Portion of an essay originally published in two parts as “City of Chaos” in Greekworks.com (May & June 2004). Revised version of full essay is Chapter 20 of Shifting Sense – Looking Back to the Future in Spatial Planning, edited by Edward Hulsbergen, Ina Klaasen & Iwan Kriens (Techne Press, Amsterdam, 2005), pages 265-280.

Urbanism and ideology in Athens.
This essay focuses on Athens as an example of a European city that destroyed its earlier, more human urban fabric. I argue that this was the result of misapplied urbanist principles. It is only by studying why things went wrong that we can ever hope to reverse the urban damage. The case of Athens is applicable, with only minor modifications, to many other European cities.

sketch Nikos A. Salingaros

At the time of Greek independence in the early 19th Century, Athens was a fairly small town, ideal for the new government to begin erecting imposing new buildings and planning its urban structure for several decades. For the most part, Athens by the 1920s still followed the model of vibrant local neighborhoods partially connected by an electric subway (and soon to be even better connected by electric trams running on rails). Unfortunately, this balance between connective links and the built environment was shattered by both the tremendous influx of immigrants from the Asia Minor disaster in 1922 (an aftermath of World War I) and the onset of global economic depression at the end of the Twenties. These factors led to the overcrowding of Athens and to its future definition as the overflowing container of most of Greece’s population.

Athens’s urban collapse, coupled with the complementary collapse of villages that emptied their population into the capital city, generated social and political forces that are still unresolved today, and gave rise to a strongly ideological — and utopian — “solutions” divorced from reality. For example, the former Prime Minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis (uncle and namesake of the current prime minister), eagerly dismantled the tramlines, as he obviously identified them with Athens’s past and wanted to bring the country into the future. The world’s top postwar urbanists recommended this step in order to speed up automobile traffic. But it was a mistake, as is now apparent by the reintroduction of the old tram (albeit in a technologically updated form) to restore this vital transport link to Athens.

While the developmental model chosen to deal with the devastation wrought by the German occupation and Greece’s Civil War was wrongheaded in the extreme (based as it was, to a great extent, on construction alone), it was an obvious choice at a time of severely limited options. To be fair to the elder Karamanlis, he chose the fast — if illusionary — track to rapid economic growth in the 1950s. At the same time, however, this choice inevitably contributed to urban and social degradation. Now we recognize it as an economic choice that proved disastrous in the long run.

Worse of all was the ideology of “progress”, which could only be realized by rending the previous urban fabric. Certain essential elements of Greek urban culture — old Athenian homes with courtyards, small side-streets, small pedestrian squares, kiosks, mixed-use four-story buildings — were condemned as useless and fit only for replacement. What was chosen to replace them were models imported from industrialized Europe and the United States (the latest in urban and architectural “progress”) that consisted of isolated villas, monofunctional high-rises connected by expressways, buildings closed to the pedestrian street, and even the total elimination of the pedestrian street. Along with these changes came an architecture that deliberately disdained life, and wore an alien face of polished metal, plate glass, sheer stone, or brutal concrete.

Greeks accepted this new “look” as symbolic of architectural (and, by implication, social and economic) progress. The political left saw this utopian urbanism as a rejection of the “old”, traditional urbanism, which symbolized the right’s power base, and as a necessary part of the socialist revolution that would guarantee the country a bright new future. The right, on the other hand, was equally willing to co-opt immigrant settlements that housed left-wing voters by razing existing structures and replacing them with “modern” workers’ housing. As for the right’s upper-class constituencies, they wanted new highways through the city so that they could enjoy their cars. Wealthy residents eagerly embraced an isolating urbanism within their neighborhoods, since it offered protection from “crime” (real or imaginary) and a chance to avoid mixing with those less well-off. In the end, a succession of governments, advised by respected urbanists, implemented policies that destroyed the functioning urban environment in place at the end of the Forties.

While more recent history easily confirms that the left has been responsible for its own share of urban disasters, the blame for the depredations of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies in Greece lies squarely with the political right. During a 40-year-long postwar monopoly on political and social power, right-wing governments consistently chose to apply anti-urbanist policies. Smaller cities survived better, simply because of neglect, as Athens concentrated most of the country’s resources. Many provincial centers weathered postwar urban blight much better than Athens. It would be heartening to point to local civic pride as having tempered the worst of the urban assault, but this is not the case. Whenever they had the funds, cities beyond Athens immediately did the same damage to themselves, destroying what was most valuable in their urban environments.
 
What went wrong in Greek urbanism.
In the mad rush to “equality” with the US and northern Europe, automobile ownership in Greece has skyrocketed. In rural areas, this is understandable, since cars have provided an efficient connectivity, perhaps for the first time in history. In cities, however, severe problems have resulted since no thought was given to how all these cars were going to get around; as a result, roads are now choked. In parts of Athens, even the smallest side street is crowded day and night with traffic. There was also no thought given to parking all these vehicles, either for the night, or once they reached their destination.

