Meaning

Of or conducive to the development, befitting the scale, or characteristic of an ecumenopolis or ecumenopoleis..

Definitions by Sense

1. Of or conducive to the development, befitting the scale, or characteristic of an ecumenopolis or ecumenopoleis.
2. An inhabitant of an ecumenopolis, especially one actively involved in its political arena.

Example Sentences

[…] “ecumenopolitan” formations.

⁽¹⁾ For the mid 1980s I estimate that at least one million adults belong to the ecumenopolitan stratum; several times as many are in the educational stream with ambitions to join them. ⁽²⁾ Iranians were graduated from North American universities with motivations that are virtually indistinguishable from their classmates, but their command of Asian languages and their entrepreneurship generates a backflow of ecumenopolitan commitments to Asia.

2007: Baleshwar Thakur, George Pomeroy, Chris Cusack, and Sudhir K Thakur [eds.], City, Society, and Planning, volume 1: “City”, page 16 (Concept Publishing Company; →ISBN The prospective urban implies, therefore, ecumenopolitan order.

Certainly the magnitude of megalopolitan or ecumenopolitan problems tends to overwhelm the individual who is a perspective participant.

‘The ecumenopolitan concept’, said Professor Dix of Nottingham, apparently proposing the ‘dilution’ motion, ‘implies the better use of resources, perhaps a greater use of telecommunications and electronics, and properly planned transport systems. It means a better and more readily accessible countryside…’.

In many, many areas on megalopolitan government, the next time a meeting of this sort gets together and begins to think basically, they are going to be talking about ecumenopolitan government and people are going to be saying: “Ecumenopolis, who needs it? Ecumenopolis, it doesn’t exist and never will.”

The very largest concentrations in the entire complex will have to be rescued from simply more sprawl, because suburbanization and exurbanization continue to bring added pressures on the core. The best way to do this, Doxiadis thought, is to engineer the establishment of new metropolitan areas at only a moderate distance away as nodes in a hierarchical pattern suitable to the ecumenopolitan phase of human history. Then, in an oracular manner looking even beyond the “world-spanning city,” Doxiadis saw mankind of the future even moving in the direction of an extraterrestrial Cosmopolis, “the city of the Cosmos.”⁵⁶

While this is the scale which, for many, is still difficult to perceive or accept, there are a number of signs that such ecumenopolitan systems are very much in the making.¹⁰ The two world wars are but consequences of frictions arising between two or three near-global spatial/operational arrangements dating back to fifteenth and sixteenth century concepts and to the systems which such concepts spurred.

Word Forms

• œcumenopolitan
• ecumenopolitans

Related Words

When Should You Use Ecumenopolitan?

Use ecumenopolitan when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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