Urban Design Challenge Report - Athens

City Challenge Report

Urban Design Challenge in a Dense City: Retrieving Civic Pride in Athens, Greece

PLAN60491 International Urban Design Assignment 2: City Challenge Report Course Unit Leader: Dr Philip Black University of Manchester Student ID: 10254245 19 Dec 2017

Executive Summary Athens in many aspects is deemed as the cradle of western civilisation. However, after generations of unregulated urban expansion in post-war years, the city especially its centre is now cramped with buildings and people. Although numerous grass-root movements have been launched to ameliorate the situation, the government seems to be acting passively. Existed literature has drawn on the problems stemming from hyper density urban areas, including traffic congestion, living quality, pollution, environmental health, flooding, however, little attention is paid to the design approaches to the challenge.

Key words: Athens, urban density, antiparochi, Polykatoikia, design

This report in response is devoted to bridging the gap. It goes through various milestones of the planning and development decisions of the city with specific focus on current problematic state, to finally raise the concerns of the path that the city design should follow given the context of today’s challenges. The report inevitably lacks depth and scope in socio-economic and institutional perspectives due to limited space. None on-site visits taken is also considered a drawback. However it tries to shed some light on the study of design responses to high density urban areas.

Table of Contents

Introduction Evolution of Urban Form Current Urban Challenge and its Formation Design Solutions Conclusion References

Introduction

The City of Athens is located on Attica plain surrounded by mountains (Figure 1), and has been continuously inhabited for over 3400 years. Due to generations of urban expansion, the urban area has grown out of the city administrative boundary and created a larger urban region, namely Athens Metropolitan Area (Eurostat, 2017). Today Athens Metropolitan Area is one of the few large urban areas in Europe still manifesting demographic increase, from 1.5 million inhabitants in 1951, to 3.8 million in 2011, among which the City of Athens contributed 640,000 in an area of 38.96 km2 (Hellenic National Statistical Office, 2011).

Contemporary Athens is characterised as a buzzing and even asphyxiated place with scarce public space and greenery, which is predominantly related to the hyper density of the built environment.

Despite some key individuals’ roles in laying the ground for urban form in Athens in 1830s, prevailing socio-economic conditions have clearer bearings to the changes of the built environment during the post-war period, during which a range of design choices were made to have significantly transformed the classical Athens into its current modern fabric. The aim of this report is therefore to examine the prevailing forces behind the changes, and how they have contributed to the urban crisis of Athens. However it is necessary to bear in mind that the Athens is not an isolated individual case, but a laboratory for all kinds of thinking and practices that could be enlightening to other urban areas.

It commences with a brief history of the trajectory of urban development, followed by a critical analysis of the forces and factors acted in the formation of the high density urban Athens. The area of study may extend to Athens Metropolitan Area to better capture the urban crisis. Finally, several design responses and international best practices are examined for potential applicability at both macro (city) and micro (neighbourhood and street) level.

Attention to non-design considerations are drawn where necessary.

Location

Development of Urban Form

4th Century B.C.: In the earliest development, Acropolis and Agora formed Athens’ urban core. Source: Thompson, Wycherley and American Council of Learned Societies, 1972. Source: Guner, 2013.

1833: The urban plan for the extension of the city was designed by architects Schaubert and Kleanthis.

The grand boulevards and gridiron patterns are symbolic neoclassical vision of the European cities, and enabled city’s further expansion towards

Throughout the history Athens has witnessed several key stages of urban formation: the early ‘fortified citadel’ era, the first modern urban plan in the 19thth century, the rapid expansion of urban footprints in post-war years, the suburbanisation in 1980s, and the ‘Golden Olympic Era’ conjoining the two centuries (Followodysseus, n.d.).

A view of the city of Athens, painted by Richard Temple in 1810.

1204-1456: The Latin era: Athens under Latin rule, inhabitants clustered at the foot of the Acropolis. Walls were built as fortification at the outskirt.

suburban areas (Papadam, 2015). The plan was revised by Léo von Klenze in 1834, and the final version was determined by Friedrich von Gaertner with repositioned Royal Palace (the Hellenic Parliament today).

1456-1687: The time of the Crescent: Mehmed II the Conqueror captures the city and the Acropolis turns into Turkish settlement. Settlements expanded northwards with all the winding roads that formed an organic urban morphology.

Schematic representation of the geometric and logical development of the Kleanthis-Schaubert plan.

Source: http://www.archaiologia.gr/ blog/2012/02/13/ιδεολογία-και-σχεδιασμόςστα-1920/

1800s: A plan of Athens under the Turkish rules, designed by Coubault, ca 1800. The city was bounded by clear traits of wall.

1870s: The development of the city by the end of 1870s, the urban area tended to stretch northwards.

Source of Historic plans: Divari-Valakou, 2014

Development of Urban Form

Expansion of the built-up area since 1880s. The dark and the light grey areas represent the city area at the beginning and at the end of each period, respectively. (Source: Diakakis, Pallikarakis and Katsetsiadou, 2014)

Urban Challenge: High Density Built-up Area

Today more than 4 million people live in the Athens Metropolitan area, and more than 250,000 people are squeezed in an area of 12 square kilometres in central Athens (Giannarou-Kathimerini, 2006).

