Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s Post-war Reconstruction Agendas in Greece and in Italy: Centralising and Decentralising the Political Apparatus

Abstract

This paper could be placed within a network of studies that aim to shed light on the complex relationships between the Cold War policies including the European Recovery Program (ERP), known as Marshall Plan, on the one hand, and architecture and urbanism, on the other hand. Its main objective is to provide a precise and deep understanding of how architecture and urban planning, which are related to the Marshall plan politics, contributed to the formation of national identity in both Greece and Italy. Within this context, the paper places much importance on the interplay between urban planning and politics. In other words, it is built upon the general understanding that the Marshall Plan played a crucial role in the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. The paper aims to show that architecture and urbanism were very important in this respect. In order to do so, it focuses on two key players regarding the connection between the politics of the Marshall Plan and agendas for urban design: the Greek town planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis (1913-1975) and the Italian industrialist Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960). In parallel, the paper springs from the observation that a couple of monographic studies related to similar research topics have been conducted, but that there are as yet no comparative studies providing a clear understanding of how certain key players in both politics and urban planning, like Doxiadis and Olivetti, contributed to the formation of national identity in different national contexts. Both Doxiadis and Olivetti were agents within the Cold War and Marshall Plan policies and contributed to the different respective trajectories in which Greece and Italy respectively ended up, while using the Marshall Plan for their reconstruction after the Second World War.