Model of Community Sector in Western Baghdad. Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Western Baghdad, Sector 10, Slides 9601 © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
Understanding the historical complexities surrounding Doxiadis Associates’ idea of ‘gossip squares’ in housing projects helps frame larger theoretical questions about the potential significance of the ‘gossip square’ as an everyday public space. The focus of this paper is the gossip square as a spatial and social concept. The idea of ‘gossip square’ was discussed among Doxiadis Associates’ designers and patrons, to eventually become entwined with larger visions of urban development. In examining the ‘gossip square’, new ‘gossip’ arises about how the term reflected ambivalent alignments with mid-twentieth-century modernism, and how it advanced particular agendas of nation-building and modernization. Unpacking the history of the term and the way the concept was appropriated (or not) by the firm of Doxiadis Associates provides insights into such public hubs in the larger context of social relations and the space of a city.
In the mid-1950s, when the Athens-based architectural and planning firm, Doxiadis
Associates, was pursuing its ambitious housing program for the young and oil-rich state
of Iraq, proposing the restructuring of cities and the building of new villages in the
name of national modernization, the firm also introduced the concept of the
‘gossip square’. Gossip squares were small public spaces built into each new
neighborhood designed by Doxiadis Associates, in Baghdad and other parts of the country.
These neighborhoods formed part of a hierarchical system of communities. The system,
also developed by Doxiadis Associates, identifed six classes of communities. The
smallest neighborhood was a Class I community, of up to fifteen families of similar
income; a Class II group comprised three to seven Class I communities; a Class III
community included several Class II communities plus some basic services. Class IV
constituted a somewhat self-sufficient community of mixed income groups, and a Class V
community combined a group of community sectors. The next category, a class VI
community, was an entire city that would then join larger regional communities.
The term ‘gossip square’ stands out as a bit odd in a master plan that
emphasized social and spatial ordering though a zealous scientific and universalist
ethos. The firm’s plan for Iraq is dominated by such abstractions as
‘hierarchies’ of communities, ‘scales’ of cities, and
‘house-types’ for ‘income groups’, and employed diligent
analyses of optimum traffic patterns and statistical data on population and resources.
With the term ‘gossip square’, the plan uncharacteristically alludes to the
intimacy of the neighborhood context, and hints at the informal, accidental, daily
experiences of a city. As a spatial element, of course, the gossip square was defined as
abstractly as the categories of ‘classes’ and ‘scales’ that
prescribed the urban order. Specifications for gossip squares included size and
configuration, and the firm’s discussions of design priorities for the squares
mostly revolved around issues of construction cost. In several reports, Doxiadis himself
requested that his design team in Baghdad keep the budget of these squares to a minimum,
and thus in some cases paving was reduced, fountains simplified, and landscaping
confined to the planting of barley (
Model of Community Sector in Western Baghdad. Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Western Baghdad, Sector 10, Slides 9601 © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
Unlike the wide roads and administrative and commercial centers of housing sectors, or
the green areas that neatly separated the city’s functional zones, gossip squares
were not perceived as key to the efficiency of the new city (fig.
Plan of Community Sector in Western Baghdad. Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Slides 9332 © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
Gossip squares received positive praise from the very beginning, precisely because they
were perceived to be amenable to local cultural preferences. A
Was the gossip square only a clever touch of local character in Doxiadis
Associates’ rational plans for Iraq? Why then the global spread of this idea
through Doxiadis Associates’ prolific practice 1960s, and why did versions of this
small-scale low-budget square for neighborhoods appear from Islamabad to Philadelphia?
One may attempt to answer these questions in terms of localism versus globalism, but the
more interesting issues lie elsewhere: How exactly was this space for
‘gossip’ conceptualized, and how might this inform the larger history of
mid-twentieth-century nation-building and modernization discourse? Doxiadis abolished
the term at some point, only to reinstate it in his writings years later. These shifts
contribute to defining a space for ‘gossip’ that goes well beyond Iraq, and
well beyond Doxiadis Associates, to the larger social, cultural and political
implications of a space for gossip in the city.
Some of the historical complexities surrounding Doxiadis Associates’ idea of gossip
squares help to frame larger theoretical questions about the potential significance of
such everyday public spaces. The focus of these questions is not the particular squares
in Iraq (the history and politics of Doxiadis Associates’ urban plans for Iraq is
offered elsewhere (
The insertion of small neighborhood squares in the restructured urban plan of
decolonized Baghdad indeed had a social dream behind it: It was an urban design
strategy for facilitating the socialization of the citizens of a modern state (fig.
In tune with the Iraqi regime’s campaign to eliminate sectarian and tribal
divisions and to champion a shared national identity and pride, Doxiadis Associates
aspired to promote a slow and controlled intermixing of social classes and to help
the ‘gradual transferring’ of people from family life to the
‘national life of a whole nation’. This attempt at social engineering,
often described by Doxiadis himself—both in his report to the Iraq Development
Board and in the guidelines he provided for the many designers operating within his
offices in Baghdad and Athens—was to begin with small neighborhoods and gossip
squares that would facilitate ‘community formation’ (
Gossip square in Mosul, with barley in the foreground. Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives, Archive Files 23970 © Constantinos and Emma Doxiadis Foundation.
