TMPhil in Architecture and Urban Design - Projective Cities 2022/2024
Cover sheet for submission 2023-2024
Programme: Projective Cities, Taught MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design
Name(s): Christos Smyrniotis
Submission title: ‘Territories of Travel: Performing the Cycladic Leisure-scape’
Course title: Dissertation
Course tutor(s): Platon Issaias, Hamed Khosravi, Anna Font Vacas
Declaration:
“I certify that this piece of work is entirely my/our own and that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of others is duly acknowledged.”
Signature of Student(s):
Date: 22nd of April 2024
Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Taught Master of Philosophy in Architecture and Urban Design - Projective Cities
I am grateful to the individuals and organisations who have supported and guided me throughout the process of conducting this thesis. I want to thank my tutors, thesis supervisors, and the academic staff of the AA for their invaluable contributions, critiques, and ideas that have been fundamental in directing this research. I also want to express my appreciation to the AA library, the National Archives of Greece, the Doxiades Foundation Archives, the Urban Planning Department of the Cyclades, the Urban Studies Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens, the Mykonos Port Authority, the ASPA KST planning office, and Kostis Petropoulos for providing the necessary resources for conducting this dissertation. I am indebted to the Stavrakopoulos family, whose expertise and experience in the island of Mykonos have informed the position of this thesis. Additionally, I would like to thank my fellow AA students and friends who offered their aid and encouragement through this year, especially Fiorenza Giometti, who assisted me with her knowledge, edits, and company during the development of this research. Lastly, I want to express my gratitude to my family, who has supported me throughout this journey, and particularly my brother Efthimis Smyrniotis, for sharing his insights during our discussions. Without the above contributions, this thesis wouldn't have been possible.
The Aegean Archipelago, a dispersed landscape dependent on mobility and delimited by its islands’ isolated conditions, has been re-invented to perform and be performed as a leisure-scape. Constantly re-shaped by desire, the development of the Aegean islands unveils how touristification manifests as a territorial process enacted in both imaginary and material realms.
Territories of Travel examines the evolution of the Cyclades into a specialised constellation of travel sites. Operating to make the imaginary experienceable, mass tourism has reciprocally shaped the islands’ spaces, hosts and guests, forming the territory host. Focusing on spatial developments in the exemplary case of Mykonos island, the research dissects the tourist construction, uncovering its political and economic motives. An assemblage of institutional devices, immaterial lines, coastline conditions, attraction points, and programmed zones has framed insular landscapes and subjects as signs of a consumable experience. Mediatised and commodified tourism spaces have formed a network of technical sites like ports, ruins, beaches, hotels and infrastructures to accommodate the travel rituals. Enacted through a functional choreography of movement, consumption practices and touristic reproduction, the island has been abstracted, disciplined and detached in order to be extracted semantically, materially and economically.
Constantly interplaying between the polarity of authenticity and profitable reproducibility, the Mykonian environment has assimilated to its touristified condition through the repeated replication of its image. Materialised and solidified within a whitewashed suburban environment, the tourist industry, increasing the island's hosting capacity, has led to local exhaustion, ultimately dictating a seasonal mode of operation. Extra-territorially dependent and oscillating between confinement and congestion, as well as individuation and alienation, insular realities are read as the result of a territorial gesture of spatiotemporal fragmentation. Acceleration and land appropriations have detached the place from its spatial specificity to re-construct it as an imaginary.
Ultimately, the research's object of investigation is the Archipelago as a territory at play, which can be critically deconstructed through its mobilities, motives and capacities. Challenging tourism’s spatial control, the thesis envisions scenarios of non-seasonal landscape occupation and resistance. The Archipelago’s syntactic elements, its sea, coastlines, and lands, serve as the starting point for its projective gradient re-composition, building the main argument of the thesis.
