The editor's page

Abstract

The completion of this volume of Ekistics makes the guest-editor, Professor Calogero Muscarà, and myself really proud and happy. We are also relieved for having fulfilled, albeit partially and belatedly, a longstanding commitment, and are deeply grateful to all those who have joined us in this tribute to Jean Gottmann who has marked our lives since we first came across some of his thoughts. I remember Calogero Muscarà telling me what a struggle he had to go through for many years obliged to work in universities and other research institutions, without real interest, in physical geography, when his main interests were history and social and political sciences which were "more appealing for the explanation of life." It was only in the mid-1950s when he discovered Gottmann's book La politique des États et leur géographie, that he began to understand how effectively geography could be connected to his real interests. The long period of close collaboration, both nationally and internationally, between Gottmann and Muscarà, which started 20 years later in 1977, only ended with Gottmann's death in 1994 but Muscarà's keen interest and personal involvement in promoting Gottmann's thought never ceased. I myself, an architect-planner, already fully engaged in ekistics, and a close collaborator of Constantinos A. Doxiadis, will never forget the day I first met Gottmann in the early 1960s and how avidly I absorbed the relevance of his remarks on the complexities involved when trying to apply the interdisciplinary approach needed in assessing conditions for planning action. And this continued during all the years and on all the occassions I had the good fortune to be with him.