Doxiadis Associates’ Understanding of the Role of Infrastructure in Urban Planning: Ekistics, Ecumenopolis, and the Regional Plan for Lagos State

The paper examines Doxiadis Associates’ masterplan for FESTAC town, a federal housing estate located along the Lagos-Badagry Expressway in Lagos State, Nigeria. FESTAC town was built to host the visitors of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos in 1977 or FESTAC 77. The paper investigates the connections between Constantinos A. Doxiadis’s understanding of the role of infrastructure in this project and his concept of “Ecumenopolis”, and relates Doxiadis’s vision for “Ecumenopolis” to the idea of Eurafrica, referring to the political project that emerged in the 1920s based on the idea that Europe’s future survival was bound up with Europe’s successful merger with Africa. Doxiadis’s concept of ‘Ecumenopolis’ departed from the hypothesis that urbanization, the growth of population, and the development of means of transport and human networks would lead to a fusion of the urban areas and megalopolises that would form a single continuous planet wide city. Doxiadis’s “Towards Ecumenopolis”—a confidential report that focused on how to devise a “different approach” to the “City of the Future”—treated infrastructure as a skeleton of a body covering the entire globe and resulting from the balance between settlements, production, and nature.