Fig.1 The Aegean Archipelago,the Cyclades & Mykonos island. (Author)
1 Touristification is the process by which a place changes as it becomes an object of tourist consumption.(See: Antonio B. Ojeda, Maxime Kieffer, “Touristification. Empty concept or element of analysis in tourism geography?”, Geoforum Volume 115, October 2020, p. 143)
The research delves into the processes of touristification in the context of the Cyclades in the Southern region of the Aegean Archipelago in Greece. By examining the exemplary historical and contemporary developments on the island of Mykonos, the research goes beyond the imaginary superficial constructs of the Aegean leisure-scape and maps out the political and socioeconomic forces that guided its realisation. Triggered during the country's postwar reconstruction and consolidated through the programmatic interventions of the Colonels’ Military Dictatorship (1967-1974), mobility infrastructures, attraction sites, zones of preservation and building policies produced an assemblage that delineated the Archipelago as a host region for mass tourism. Reading the island of Mykonos as a laboratory of post-urban-planning practices for tourist development in the area, the research re-frames the Archipelago as a Travel Territory’ where the adjustment of water surfaces, lands, and coastlines enable its territorial re-definition, guiding the rituals of travel. The research examines contemporary tourism geographies and aims to unite political, infrastructural, landscape, ecological and material consumption discourses.
seasonal habitations. Introduced within existing and repeated insular conditions, the proposals seek to project a dispersed territorial plan that polemically utilises the actual elements of the Archipelago to enable the diversification of sea movements, the re-appropriation of the coastline and the critical re-activation of land
2 Mediatisation broadly refers to to the interrelation between communication media, and changes in culture and society. For the scope of this research, mediatisation is used to reflect on how media-enhanced social-spatial transformations are enacted through tourism.(Nick Couldry on Andre Jansson’s theory of mediatisation in: Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, “Conceptualizing Mediatization: Context, Traditions,Arguements,” Mediatizaxtion(s), December 22, 2020, p. 199)
3 Michel Serres contextualised the relationship between host and guest in social, biological and informational systems as parasitic. He framed parasitic relationships not as a negative drainage of systems but rather as something that changes the very nature of the host, ‘a thermal exciter’ that triggers changes in systems. (See: Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris: Pluriel, 2014))
4 ‘De-territorialisation’ is a concept developed by G.Deleuze and F.Guattari and refers to the process of altering, destroying and re-making the territory (re-territorialisation) (See: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).p.174)
The thesis aims to deconstruct the mythology of the Aegean and its evolution from a landscape of spatial dispersal, inter-dependence, and maritime intercommunication to a constellation of international tourist destinations. Mediatised2 de-contextualised and commodified, insular landscapes and subjects have been framed by the tourist gaze as elements of a consumable experience. Managed to be simultaneously authentic and profitably reproducible, traveller experiences dominate local activities and direct the island’s development patterns. In the absence of holistic planning, liberalisation processes, private motives and extra-territorial forces operated in reciprocity, ultimately resulting in the refinement of the Greek-host national identity and the transformation of insular environments into a suburban structure of high monetary value and touristic capacity. In this context, sea mobilities, attraction points, and land management protocols became territorial and political tools operating to sustain travel practices and desired sights. They indicate how tourism sites constantly interplay with the mobile bodies of both hosts and guests, driving their practices and being adjusted to their desires, formulating a parasitic relationship3 Slowly detached from its spatial specificity, the Aegean Sea is increasingly subjected to external dependencies, local resource exhaustion and seasonality effects that give rise to alternating conditions of isolation and over-congestion that sync with the touristic flux.
