Environment: Exit the Ekistician

Despite their confident use of statistics, graphs and maps to limn the future, city planners have no claim on prescience. They depend instead on an all too fallible blend of private intuition and public persuasion; theirs is not a profession for the timid. Most persuasive of them all, at least through the 1960s, was Greece's Constantinos Apostolos Doxiadis, who was buried last week after dying at the age of 62 of multiple sclerosis. Based in Athens, he specialized in drawing up practical housing programs for developing countries and thus directly influenced the lives...