Traffic increases by 2.6 percent every year and 40 percent of the vehicles are found parking in pedestrianized streets (Figure 1). A yearly increase of 3,000-4,000 houses are observed in the already-saturated capital whilst at the same time public spaces are shrinking (Giannarou-Kathimerini, 2006).

Figure 3: the two typical districts in Athens. Source: drawn by author. Basedmap: Mapstack, 2017

Figure 1: Ermou street, a ‘pedestrianised’ commercial street of Athens.

Source: https://www.pezh.gr/sites/pezh.gr/files/ pezh.gr/english/photo2.htm

Figure 2: The density variation inAthens. Source: Tombolini et al., 2015.

Urban Challenge: High Density Built-up Area

The hyperdensity in urban centre has resulted in Athens’ notoriously low parks-per-capita level.

Greenery in Athens can be identified by two categories: large green spaces and neighbourhood greenery. According to the City of Athens official website, the large green space including Attiko Woods, Lycabettus and Filopappos Hills and archaeological sites, with a total size greater than 10,000 m2, greenery found in city neighbourhoods is comprised of squares, small parks and pavements, with a total size of less than 10,000 m2 (City of Athens, n.d.), which, in all, a greenery of around 2 hectares.

To compare, the Hyde Park in London covers an area of over 142 hectares (Giannarou-Kathimerini, 2006). The ratio of greenery per resident has been frozen at 0.96 square meters even though the World Health Organization has set the rate at 9 square meters per resident (Greenspaces, 2017).

Moreover, the two large fires in Attica over last 10 years has burnt down 14,000 hectares of forest land, whereas only 7,500 hectares were reforested. In the rest of the burnt area, informal constructions sprouted instead of trees (Sapountzaki, Delladetsimas and Chalkias, 2015)

Figure 4: Green system in Athens. Source: Greenspaces, 2017.

Factors that Form the Challenge

Figure 4: The Dom-ino Housing structure.

Source: Aureli, Giudici & Issaias, 2012

Figure 5: The polykatoikia has profoundly changed the skyline of Athens city centre.

Source: Aureli, Giudici & Issaias, 2012

Figure 6: A tyical polykatoikia housing in Athens city centre Source: Googlemap, 2017

The forces behind this massive expansion can be explained by the population boom since the early 20th century, the political reaction to meet the housing need, the architectural response, urbanisation in the 60s and 70s, suburbanisation and the densification of suburbs in the 80s, and lastly, geographical constraints.

The first three factors are somehow intertwined.

Since the early 20th century, Athens has been experiencing recurrent influx of population. In 1921, Athens population exploded from 473, 000 to 718, 000 after the greco-turkish war (1919-1922) that generated urgent housing need (RWTH, n.d.a). The massive production of apartment buildings (Polykatoikia) thus gained momentum. This type of housing production was encouraged by the government in terms of tax relief, adjuvant building regulations and property law, besides, house builders could be able to share a flat with the home-owners, which is known as the antiparochi1 system (Emmanuel, 1981).

The new, lost-cost housing model polykatoikia2 became ubiquitous in Greek and especially Athens from the 1930s through to the 80s (Emmanuel, 1981). It refers to mutli-storey apartment dwellings that accommodate different social groups. The design of building is based on Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino (Figure 4), a reinforced concrete frame of columns and slabs, plus an elevator shaft and staircase, which is open to flexible floor plans in order to meet spatial variations (Aureli, Giudici and Issaias, 2012). The façade is characterised by horizontal balconies and repetition of the typical plan, symbolised by a grid-structure (Figure 5-6) (Aureli, Giudici and Issaias, 2012). No advanced construction skills are required, flexible and adaptable to local conditions, this model successfully tamed an increasing number of homeless population in post-war Athens (Emmanuel, 1981).

Factors that Form the Challenge

With the exponential increase of demography, the demand became higher and required more buildings to be built, while there was no masterplan to guide the growth, in turn the city quickly became very condensed with no public space considered.

The undiluted borrowing of architectural actions has characterised the city as a massive repetition.

Figure 7:Map of empty housing stock in central Athens: The darker colour refers to higher empty rates

Figure 8: Building coefficient map: Red colour shows properties where existing development exceeds the currently applicable building coefficient. Green shows properties which can be developed further.

However, the economic crisis in Athens remained strong, and has deteriorated the urban fabric in city centre. The business and shops in lower part of Polykatoikias lost their vibrancy, and are often crowded with homeless people during nighttime (Figure 7) (RWTH, n.d.a). Besides, almost all buildings today require costly restoration and modernisation to retain future functioning, however, more than 60% of the buildings exceeds their current (2015) market value (Figure 8). Therefore, it has been extremely difficult

or even utopian to demolish the buildings and replace them with public spaces (Triantafyllopoulos, 2015).