The thesis challenges the ideas that codified lands and artefacts into signs for touristic consumption and advocates for their urgent re-interpretation. The organisation of the sea, the precarious definition of the coastline and the absolute bordering of land become initiating points for a series of propositions that imagine re-appropriation scenarios in a homogenised Archipelago. States of exemption, areas of common use, and merged functional zones respond to the practices of touristification, as well as their imaginaries and development protocols. Three projective design acts, inherently unfinished and nonconclusive, argue for the production of ‘soft’ interfaces that aim to break touristic mono-functionality, providing potential for de-territorialisation4 through non-
The thesis dissects the emergence of leisure travel in the Aegean Sea through the three operative elements that structure the rituals of travel: Mobilities, Motives, and Capacities. These elements, which form the backbone of the research, are explored in three main chapters. The aim is to provide a nuanced image of the Archipelago’s territorial evolution, depicting touristic space as a technical land comprised of a localised network of devices that enable movement, produce imaginaries, and re-organise the islands to host the incoming flux. The research is underpinned by an interdisciplinary theoretical foundation, framed by a prelude and two interludes, which provide the basis to reflect on architectural case studies, field research, and archival material. Each chapter is concluded through a design act placed in the context of Mykonos, attempting the reversal of the examined spatial organisations that structured the touristic landscape.
The prelude serves as an introduction to the spatial structure of the Archipelago and frames the islands’ scattering on the sea surface and their latent interconnections as the guiding factors of the region’s disposition. Leading to the Archipelago’s description as a Travel Territory the prelude attempts to expand its understanding beyond fixed theorisations describing it as a place-in-play performed through corporeal and material movements.
Chapter 1, Mobilities historically analyses the organisation of the sea and the use of architecture as necessary pre-conditions for the Archipelago's territorial remaking. The shift from a de-centralised colonial trade network to an institutionally managed surface under the nation-state is traced through the examination of sea borders and coastline architectures in the Cyclades. Ultimately leading to the sea’s mono-functionalisation and canalisation from multiple touristic migration flows that carry their own representations and practices, the Archipelago has been hierarchised as a constellation of destinations. Arguing against the conception of mobility as a homogeneous field, the research looks at crossings and their characteristics as the differentiating elements between mobile bodies. As such, the territorial conditions of tourism are readable through the management of the edge This renders immobility the Archipelago’s primary field of friction where power structures are manifested in the effects of seasonality and external dependence. In response, the first design exercise depicts a scenario of a soft mobility infrastructure that occupies the sea in order to enceite it as habitable. Attempting a disruptive gesture, a series of floating grounds imagine a condition where the port is soft and de-militarised, the route is walkable, and the border is visible, triggering negotiations around the use of the sea.
The first interlude examines the production of touristic space as a territorial gesture that materialises ruptures in space and time to condition the ground for leisure functions. Simultaneously functioning as a mechanism of monetary output and as a preservation protocol, sites of attraction, mediatised, bordered, and reproduced, create a tourist geography that directs the Archipelago’s contemporary economic model,
Chapter 2, Motives analyses the ingredients that have triggered the desire to travel toward the Aegean through media and attraction points. These are traced from the period of scholarly expeditions of Western travellers to the ultimate democratisation of leisure and its manifestation on the seashore. As such, the research examines the emergence of Islomania as a process that has codified the landscape into particular icons and signs. Bound by the methods of selection, abstraction and separation, the archaeological excavation and the Mykonian beach are drawn as exemplary points of the touristic landscape. Relationships between institutions, hosts and guests are studied through touristic rituals and their effects on land use and plot values, constructing the territories of leisure The second design act attempts to provide the potential for the re-appropriation of the exclusive Mykonian beach. Performing a unifying gesture, the design aims to re-interpret the coastline as a common public ground for potential exchanges between land and sea, countering its conception as a consumable space.
The second interlude delves into the notion of capacity to frame it as a selfvalidating argument for expanding touristification processes. Looking beyond capacity’s conception as a spatial volume within the hospitality apparatus, the interlude looks at insular capacities in relation to the island’s operation, resource management and labour potential to frame tourism as a dispersed territorial force that expands from the region to the body.
