Delos Network

In the past two decades, discussions about ecological impact and sustainability have come to prominence in the fields of architecture and urban planning. Architecture schools create new MA programs, such as 'landscape urbanism', and architectural theorists coin new terms, such as 'ecological urbanism', in their efforts to tackle the urgent environmental and demographic pressures of global urban developments. Such concerns have been epitomized recently by initiatives to re-designate the current era of geological time as the 'Anthropocene' - the epoch that began when human rather than natural phenomena started to have the major influence on the Earth's appearance and ecosystems. But these anxieties are not new.

In the late 1950s the Greek architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis and British planner Jaqueline Tyrwhitt sought solutions to similar problems by combining architecture, planning, technology and many other fields into a new science: 'ekistics'. This came to international prominence through a series of twelve symposia (the 'Delos Symposia', 1963-1975), ten of which convened aboard a yacht in the Aegean Sea and concluded on Delos island, and prefaced by an 'Ekistics Month' of activities and discussion in Athens. Many of what Time magazine called "brilliant, informed, influential people" but also "glamour intellectuals" (8th August 1969) participated in the symposia, including Margaret Mead, Barbara Ward, Conrad Waddington, Arnold Toynbee, Marshal McLuhan, Jean Gottmann and Buckminster Fuller to name a few, and featured extensively in international media, from gossip columns to academic journals. Their fame was in part fuelled by the elite cadre of yacht-bound 'Delians' shutting themselves of from the world in order to solve its problems and also to the outlandishness and wild optimism of their 'solutions': the terra-forming of other planets; public transport in nuclear powered submarines emitting 'harmless' co2; predictions on the transformative socio-behavioural effects should the then-incipient military communications networks be extended to civilian use - soon realized as the World Wide Web we know today.

The global economic recession precipitated by the oil crisis of 1973 and Doxiadis' death two years later marked an end to the utopian aspirations and speculations of a generation of architects and planners descended from the 'Lawgivers' of CIAM, including not only the Delos group but also the Japanese Metabolist group with whom they were tangentially associated. A groundswell of architectural and planning opinion, sceptical of their world-saving goals, shifted towards more modest small-scale approaches to design. These late-Modernists were utterly eclipsed by the new architectural and planning orthodoxies and nowadays the intellectual agenda of the Delos Symposia and its repercussions in planning initiatives from the 1960s to today are little known, even among scholars.

On one reading, the Delos moment is unique and strange, a last-gasp moment of optimism in the power of a self-appointed but disconnected elite with ludicrously ambitious plans. On another reading, the Delos moment is extraordinarily prescient and still relevant, pioneering new ways of thinking about the relationship between demographic, economic, health and natural-resource pressures at a global scale, combined with the latest construction developments, infrastructural and communication technologies, as well as with regional values, traditional techniques and local wisdom.

This research network will bring together for the first time scholars who are currently looking into this fascinating but until now forgotten period of intellectual history, with a view not only to understanding its significance but also to address how the Delos debates compare with and feed into contemporary concerns about demographic pressures and environmental sustainability by architects, planners and others.

It is the aim of the network - the core group of which represents a broad range of specialisms, including architect-planners, architectural historians, geographers, archaeologists and sociologists - to address the importance of the history and legacy of the Delos group in order to contextualize, enrich and interrogate contemporary assumptions, ideals, decision-making and practices related to environmentally-conscious architecture and planning and the ways in which these are intertwined with interpretations of history and tradition. We seek to build pathways to impact across four key areas:

1. DESIGN AND HISTORY EDUCATION;
2. DESIGN PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE;
3. BUILT ENVIRONMENT POLICY;
4. GRASSROOTS/SELF-BUILD COOPERATIVES.

The network will achieve this principally through three workshops featuring presentations and discussions from the core group. Each event will be open to the general public and will seek contributions from stakeholder-representatives (some of which listed below) through video-conferencing and in-person. The deliberations and papers of each event will be disseminated on the project website as well as in a collected edition of essays.

Workshop 1: Delos Ideals. Themed to the Delos search for urban and environmental solutions in two directions: 1) in ancient cities and societies, and in the values and vernacular approaches of traditional societies still flourishing or under threat in the present; 2) in future-looking construction and machine technologies, computer analyses, renewable energy sources, telecommunications networks, cybernetics and nanotechnology.
- Question: how were urban and environmental ideals related to understandings and interpretations of history, tradition and technology?
- Stakeholders: Royal Institute of British Architects ([RIBA] professional body, UK); Royal Historical Society (voluntary organisation, UK); educators of sustainable design and history (various).

Workshop 2: Delos Practices. Themed to how the ideals of Delos were applied in many high-profile schemes across the developed and developing world in the 1960s-70s, often involving the imposition of ostensibly global solutions on sensitive regional contexts, including lucrative private and government contracts. We shall analyse the planning tools of these schemes and explore the backlash against this scale of ambition and intervention.
- Question: how were the Delos environmental ideals implemented and how were they related to post-political and supra-national discourses?
- Stakeholders: Design Commission (research arm of the All-Party Parliamentary Design and Innovation Group, UK); Design Council Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (charity/provider of expert advice on environmental design, UK); RIBA; Open Architecture Collaborative (global grassroots cooperative); practitioner architects (various).

Workshop 3: Delos Now. In October 2016, the United Nations Habitat III conference on Sustainable Urban Development was held in Quinto, while the first Habitat conference (Vancouver, 1976) was informed by the ambitions of the Delos group and choreographed by several ex-members. In August 2016, the 'International Commission on Stratigraphy' debated whether to adopt the term 'Anthropocene' to describe the current geological epoch, while the Delos group were theorizing the 'Anthropocosmos' in the 1960s. This workshop builds upon the earlier ones to explore the legacy of Delos in contemporary environmental thinking and environmentally-conscious design, assessing its lessons - positive and negative - for now and the future, and will also explore the next stage of activities for the network.
- Stakeholders as above, plus: Anthropocene Working Group (thinktank, UK); UN Human Settlements Programme (US); Greenpeace (environmental pressure group, UK)

The full-time Impact Officer in the School of Arts, University of Leicester, will advise and assist in dissemination and impact plans.