In the mid–1950s, British architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew were among the leading figures behind the institutionalization of the Tropical Architecture field, contributing to the proliferation of publications, international conferences and establishment of academic centers. During the same time, the global shortage of housing and United Nations’ development agendas for the “third world” brought a shift in planning priorities. Focusing in that particular moment, the paper traces the efforts for the de–tropicalization of Africa and planning practice alike, through the research activities of the Athens–based firm Doxiadis Associates and the writings and visions of Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis.
This article investigates the complex ties between planning, socio-political conflicts, and emerging Cold War geopolitics during the post-war reconstruction period in Greece, by focusing on the years between 1944 and 1947. In these crucial transitional years, transnational flows of expertise, interwar legacies, and political, scientific, and ideological contestations gave rise to novel planning ideas and antagonistic visions for the country's reconstruction and its future development path. The article sheds light on how the architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis formulated Ekistics as a spatial vision, a mode of central planning, and a technical guide, examining how Ekistics affected the shaping of reconstruction policies, particularly in the countryside. This analysis further exposes the way the Greek countryside became the locus of competing visions of spatial development, as well as contradictory state responses: from long-term housing policies and self-help practices all the way to ideological repression and population resettlement strategies, British interventionism, and Civil War conflicts that paved the ground to Greece's subsequent US-led recovery programs under the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshal Plan (1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952). By focusing on the paradigmatic case of Greece, this article advances an understanding of European reconstruction as an uneven, contested, and transitional process and highlights the implications of architecture and planning discourses and practices amid ideological, territorial, and geopolitical contestations.
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