Therefore, chapter 3, Capacities investigates the factors that have determined Mykonos’ ability to sustain its population fluxes. The production of capacity, intrinsically linked to the disciplining of space and subjects as a preparatory process for hosting, was guided by institutional and private experimentation. Particularly contextualised in the case of the Aegean, the research analyses how national plans, private developments and legal frameworks of insular programming framed the island as a hosting machine. From the first public hotels to the eventual emergence of a local hotel-owner class, infrastructures of hospitality and their architecture assist in the conceptualisation of tourism within the polarity of authenticity and reproducibility. As such, the multiplication of capacity materialised through the Mykonian white house’s translation and replication is understood as the root of an intense, post-planning, development protocol disguised through whiteness. Ultimately resulting in the island's division between an attractive foreground and an infrastructural background, zoning and sprawl are utilised as the basis for breaking the imaginary of rurality and ludic lifestyle, highlighting their increasingly sub-urbanised and resource-exhausted environment. As such, the third design act performs a unification strategy, reframing insular lands under a protocol of plot unification and resource commoning, countering their commodification within the process of touristification.
Through a series of edits, the Archipelago has been re-constructed to operate as the host agent of the touristic circuit. Movement, images, labour, resources and land are all fields of economic potential exploited through repeated mechanisms and “authentic” signs. Touristic consumption through its spatial conditioning and rituals, rendered (im)mobility as both the indicator of an offered experience and the catalyst of difference between hosts and guests.
See: Mimi Sheller and John Urry, Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (London: Routledge, 2004).
Research Questions
_and key concepts
Research Objectives:
-How can the territorial structure of the Archipelago be read?
_mobility, motive, capacity
-How does the architecture of the sea manifests in mobility in the Archipelago?
_device, route, surface
-How the coastline as a border responds to the territorial condition?
_edge, access, flux
-What are the motives that determined the Aegean touristic product?
_mediatisation, assimilation, reproduction.
-How can touristic space be read a territorial process?
_performance, frame, border
-How are the islands programmed for hosting to the demands their of flux?
_volume, codification, extraction
-Creating a dissection of the travel territory through the study of its composing and performative elements: mobility switches, attraction sites and capacity carriers.
-Tracing the material reflections of mobility’s implications in the Archipelago.
-Understanding the processes of leisure-scape manufacturing in both material and immaterial terms.
-Investigating the production of touristic capacity as a political process.
1.2 Crossings & Frictions: Managing the Coastline Infrastructures of insular movement
Design Questions
_And objectives:
-How can the normative spatial organisations of tourism be reversed?
An Archipelago is a sea region containing groups, chains, or clusters of islands. Etymologically, the term is composed of the words archi- άρχι-), meaning leading, and pelagus (πέλαγος), which is translated as a sea and is associated with qualities of flatness and proximity6 Initially used to describe the Aegean Sea, which stretches between Greece and Turkey, the term was detached from its spatial specificity. It evolved into a geographical term, a vehicle for theorisations on archetypical formations of discrete and isolated entities, separated and connected by homogeneous spaces, (potentially) operating as a single unit.
When looking at their physical properties, islands, assembled by water, edges and lands, compose a syntax of elements that all together determine their ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ as well as the Archipelago's overall dispositions. Insular lands, resources, and populations, clearly delimitated by their surrounding medium, entail the possibility of both isolation and connectivity7. Oscillating between the two, the islands of the Aegean, presented through time ambiguous and flexible grounds, often linked to the idea of isolated utopia. They have been the hosts of an assortment of operations: military posts, commercial nodes, industrial sites, prisons, hideouts, pilgrimage sites and leisure paradises, each one implicitly determining their (self-)identification and openness. When laid out in a background of dispersal and discontinuity, islands form nodes in networks, activated in the event of connection. Such historical conditions have allowed the conceptualisation of the Aegean as a “dispersed urbanity”8 a scattered city where specialisation, resource distribution, common habitation practices and mentalities compose a region that can be interpreted as a whole despite the differences of its parts. Within its de-centralised configuration, internal hierarchies can be read in the relational geographies of islands, their scales, proximities, sizes and, primarily, their connections. Together, they imply an island’s capacity and role in the system.
To operate as part of systematised networks and together as a network itself, the Aegean Sea has been treated as an empty space and a manageable surface. The organised sea has determined the reality of the islands, creating connections and collective economies while suggesting power structures.
