, unless city growth can be brought into an orderly growth pattern.

"Demographers predict a 'realistic average' of around 30 billion people in the world by the year 2100, he notes. With the continuing trend for them to cluster in cities, he says we are moving into the time, when megalopolis will spread out to become 'ecumenopolis'­­ a global city.

"Natural forces, says Dr. Doxiadis, shape a city. These are: existing cities; major lines of transportation; and aesthetic considerations. 'We cannot change these forces,' he says. Take the existing city. Can a new town counteract that? 'To do so you would need an equal investment. How long would that take? How much money? How many billions of decisions?' If the forces cannot be counteracted he says, then 'we must exploit them to the benefit of man. This is what he is attempting to do in Philadelphia, Washington, Miami, Detroit, Islamabad, and in Zambia, Libya, Ghana, and the Canary Islands.

"The existing city is an organism that will continue to grow, he insists Isolated new towns cannot resolve its problems…

"Small cities," says Dr. Doxiadis, in the superpopulated world of the future, are unrealistic: unjustified, and an attempt to reverse the trends. The trend is for higher development, higher productivity. The big city makes for greater freedom, greater democracy, greater choice. If you accept personal freedom as the goal of humanity, for good or for bad, then the imperative conclusion is the very big city.'

"On the other hand,' says Dr. Doxiadis, 'we know that this city (waving his hand toward Manhattan), is a failure. And any extrapolation we make shows that the failure is going to become bigger and bigger. We struggle with more and more pollution, noise, and congestion.' Dr. Doxiadis' solution is to maintain the humaL1 values of the small city within the larger context of ecumenopolis. "We must build a city which is extrahuman in dimension and numbers and pressures, but by units which are human.

"This is where ancient Athens­­ and Florence, Paris, London, Constantinople, and other ancient capitals as well­­come in. His studies show that the old cities never exceeded a square of 2,900 yards . . .

"If megalopolis, later ecumenopolis, is allowed to arrow by such units or cells­­ much in the way nature causes organisms to grow­­ then Dr. Doxiadis says the city, whatever its ultimate size, will always retain its human scale. Which direction these cells take will be subject to the 1arger natural forces. ''They will move outward from existing cities, following the lines of transportation and seeking the most esthetically satisfying areas. Thus rivers, lakes, seacoasts, valleys, and plains will gradually fill in with these humanly scaled cells, each of which may contain up to 50,000 people. Between these complexes of cells will remain the hills and mountains, the forests, the inaccessible and inhospitable regions, greenbelts set aside for recreation, and agricultural lends. What's more, Dr. Doxiadis insists that democratic expression with freedom of choice and variety of development can best be fostered through such orderly planned growth.

"Dr. Doxiadis is a champion of metropolitan government ­­ within dell­defined limits. He admits the need for control at a higher level for such matters as policing, water, sewage and waste disposal, and zoning of land use. But within the individual cells, he calls for the maximum of free and democratic choice. 'People should have administrative responsibility for their own sectors, without interference from anyone on the outside. Why should the citizens of the neighborhood, who want to put a statue in their local park, have to go to a city council which represents millions of people and get the decision of several administrative bodies?"

"A sense of neighborhood of community, of human scale ­­ these are the major elements which he believes can make tomorrow's ecumenopolis habitable." (Sprawl Versus Livable Cities," THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, Dec. 26, 1967)