Revisiting Doxiadis Through a Book and the Reality of Riyadh

This reflection begins with a Christmas present. A book I had been looking for for quite some time, and one that is no longer easy to find: a collection of Constantinos A. Doxiadis’ texts, design drawings, and settlement studies, now largely confined to antique bookstores and private libraries. Browsing through it during the holidays, it quickly became clear that this is not simply a historical document, but a provocation. Reading it against the background of my daily work in Riyadh, I felt it deserves more than a casual revisit. It calls for reflection—on its content, on its ambition, and on how its ideas have translated into built and adapted reality over time. This is not a comparison contemporary planners can easily be subjected to. The time spans between our plans and their consequences are still too short. We rarely get to see our frameworks fully absorbed, normalized, and eventually contested by reality. Doxiadis, by contrast, can be read today not only through his texts and drawings, but through cities that have lived with his ideas for decades. That distance makes his work both more vulnerable—and more instructive.

The book itself reads less like a retrospective and more like a working manual. It brings together essays outlining the principles of Ekistics, diagrams tracing settlement systems across scales, and planning frameworks for cities and regions undergoing rapid transformation. The tone is confident, systematic, and remarkably free of irony. Doxiadis writes as someone convinced that urbanization is humanity’s central project, and that planners therefore have a duty to think beyond individual sites, political cycles, and stylistic debates.

What stands out immediately is the geography of the work. This is not planning theory developed in the Global North and exported elsewhere as an afterthought. The cities and regions documented here—South Asia, the Middle East, Africa—are the core of the narrative. Doxiadis was operating as a global planner long before the profession had the language to describe such a role. He worked where urbanization was fastest, where institutional frameworks were still forming, and where planning decisions would shape not just cities, but nations.

A recurring theme throughout the book is his attempt to reconcile the universal and the local. His diagrams are abstract, sometimes austere, yet his texts insist on climate, culture, and vernacular settlement patterns as fundamental parameters. Modernity, for Doxiadis, was unavoidable—but it did not justify erasure. Infrastructure, mobility, and growth had to be universal in logic, but local in expression and adaptation. The book documents a continuous search for this balance, never fully resolved, but never abandoned.

Reading these pages while working daily in Riyadh gives them a particular weight. Doxiadis’ involvement in the Saudi capital was not about architectural authorship, but about metropolitan structure: road hierarchies, neighborhood units, low-rise expansion, and an infrastructural grid capable of absorbing extraordinary growth. In the book, these frameworks appear as rational, forward-looking responses to the conditions of their time—cheap energy, rapid modernization, and the promise of the automobile as a tool of accessibility and freedom.

In Riyadh today, those decisions are no longer theoretical. They are lived reality. The city remains deeply shaped by this early planning logic, and in many ways it is precisely its success that has become its challenge. The hierarchical road system functions almost too efficiently, reinforcing car dependency and long distances. The low-rise model, once associated with human scale and adaptability, has produced vast horizontal expansion that is difficult to retrofit. Neighborhoods designed as coherent units now operate as locked islands within an infrastructural grid that privileges movement over connection.

What becomes clear, reading the book against this daily experience, is that Doxiadis did not fail to anticipate growth—he enabled it. The question his work now poses is not whether planning frameworks can shape cities, but how they age. The book reveals a planner deeply aware of time and scale, yet inevitably bound to the assumptions of his era. Energy was abundant. Land was limitless. Mobility was equated with speed. These premises made sense then; their consequences define Riyadh now.

This is where the value of the book lies for contemporary planners. It does not offer ready-made solutions for today’s challenges, nor should it. Instead, it demonstrates what it means to plan seriously enough that one’s ideas remain visible—and debatable—half a century later. Doxiadis can be critiqued precisely because his frameworks endured. Many contemporary plans will never face that test.

As a book, this collection is demanding. It resists nostalgia and refuses simplification. What it offers instead is a way of thinking about cities as systems shaped by culture, infrastructure, and time. Reading it today—against the built and adapted reality of Riyadh—feels less like revisiting a historical figure than engaging in a delayed dialogue. It reminds us that planning, when taken seriously, always risks working too well—and that living with its consequences is the real test of the profession.

The book can be found in antique bookstores:

Constantinos A. Doxiadis. Texts, Design Drawings, Settlements

Edited by Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis, Ikaros Publications, 2006, ISBN 960-8399-36-X