Ultimately, the act of striating the sea’s space, making it disciplined and controlled under a specific power structure, is the vehicle to formulate the Archipelago as a territory. In the conjectural boundedness of the sea, the acts of travel, the approach, the anchoring, the crossing of the coastline and ultimately, the occupation of land reveal the territorial dynamics of the Archipelago.
Moving beyond its functional, geophysical and topological reading, the research reads the Archipelago as a travel territory’, which, rather than fixed, is enacted through the choreography of movement. Its structure is reflected in the form of sea routes, ports, and island settlements that embed assemblies of political and infrastructural technologies, dictating the ways to move within it. Ultimately manifested in the (im)mobility9 of bodies, the movement itself becomes the vehicle to exercise Archipelagic politics.
Never homogeneous and always performative, the Archipelago has evolved from a dense maritime hub to a network of leisure sites where the landscape, the sea, the sky, their contained habitation practices and shells have been
6 The term originates from the Latin ‘Archipelagus’ which was the proper name of the Aegean sea (c.1500). The origin of the term is uncertain either coming from the Proto-Indo-European ‘pele’ meaning flat or from the ancient Greek ‘πέλας’ (pelas) meaning close. (See: G.Babiniotis, ‘Dictionary of Modern Greek Language’ or Beekes Robert Stephen, ‘Etymological dictionary of Greek’.)
7 See: Pier, Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, “Islands: The Settlement from Property to Care.” Log no.47 (n.d.): 175–99,
8 The term has been used by the historian S. Asdrachas to describe the regional organisation of the Archipelago during the 17th and 18th century, as an interdependent network, when under fragmented administrative jurisdictions, responding to local resource scarcity and specialisation. (See: Vas Vl Sphyroeras et al., Maps and Map-Makers of the Aegean (Athens, Greece: Olkos Editions, 1985).p 235-248)
9 “slowness … acceleration, blockages, stoppage, friction … and coerced movements” introduce an understanding of mobility, reading it as a site of localised power exertion, immobilising or accelerating bodies. (See: Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in the Age of Extremes (London: Verso, 2018).page 3)
10 “modern society is characterized by power that has become truly exterritorial, no longer bound, not even slowed down, by the resistance of space” (See: Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012) p.11).
commodified. In this context, the emergence of travel practices aesthetically hierarchised islands according to constructed imaginaries, imposing attractional geographies and centralities. As space and time have collapsed through accelerated movements, the islands have expanded their scale, assimilating the globalised touristic circuit into their settlements and communities10 Fluxes of bodies and materials guided by consumption highlight tourism as an extraterritorialpower, infiltrating within the space it occupies, constructing islands within the island. Seasonally alternating between confinement and overcongestion, conditions of alienation arise, and insular living is dismantled in desirable signs. A flexible host and a constant migration site, the Archipelago has accommodated whatever otherness approached it and has been re-configured accordingly. The Aegean is a geo-political middle ground between East and West, and since the 19th century, it has been in a constant state of becoming westernised. As it becomes a node in a circuit of a touristic movement, its settlements are re-configured to operationally dependent suburbs to keep up with the demand for capacity.
11 “The milieu is an ensemble of natural givens […] and a set of artificial givens […]. The milieu is a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects and causes,since an effect from one point of view will be a cause from another [...]” (See: Foucault’s Security, Territory,Population lectures from 1977–1978 ((2004: 22–23, 2008: 21))
