Constantinos Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti's Urbanism vis-à-vis Sustainable Planning: The Ekistic Grid and the Role of Urban Scale DIgital Rwins in Urban Planning Practices

The paper explores how urban scale digital twins can contribute to sustainable environmental design in urban planning. Urban scale digital twins, which have as a core characteristic the possibility to be updated in real-time thanks to the use of technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence, aim to compare different strategies during the processes of decision- making concerning urban and spatial planning. The paper also relates the contemporary practices of urban planning that are based on the use of advanced technologies, such as urban scale digital twins, to the urban governance approaches of Constantinos Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti. Particular emphasis is placed on analysing the connections between the concepts of ekistics, and 'entopia' in Doxiadis's work and circular economy. Another aspect examined in the paper is how sustainability can be incorporated into urban governance practices. Doxiadis believed in the potential of 'entopia' instead of utopia or dystopia. According to Doxiadis, architectural or urban design strategies could be characterized as 'entopian' if they intend to take into consideration environmental and physical limitations, if they take into account the networks that concern the social aspects of the architectural or urban project under study, as well as if they are based on the intention to take into consideration the dynamic parameters concerning the settlements. Doxiadis conceptualized the so-called 'ekistic grid' as a tool aiming to provide architecture and urban planning solutions to promote 'entopia'. Doxiadis was convinced that 'entopian' architecture and urban planning projects should place particular emphasis on the following five elements and their interconnections: Nature, Man, Society, Shells and Networks. Moreover, special attention is placed on Olivetti's understanding of urban planning methods as concrete utopias. The paper relates the aforementioned ideas of Doxiadis and Olivetti concerning urban planning strategies to the current debates around urban scale digital twins and their role in enhancing sustainability and circular economy in urban planning.