EKISTICS ON TURBLENT SHORES: Doxiadis Associates in Cyprus (1965–1968)
In the 21st century, Cyprus entertains seemingly unchecked urban growth. But after the country’s independence from the British Empire, in the period between the intercommunal violence of 1963–1964 and the eventual de facto partition between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities in the island after the Turkish military invasion of 1974, the Athens-based architecture and city planning firm Doxiadis Associates (DA) produced four planning studies for Cyprus, including a city plan for Limassol and studies for tourist developments in Troodos and Alakati. The Cypriot government contracted DA during a key moment when post-independence governmental authorities considered holistic plans for the future of the island, directives which included the expansion and modernization of the tourism industry. Though DA’s better-known efforts in places like Iraq, Islamabad, and Detroit were grand and sweeping, the plans they prepared for Cyprus seemed comparatively small and pragmatic in scale. However, through DA’s implementation of Doxiadis’ ekistical perspective on Cyprus’ development, the plans represented a prescient historical analysis innovation that situated Cyprus within a greater regional network of urban areas.
Forthcoming from Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 2026.
TO-GO ZINE, issue 1: Care package
To-Go Zine is a charity food zine that blends the best of magazine nostalgia with meaningful storytelling. We emphasize interactivity, conversation, and joyful playfulness through Q+As, quizzes, crosswords , crafts, and games alongside thought-provoking stories to recall experiences that root us and generate joy in the face of uncertainty, violence, and displacement. All profits from initial sales of this print zine will go directly to The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), a nonprofit that helps immigrants and their families fight harmful policies and demand equity from our government.
THE VISIONARY IN THE MARSH: DOXIADIS AND THE DREAM OF EASTWICK
In the late 1950s, the Philadelphia neighborhood of Eastwick was in a state of appalling decay—abandoned houses, illegal dumps, and rodent infestations marked the swampy terrain, revealing a society in trouble. To address the situation, city planning director Edmund Bacon made a logical and consequential choice: he hired the world-famous architect and urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis. The Athenian was no stranger to working in less-than-ideal conditions—in Greece, he had led a resistance group against the Axis Occupation; in Iraq, his team of architects survived a coup d’état; in Pakistan, he had realized an entire city from the ground up. Doxiadis’ efforts in Eastwick were no less ambitious—at the time, it was the largest urban renewal effort in American history. And despite the praise of its initial residents, the redeveloped Eastwick never took off, and today, to the untrained eye, it appears an unremarkable, low-income suburb on the fringes of the Philadelphia airport. What happened to Eastwick? The answer lies not in the idealistic vision of its international master planner, but what his dream ran up against. At the heart of Eastwick’s disappointment was a deep-seated American phenomenon—the racial prejudice of its prospective inhabitants.
Essay published in The Delos Symposia and Doxiadis, Lars Müller, 2024.
“Greece at the Turning Point”: A “Collective Memoir” of US Marshall Plan Officials in Greece, 1947-1951
Paul R. Porter served as the Mission Chief of the American Mission for Aid for Greece (AMAG) from 1949 to 1950, the Greek division of the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan. The Paul R. Porter Papers in the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library feature the written memoirs of twenty former American aid officials and their wives, all of varying length and complexity. Dubbed a “collective memoir” under the title “Greece at the Turning Point,” solicited by Porter in 1982, the stories within point to not just Greece at a crucible during the country’s civil war (1946-1949), which followed the devastating Axis occupation (1941-1944) during World War II, but a turning point for the United States as well. Now that the United States was a superpower at the head of a coalition of Western democracies, the American diplomatic corps were faced with never-before-seen challenges as they sought to implement the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, in turn drawing the fault lines with the Soviet Union that defined the Cold War. Lacking in the international management experience of former imperial powers such as Britain and France, the Marshall Plan in Greece represented a grand experiment in American foreign assistance. The American aid officials’ commentary on their relations with Greek officials, and their wives’ descriptions of raising families in the particular trying conditions of a less developed and war-ravaged Greece, form the central interest of this collective memoir. This article seeks to bring these memoirs into context to add another lens into the history of postwar Greece, as seen through the Americans dispatched to manage the country’s affairs under the terms of the Marshall assistance program.
Essay published in Ex-Centric Narratives, Vol 8, 2024.
Currently being expanded into the book Greece at the Turning Point: Remembrances of U.S. Foreign Service Families Living and Working in Postwar Greece (co-edited with Gonda Van Steen), January 2027.
The Void and the Infinite: C.A. Doxiadis, The Lagos Handbook, and the Harvard Project on the City’s Analysis of the Modernist Movement in Nigeria
One of the most compelling portraits of the activities of the international planning firm Doxiadis Associates in Nigeria is included in The Lagos Handbook, a massive master’s thesis prepared by the Harvard Project of the City in 2000, supervised by Rem Koolhaas. This paper will seek to understand how, in The Lagos Handbook, the Doxiadis initiatives in Nigeria were characterized as a flawed yet influential forerunner of the Handbook’s own analyses. In such fashion, the text drew a lineage between postmodern interpreters of the global condition with their modernist forebears.
Essay published in “Adaptive Cities? Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana” Vol 4, 2024.
SOUTHWESTERN FANTASY: Pueblo revival and regional authenticity in New Mexico
Today, a visitor to New Mexico will encounter numerous examples of ‘Pueblo Revival’ architecture that suggest the region’s vernacular architectural language has remained static for millennia. However, the building language is less than a century old, and it was largely the result of one man’s initiative: local architect John Gaw Meem (1894–1983), who solidified a modern take on indigenous building forms. Though the style consists of historical artifice, it has since ‘aged into’ a status of regional authenticity, inspiring and constraining its inhabitants. This paper adopts a narrative nonfiction approach to parse the strange history of this architectural motif.
Essay published in Region (Routledge, 2023).
The Demolition at Porto Rafti: Retracing Doxiadis’ Remarkable Life and Contested Legacy
Constantinos Doxiadis (1913–1975), the inventor of ekistics and founder of the eponymous journal, was one of the major architects and city planners of the twentieth century. In recent decades, however, his body of work has been largely ignored. In 2011, his monumental house at Porto Rafti was demolished, exposing the consequences of such obscurity. To date, no comprehensive narrative biography of Doxiadis exists in English, a void I seek to fill in my ongoing biography project of Doxiadis’ life and legacy, tentatively titled The World Planner. In this essay, I discuss the fate of the Porto Rafti house, sketch Doxiadis’ life story, explain the origins of my project, and solicit further collaboration from interested readers.
Published in Ekistics and the New Habitat, Vol. 82, No. 1, 2023.
Princeton’s Lost Museum
Natural science in Europe in the middle to late 19th century was a discipline rooted in
classification, but the contemporary, fledgling American museums dedicated to the field were predominantly organized around eclectic collections. The E. M. Museum of Geology and Archaeology, whose collections rivaled those of the Smithsonian, represented an important juncture in the history of American natural science museums. Operating from 1874 to 1909 at the then-named College of New Jersey (renamed Princeton University in 1896), the museum reflected the interdisciplinary, hands-on approach of natural science characteristic of its first curator, Swiss-born geographer Arnold Guyot.
Published in Princeton Historical Review, Fall 2017.