The Man and his Work

Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City

Humanity has never before had to deal with such forces of change as exist at present, in technology and population growth. Many thinkers have dreamt of or proposed solutions for the Ideal city, but, instead of thinking of the city, we need to re-examine the type of life we want to live in cities. Currently, we are building the wrong cities for the future, wasting and spoiling natural resources and allowing man to lose his importance inside the cities due to traffic and pollution. The cities of the future will be extra-human in dimension, therefore our task is to create them as a web of many communities with human dimensions. Such cities will finally be interconnected in one continuous network, the Ecumenopolis, which will retain its human content despite its size. In these cities, man will have more time to spend in education and leisure rather than in transportation. The cities that will form the Ecumenopolis will be in some cases dynamic – expanding – static, or totally new, according to the particular needs of each region.

From BRITANNICA Book of the year 1968, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.