Athens saw the culmination of its urbanisation in the 1960s and 70s (Followodysseus, n.d.), during which the standardised housing development expanded in an unregulated, unplanned manner towards every direction (Figure a). These informal self-financed buildings sprawled to cheap suburban land with severe deficiency in infrastructure to accommodate the migrants and refugees (Followodysseus, n.d.). Later in the 1980s, the suburbanisation reached its peak, the urban periphery became asphyxiated as the aggressive entrepreneurship culture was still dominant and tried to transform every piece of land into buildings to maximize profits, so as the city centre (Followodysseus, n.d.). In fact, the whole city in the post-war period was 'lava flow of Dom-Ino-like Polykatoikias', as described by Aureli, Giudici and Issaias (2012).

Another strong inflow of migration emerged in the early 1990s from Eastern European countries. Immigrants clustered in lower floors of antiparochi buildings in suburban areas in southwest of the city. At the same time, because of the hyperdensity in city centre and the overall devalued environment in city centre, middle-class also tend to relocate in suburban villas. Large infrastructure construction funded by EU accelerated this process (Triantafyllopoulos, 2015).

Furthermore, the natural barrier has also fostered the condensation of urban fabric. The contemporary Athens has reached its maximum limits of surface area: the city is bounded east, west and north by mountains and south by Aegean Sea, which is literally trapped inside its geography (RWTH, n.d.a).

Design Solutions Concept: Connecting major green spaces To ameliorate the condition of density, a perspective normally would lead to the creation of large urban gardens. This approach has had plenty of examples in London, Paris and America. However as previous section discussed, there is a difficulty in demolishing current building block and that the natural boundary also constraints this strategy, thus, several compromised proposals are raised.

At city level, there is a possibility to connect the major parks and green space by creating green corridors.

One of the emblematic case is the Emerald Necklace in Boston (Figure 9-10). The design of shared paths in conjunction with green corridors has effectively eliminated the isolation of urban green space.

A recent urban regeneration masterplan in Athens was clearly inspired by this notion (Figure 11-13).

The project proposed to a linear park aimed to reformat the cultural, communal, commercial, and civic relationship of the people to the city, mainly by pedestrianising a road running parallel to the historically important Stadiou Street (Urbanterrains, 2012). The green elements are highlighted in terms of garden park, city park and forest park. Looking ideal though, the chosen street is questioned for it may further devalue the attractiveness of Stadiou Street (Urbanterrains, 2012).

Figure 9 : the Emerald Necklace, green corridors are designed to connect major green space, with topography issues well sorted.

Source: The Emerald Necklace Conservancy.

Figure 11: The Athens Regeneration Masterplan Source: Urbanterrains, 2012.

Figure 10 : The shared use path in the green corridor of Emerald Necklace.

Source: The Emerald Necklace Conservancy.

Figure 12: The Garden Park, City Park and Forest Park notion proposed by the Athens Regeneration Masterplan Source: Urbanterrains, 2012.

Design Solutions Concept: the Suffix to existed building block Narrowing down to neighbourhood level, the notion of vertical garden can be applied. One of the breath-taking projects may be the Bosco Verticale in Milan. The two 27-storey apartment buildings are built with exclusive plantations on their facades. The design of towers also allows maximum sunlight (Figure 13-14). Considering the context in Athens, no high rises can be built in city centre due to the height limitation, however vertical extensions are feasible. In Athens, neighbourhood, the design of Appendix and Suffix can be a best illustration based on this notion (Figure 15-17).

Figure 15: The development of a ‘Suffix’ to existed building fabric.

Source: Oikonomakis and Siampakoulis, 2015

Figure 16: The variations of the ‘Suffix’.

Source: Oikonomakis and Siampakoulis, 2015

Despite the design responses, a city level resilient plan is also helpful. The employment of advanced mitigation techniques such as cool roofs and cool pavements, can also contribute to the good quality of urban living (Santamouris, Cartalis and Synnefa, 2015). Moreover, the Athenian government is for a long time criticised as lethargic state, therefore a collective effort and public supervision is also required during the implementation of any projects.

Figure 14: the vertical greenery of Bosco Verticale. Source: ArchDaily, 2015

Figure 14: Maximum sunshine. Source: ArchDaily, 2015

Figure 17: A physical model of the ‘Suffix’.

Source: Oikonomakis and Siampakoulis, 2015

Conclusion

The report reviews several key stages of urban morphology in Athens, among which the Schaubert-Kleanthis plan in 1833 has largely determined the modern urban form. It then examined the forces of unregulated, informal urban expansion in the post-war era that shaped the hyperdensity in contemporary Athens, in which governmental reaction to the problem was deemed as lethargic and has generated little help in leading the urban growth towards a sustainable direction.

The severe scarcity of public space and greenery is closely related to the devalued housing stock and thus increases difficulty in rejuvenation process. However, despite the fact that horizontal development is limited, there is still opportunity to rethink and redesign the city upwards, but surely with a sustainable notion in mind.

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