12 See: Mimi Sheller and John Urry, Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (London: Routledge, 2004).
13 In the face of ecological changes, resulting in escalating in inequalities, B. Latour & C.Porter advocate for reframing the politics of today, centred on Earth. ‘Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful re-description; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth.. . Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.’ (See: Bruno Latour and Catherine Porter, Down to Earth Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, UK: polity, 2018))
Looking beyond their value-producing idyllic image, the sea, the lands, and the coastlines of the Aegean are not as stable and unchanging as framed by the lens of tourism. Its terrains, active and reactive, are managed to enclose territories that limit their potential for appropriation. A coastline and a seafloor are flattened to host a cruise ship. A beach is maintained, segmented, and certified for monetisation. Island plots are punctuated by white cubes that antagonise for the scarce views of the sea. The Aegean as a travel territory is a ‘milieu’11 where natural and artificial elements and communities interplay, transforming each other into a parasitic relationship. A place-in-play12 each time performed for specific economic processes, the Archipelago can be interpreted as a design medium of territoriality- structured and re-structured. Within this precarity and resilience, it advocates for ways of “belonging” within it13 Even in the condition of panoptic control, events of transgression and the historical practices of piracy, exploiting and revealing its territorial ambiguity, remind that mobility itself can become the practice of negotiation on the utilisation of sea. Potentially re-appropriated beyond centralised regimes, the research imagines the Archipelago beyond its mental construction or concept of discreteness, but an assemblage of inter-play between land and sea.
Fig.4 Baud-Bovy 1919 Kimolos (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.5 Outline of the coasts of Cythera and Anticythera islands as seen from the sea,1771. London, Printed for
Fig.6 Aegean Sea,
Fig.7 Piraeus Port, 2023. (Author)
Fig.8 Docking, 2023. (Author)
Fig.9 Pleasure Boats, 2023. (Author)
Fig.10 Disembarkation at Piraeus, 2023. (Author)
Fig.11 On route, 2023. (Author)
Fig.12 Garage, 2023. (Author)
Fig.13 Old Port, 2023. (Author)
Fig.14 New Port, 2023. (Author)
Fig.15 Passenger Boat, 2023. (Author)
Fig.16 Antenna, 2023. (Author)
Fig.17 Crossing, 2023. (Author)
Chapter 1: Mobilities
Chapter one, 'Mobilities' serves as an introduction to the structure of the Archipelago and examines historical movement management practices and their relation to architecture. It aims to read the territorial processes that ultimately have led to the emergence of tourism. Sub-chapter 1.1, titled ‘Organising the Sea: Architectures of Control’ examines historically operative architectural and urban planning interventions and their relation to movement networks in the Aegean. Institutional devices, borders and routes are read as an assemblage that constructs the travel territory. Sub-chapter 1.2, named Crossings and Frictions: Managing the Edge’ delves into the evolution of mobility infrastructures on the island of Mykonos, linking their manufacturing with their co-current political and economic motives. Projecting territorial dynamics on the coastline and its crossing allows for reading touristic mobility as a field of subject differentiation. The systematisation of the flux, leading to effects of seasonality and dependence, shapes the background for the first design act that imagines non-programmed and diversified habitations of the sea. The re-design of the sea as a ‘smooth’ space allows imagining it as an appropriate-able terrain within a de-territorialisation scenario.
Mobility, noun:
1. The capacity for motion, ability to move or be moved.
2. The possibility of movement between different social levels.
From Latin mobilis/mobilitatem: activity, speed, changeableness, fickleness, inconstancy14
15 In the 14th Plateau, G.Deleuze and F.Guattari have defined “smooth space” as the ‘directional’ space of nomadic and fluid occupations, opposing the striated space of the state, which is ‘dimensional’ homogeneous, disciplined and predictable. Smoothness and striation are “the very special problem of the sea” defining the centrality of its organisation. (See: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).p479)
16 “The word territory derives from the Latin ‘territorium’, a term tlinked to ‘terra’ -earth- and ‘terere’ - to tread. Therefore ‘territorium’ seems to address the possession of land effected through agricultural cultivation.” (See: Aurelli Pier Vittorio. ‘TERRITORY.’ AA Files, no. 76 (2019) p.152-55)
17 “Land is a relation of property, a commodity to be bought sold and exchanged, a finite resource that is distributed, allocated and owned; a political- economic question.” (See: Stuart Elden, “Territory: Political Technology, Volume, Terrain,” Landscape Urbanism Open School Event AA (2015).)
