Oracles at Delos

The work of the city planner is highly technical, complex and occasionally grubby. It is also exciting, full of heady schemes and grandiose concepts. Among the most grandiose are those advanced by Constantinos Apostolos Doxiadis, 56, inventor and prophet of "ekistics," meaning the science of human settlements. His planning and design firms employ more than a thousand people in Athens, Washington and 17 other cities. His smallest projects these days are complete university campuses, his largest embrace thousands of square miles, such as the River Plate Basin Development Program, involving new towns and transportation in five South American countries. A better stimulator of ideas than he is a designer, he is also a tireless preacher of the notion that ekistics must include many different disciplines.

For the past six years, Doxiadis has invited 30 or so distinguished architects, businessmen, politicians and academics to a week-long superseminar on environment problems aboard a chartered Aegean cruise ship. Most expenses are paid by Doxiadis--who may or may not be a millionaire--and assorted wealthy friends. The trip always ends at the island of Delos, sacred to the ancient Greeks as the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, where a formal summation of the results is read in the ancient theater. The event suggests that growing numbers of what might be called glamour intellectuals are drawn to the idea of city planning--although they are finding its problems difficult to articulate. A few days ago, TIME Correspondent Horace ludson was aboard for the seventh symposium. His report:

The chief characteristics of the symposium are the sea and air and sun, and endless talk. Anthropologist Margaret Mead, who has been on all but one of the trips, says that the symposium is the closest thing she knows to the great English country house parties at the turn of the century, and the comparison is just.

Athens Apex. The talk starts smoothly at the reception Doxiadis gives on the evening before embarkation. His triplex apartment is on the highest rooftop on the highest street in Athens. His guests look out on painfully appropriate urban contrasts: from marble-and-plate-glass luxury across the charmless sprawl of the modern city to the ruined perfection of the floodlit Parthenon. This year former Democratic Senator William Benton was holding court on a huge sofa, playing the part he loves: the crusty old American millionaire. Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, now a consultant on conservation, silently contemplated a Boeotian vase. Buckminster Fuller, a chunky little figure in black tie and white jacket, bald head shining, talked to Dr. Thomas Lambo, a towering blue-black Nigerian psychiatrist in flowing tribal robes. The guests ranged from British Economist Austin Robinson and French Geographer Jean Gottmann to American urbanists like Robert Wood of M.I.T. and Martin Meyerson, president of the University of Buffalo. Mingling easily among them all was Dox-iadis, a silvery fox of a man--academic, politician, humanitarian, man of influence.

Gods and Grids. On Saturday morning the 6,000-ton vessel Orpheus sailed out of Piraeus harbor. By midafternoon, after the first of a series of daily swims and visits to fascinating ruins, the passengers gathered on the ship's deck for a two-hour working meeting. "Society and Human Settlements: Policies for the Future" was the stated theme of the conference, but policies rarely emerged. The language unfortunately was almost unfailingly prolix, sententious and jargon ridden.

Doxiadis introduced the first session, on the subject of man and his environment. "The two components of the environment are physical and social," expounded the host. "We must be concerned with the quality of life. Does the grid system of organizing human settlements, for example, give greater opportunity to individuals than the centralized, circular pattern of contacts?" The responses were, at best, tangential. "We can't be godlike," mused Washington, D.C., Psychiatrist Reginald Lourie, "but we have the opportunity to contribute the appropriate inputs." Lord Llewelyn-Davies, the British architect, professed that the rigidity of bricks and mortar was exceeded by the rigidity of human institutions.

Doxiadis attempted to give shape to the discussions, and his daily summing up was accompanied by conceptual diagrams, which he draws on huge newsprint sheets with multicolored felt-tip pens. But dissatisfaction with the meandering course of the formal sessions was palpable. Elspeth Rostow, the highly political wife of former White House Aide Walt Rostow, sat in the background writing savage light verse. Eventually Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, was provoked into a short, sharp speech. "This has been a real smorgasbord of great ideas," he said, "but we must focus on the problem of the will to act. We do have the resources, but you are living in tomorrow. The victims exist today."

Despite complaints, provocative and timely ideas broke through the verbal fog of Delos. Sociologist Robert Merton of Columbia suggested that the class structure in the West is undergoing a profound revolution as upper-middle-class and working-class life styles approach each other, and upper-middle-class youths reject their traditional aspirations. Harvard Political Scientist Karl Deutsch elaborated a theory that certain employers, such as sanitation departments, perpetuate poverty by exploiting low-paid labor. As he sees it, low-paid occupations ranging from domestic service to teaching may have to be subsidized. Jerome Monod, the French planner, also described a sweeping scheme for reconstructing the entire south of France, including new industrial cities, research centers and universities.

Benign Bullfrog. On the sixth day of the symposium, the participants began drafting a report of their doings, which became the declaration to be read Friday evening. Delos is truly a holy place. It is the psychological center of the Aegean, the union point of Greek clarity and Greek mysticism. In the evening light, the sky takes on blues and oranges and greens, the sea becomes deeper, the moon blazes in the sky. But neither the place nor the rhetOTIC now seemed equal to the distant crises that these people had tried to discuss all week. The wind was rising as Margaret Mead stumped forward in a flowered hat, a long black cape and blue sneakers. Reading out the Declaration of Delos VII ("there is a basic distortion of values in society's failure to allocate resources for the improvement of human settlements"), she looked like a benign bullfrog. As she read, the wind blew out the flaring kerosene torches.

Is Delos a waste? No: if the formal meetings lack unity and direction, Dox-iadis still performs a considerable service by bringing together brilliant, informed, influential people and giving them time to teach and invigorate one another. Much of the payoff occurs between the regular sessions when the participants freely exchange new ideas and form new intellectual friendships. Delos may be pretentious; it is also fun, and the experience is bound to affect urban crises throughout the world.

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