The present state of commuting in Athens is the result of a monumental misunderstanding. Cities are transportation networks connecting pedestrian nodes (Salingaros, 2005). The quality and density of connections within and around those nodes, and connections among spatially separated nodes, are what enable a city to function. How efficiently a city works depends on the degree to which distinct transportation (including pedestrian) networks are integrated. Government planners, however, have visualized cities as buildings fitted into an abstract geometry, allowing them to cover every available space. Their idea of connectivity is to build a highway out to a group of isolated villas or high-rises. This philosophy naively supposes that the urban fabric will magically reproduce and expand by itself.

The old courtyard house fronted by a calm side street provided Athenian urban life with a ground-floor pedestrian realm connecting internal, private space to external, public space that was available to children and the elderly. This was replaced by the four-storey apartment building, with shops on the ground floor. The street, consequently, carried a high traffic load, thus leaving only a narrow sidewalk for the urban realm. The lost pedestrian space was shifted to a number of small neighborhood parks, which represented a workable but primarily CAR-FREE solution, since the main transport in this pattern functioned through buses, trams, and subway. The increased pressure from cars promptly made it unworkable, although we were left with semi-functional pieces throughout Greece. What killed this model were greed and a total lack of government oversight.

The typical phenomenon of the high-rise (four- to six-storey) apartment house was both forced upon and eagerly adopted by the Greek public, for two reasons. First, it was propelled by the huge population (that is, internal-migration) pressure, which led to vertical stacking. Second, it was itself a driving force behind the construction boom that heated up the Greek economy in the Fifties and Sixties. For many citizens, the speculative building of apartment buildings became a gold mine, an employment opportunity, a route to a higher standard of living, or even all of the above. Politicians were unwilling, therefore, to criticize the postwar urban model in any way. The available ground space was far more useful (and valuable) for erecting more buildings.

It may indeed be possible to return to the four-storey, mixed-use apartment model. Today, however, one has to provide for underground (as well as limited surface) parking. Sidewalks have to be much wider, and urban space better defined, to enclose protected portions of the pedestrian realm (Alexander, 2001-2005). A lot more green space needs to be made available. Finally, balconies have to be at least two meters deep (roughly); otherwise they don’t work as raised living spaces (Alexander et. al., 1977). These improvements would not, in themselves, solve the circulation and parking problems in the city, however. Although the destruction of any vestige of urban green space amounts to criminal negligence, the consequences of ignoring the parking and circulation problems are just as serious over the long term.

I cannot overemphasize that urban society forms in the pedestrian realm, which itself has to be nurtured at street level. But the postwar residential urban model evolved into new and unsustainable typologies. The height of a typical apartment building in Athens has now increased beyond four stories, which surpasses the critical limit of density capable of sustaining urban life. Above four stories, there is no visual or spoken exchange with the street level (Alexander et. al., 1977). Children and the elderly are virtually imprisoned in their apartments, thus disconnecting society.

Even more serious is the elimination of mixed use. The parking garage has replaced the traditional commercial ground floor. A cheap solution — easing parking problems at home by putting cars under apartments (but not underground) — has dealt the final blow. Today, monofunctional apartment high-rises sit on stilts, with the ground floor entirely taken over by parking (following the 1922 Citrohan model of the hysterically antisocial Le Corbusier). This disconnects inhabitants from urban life, reconnecting them only through their cars. It is the same disconnection seen in North American suburbs, with their well-documented social alienation (Duany, Plater-Zyberk & Speck, 2000). We have vertical isolation in Greece, as opposed to the horizontal isolation of the United States. Since there is no longer any connection with the ground, sidewalks have begun to shrink, and apartment buildings stand apart from each other, thus failing to define any urban space.

The pedestrian realm has been totally sacrificed to the needs of the automobile. A facile parking solution is to accommodate vehicles underneath the new, freestanding apartment buildings, but this is an illusion. Those cars start off in the morning to jam the streets and fight for nonexistent parking spaces at their destination. Some residents pretend that they need their cars only to take their families out of the concrete hell of Athens, so that they can live a “normal” life in the countryside for a few days. It never occurs to them that it is possible to live a more connected life in the city itself — with the correct geometry.

Nikos A. Salingaros


References.

Alexander, Christopher (2001-2005) The Nature of Order: Books One to Four (The Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California).

Alexander, Christopher, S. Ishikawa, M. Silverstein, M. Jacobson, I. Fiksdahl-King & S. Angel (1977) A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press, New York).

Duany, Andrés, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk & Jeff Speck (2000) Suburban Nation (North Point Press, New York).
Salingaros, Nikos A. (2005) Principles of Urban Structure (Techne Press, Amsterdam, Holland).