Ekistics

Ekistics is the systematic study of human settlements, their organization and development, and their relationships with people and the environment.

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Human settlement: A place where people live, work, and organize social life, from a village to a metropolis. This is the broad subject ekistics examines across scales.
Ekistic units: A hierarchy of settlement units ranging from a dwelling to the ecumenopolis. The hierarchy gives ekistics a scale-based way to classify settlements.
Constantinos Doxiadis: A Greek architect and planner who developed ekistics as a systematic approach to human settlements. Doxiadis formulated ekistics and promoted it internationally.
Islamabad: The planned capital of Pakistan, designed under Constantinos Doxiadis's leadership in the 1960s. Its master plan is a prominent application of Doxiadis's settlement-planning ideas.
Architecture: The art and practice of designing and constructing buildings and other physical environments. Architecture often focuses on individual structures, while ekistics considers whole settlement systems.
Dwelling: A place or structure used as a home by an individual or household. Ekistics treats the dwelling as the smallest settlement unit.
Ekistic grid: A planning framework that relates settlement components to levels of spatial organization. The grid helps organize relationships among elements and settlement scales.
Athens Charter: A 1933 modernist planning manifesto that organized urban functions into categories such as housing and work. Ekistics developed alongside, but beyond, earlier functionalist approaches to city planning.
Ecumenopolis: A proposed worldwide urban network formed by the eventual interconnection of cities. Doxiadis used this concept to imagine the largest scale of settlement growth.
Urban geography: The study of cities' spatial patterns, processes, and relationships with surrounding regions. Urban geography overlaps with ekistics but centers on spatial patterns and processes.