Although the gossip square was positively received, Doxiadis became wary of the popularity of the term. He thought outsiders abused the term and ignored his firm’s larger goals. In an internal memo to his firm in May of 1957, he sternly forbade the use of the term by arguing the following:
Many either do not understand the issue, or do not wish to understand it, and
rather than look at the essence, they stick to the meaning of
‘gossip’ (characteristic of their own tendency for gossip) and
perhaps they overemphasize a relationship between our work with gossip squares
and the character of Middle Eastern societies and gossip. For this reason I ask
that the use of the term ‘gossip square’ be stopped immediately from
[sic] all our reports and drawings. These squares will from now on be called
‘Community Squares of First Degree’. (
From today’s perspective, one’s first reaction to this memo might be, ‘Bravo Doxiadis!’ He had the foresight to recognize the orientalizing overtones in the term, and he was quick to distance himself from cultural stereotypes that saw gossip as what made Middle Eastern societies tick. What was important to Doxiadis was not an endorsement of a specific social practice, but his firm’s effort to cater to the everyday needs and practices of families or other small groups. This is what the new more generic term aimed to highlight.
On second thought, however, one might also realize that the new, more neutral-sounding name seems to better align the small squares of residential neighborhoods with the overall scientific and technocratic claims of the firm. Just like the other parameters diligently charted in Doxiadis Associates’ reports, the ‘Community Squares of First Degree’ would now be framed as objects of scientific knowledge, and could be reduced to statistical content much more readily. Those small public spaces would now fully and neatly fit into the master plan’s system of ordering—an ordering of the city that was understood more in visual, aesthetic, and administrative terms than in terms of the actual, complex, colorful, and possibly contradictory daily operations of its inhabitants.
Doxiadis’s renaming of ‘gossip squares’ to the abstract ‘community squares of first degree’ was not a simple change in terminology. The shift in rhetoric also meant that that his dozens of designers, engineers, and other experts who were working on the housing program for Iraq and who would read this memo would also be conceptualizing this small square in a different way. In a large firm with many branches on four continents (by 1959 Doxiadis Associates had office branches in Baghdad, Karachi, Beirut, Addis Ababa, Khartoum, and Washington), words—and the many memos and reports that circulated among different branches—communicated design strategies, spatial conceptions, and social visions. Thus the change of term from the firm’s chief leader would signal a change in the symbolic, spatial, and social meanings of those squares. Was perhaps something lost through this change of name and its associations with the informal and the quotidian? Was Doxiadis on to something when he returned to using the term in the mid-1950s?
While the charges of cultural and gender stereotyping mentioned above are valid,
another useful potential can be found in the gossip square. Studies of the everyday
show that even though in most societies, gossip is considered a contempible form of
interaction, it is also a practice of the everyday, a way for people ‘to make
sense of things’ (
Of course, neither Doxiadis Associates’ reports nor the reception of his work, positive or negative, intimated what ‘gossip’ might actually mean in those squares, nor did they suggest what alternative practices of public engagement these spaces might facilitate. The fact that Doxiadis Associates had to abandon the project in Iraq well before completion (a military coup in July 1958 resulted in the brutal deposition of the Hashimite monarchy) complicates the judging of both the users’ reception and the long-term social impact of those public spaces. More historical research on the users’ reception and social impact of the gossip squares in Baghdad (and of the ‘Community Squares of First Degree’ in urban plans that followed) is necessary. What can be contemplated, however, is the informal and quotidian qualities of the gossip square, regardless of the extent to which they were acknowledged by Doxiadis Associates. The fortuitous coupling of gossip, public space, and public life can be used to frame key historical and theoretical questions that could inform not only the histories of Doxiadis Associates’s practice, but also the histories of mid-twentieth-century modernist practices and modernization processes and even current urban design debates on democracy, public participation, and the everyday.
The exploration of gossip squares in this paper suggests three areas for further discussion. First, if ‘gossip’ is understood not as a specific act of information exchange but, more generally, as shorthand for informal modes of social interaction that are available even to those with no or minimal access to formal political institutions, then the gossip square can be understood as a setting for alternative social encounters, even a locus of power that allows informal networks to flourish. Both the name ‘gossip square’ and its minimal design and construction allude to unglamorous settings for everyday activities, settings that are available to tribal or ethnic groups typically voiceless in formal democratic processes. Could these spaces then also allow social encounters that challenge the hierarchical structure of the functionally zoned efficiency-happy master plan, or even the state’s presumptious top-down modernization project?
Furthermore, just as the challenging of the categories of public and private in
feminist thought opened up opportunities for women to discover alternative arenas
for action, the act of putting gossip outside the intimacy of a home or yard into a
‘square’ also allows the gossip square to become an arena of political
engagement for voices and networks that are typically left out the public sphere.
Might spaces for ‘gossip’ provide an opportunity for egalitarian
processes that give voice, or power, to those who were left out of mid-century
nation-building and modernization projects or later versions of urban planning and
‘development’?
Finally, as the seminal works of De Certeau, Barthes, and Levebvre teach, no element
of daily life is ‘lacking of value, meaning, or political resonance’,
and blindness to the details of everyday public life undermines our ability to
imagine possibilities (
An earlier version of this article was published (with my thanks to special issue
editor Meltem O. Gurel for the invitation and for overseeing the article’s
translation into Turkish) in a special issue on ‘Architecture and Everyday
Life’ in the scholarly journal
Doxiadis Associates’ master plans were based on Ekistics, ‘the science of human settlements’ developed by Doxiadis himself in 1942. According to the principles of Ekistics, the master plan divided the city into ‘community sectors’ of seven to ten thousand people, and each sector provided administrative, social, educational, health and other community buildings, shopping centers, green areas, coffee houses, and religious buildings. Each community sector (that is, each Class IV community, which typically constituted ‘the basic element’ of Doxiadis Associates’ urban plans) was broken down in a hierarchy, described in the text, of smaller socio-spatial units.
Many of Doxiadis’s writing in the mid 1960s and ’70s used the term
‘gossip square’ once again. See, for example, Doxiadis
These questions draw on the insights of Besnier’s discussion (