Urban renewal, Athens style

Athens is a city desperately in need of urban renewal. Packed with polykatoikies (apartment buildings) erected for the most part in the 1960s and 70s and presently in bad need of sprucing up, not to mention more serious structural reinforcements following the earthquakes of 1981 and 1999, Athens is at an impasse. The regime of myriads of small properties embedded in the polykatoikia concept make effective policies for urban renewal next to impossible. Not only finding the money to compensate the millions of “home owners” (i.e. cement cubicle owners) in order to demolish their properties would be next to impossible, but actually agreeing on what to do with the tracts of land freed thus would constitute a case study in the traditional Greek indecision and lack of effective planning.

The photos that follow highlight a particularly glaring case of how urban renewal in Greece (and especially in Athens) may get stuck forever, without anyone being able to push forward with a solution. These are the poor polykatoikies that were built before WWII to house refugee families from Asia Minor. The apartment buildings fell into complete disrepair in the 1980s and were slowly abandoned by their last inhabitants. The Culture ministry, under pressure from architects and the few who care about this city’s residential planning history, declared two out of the total eight polykatoikies “protected buildings,” which cannot be touched unless there is permission from the ministry. The other six were thus condemned to the wrecker’s ball. Given the usual chaos that permeates Greek bureaucracy, however, no decision to go ahead with the demolition has been given. The refugee polykatoikies continue to languish in the state you see in these photographs, even with bullet holes received during the Battle of Athens (December 1944 - January 1945) still visible.

Of course, the rational way, most would say, should have been spending some money to restore these buildings and make them habitable again. Architecturally, the refugee polykatoikies  are significant examples of the inter-war Spartan style that produced simple buildings with basic amenities, but with ample open space between them to create a neighborhood scheme where everybody could breath. One look at the area surrounding these polykatoikies today is enough to convince you that those pre-war architects knew something that the post-war greedy amateurs ignored completely, viz. the need for town planning before bringing in cement and mortar and begin to cover every square inch of available soil.

The refugee polykatoikies  are living (if ruined) monuments of a now long forgotten time when the Greek state seemed to have the initiative for renewal, even at this limited scale. “Modern” Greece and its “technocrats” display no such tendencies to the detriment of all.

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