18 The Venetian army formed the Dukate of the Cyclades, the Order of St.John Occupied the Dodecanese and the Genovese Companies the Northern Aegean. Each grouping operated under a different authority, organising a de-centralised mode of governance in the Archipelago. (See: Nikos Belavilas, Ports and Settlements at the Archipelago of Piracy: 15th19th Century.1997).)
The Aegean Archipelago is the sea region bounded between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey and is dotted by approximately 1.400 islands and islets. Within this landscape, the sea serves both as a separator and a connector. It becomes a centre, enclosing latent connections between islands and the potential of their operation as a whole. This research argues that this possibility hinges on the presence of a particular larger organising force. On top of such forces, sea mobilities emerge, formally or parasitically, appropriating the sea and connecting island activities. Historically, the Archipelago has been the (simultaneous) host to nomadic habitations, sedentary insular settlements (often pushed toward the inland) and organised networks of variable density. Oscillating between conditions of smoothness and striation, the territorialisation of the Aegean Sea has indelibly shaped the socio-economic reality of the islands15
Thus, territorial definitions can be argued to be a necessary precondition for forming organised networked economies and stable movement patterns in the Archipelago. On solid ground, territorial processes are rooted in the concept of permanent land occupation and use16 Inextricably linked with ownership, the territory has been conceptualised as an apparatus of political technologies that condition land as a legally owned asset17 demarcating it geometrically through boundaries. In its simplest form, territoriality on land manifests as the abstract definition or material manipulation and segmentation of the land. On the contrary, within the sea, where fluidity resists terrestrial techniques, abstract, mathematical, and navigational tools have become the initial organising forces applied to smooth space. Yet, within the Archipelago’s landscape, territorialisation takes on a particular form, necessitating the mental reconstruction of the islands’ encircling medium, which organises on movement patterns and is reflected in the appropriation of lands and coastlines. The travel territory of the Aegean is amphibious, reciprocally transforming both solid and liquid terrains.
The systematic management of mobility presupposes the imposition of a certain order on the sea surface that makes it measurable, manageable and comprehensible, thereby maintaining a certain power structure. A paradigmatic instance of the Aegean’s territorialisation process occurred in the 13th century when the islands were utilised to expand the colonial trade networks of the Latin empire after the 4th Crusade18 Enabling its establishment, the Archipelago was subjected to a multiplicity of cartographic representations that indicate how navigational knowledge became the primary apparatus of territorial construction. Portolans (fig.18) were maps designed for directional sea navigation in relation to one’s position. They diagrammatically depicted the Archipelago and overlayed a system of descriptions, demarcations and rose compasses, regulating it as a navigable space. Abstractive mathematical techniques treated the Archipelago as a homogeneous, radially gridded space canalised by naval routes and punctuated by intermediate nodes along them.
In this context, nodes, territorial marks on the land, were formed as fortified colonial settlements, and a de-centralised local administrative model was brought along that remained present until the 19th century. Remotely extending
Fig.18 Aegean Portolan by Estienne Bremond,1650. (Source: Cambridge University Library)
19 Established 1207, the Duchy of the Archipelago the Venetian nobleman Marco Sanudo, nephew of Doge Enrico Dandolo, who led the Venetian the Fourth Crusade’s fleet to Istanbul after. He established an administration centre on the island of Naxos, and expanded the Dukate throughout the Cyclades.
20 Which has continued to operate in relation to the administration centre of Istanbul. (See: The Aegean since the 15th century a historical outline Vas Vl Sphyroeras in, Maps and MapMakers of the Aegean (Athens, Greece: Olkos Editions, 1985).)
21 “Terrain is a relation of power,with a heritage in geology and the military; the control of which allows establishment and maintenance of order. As a“field”, a site of work or battle, terrain is political-strategic question.” (See: Stuart Elden, “Territory: Political Technology, Volume, Terrain,” Landscape Urbanism Open School Event AA (2015).)
22 Venice, Alexandria, Istanbul, Odessa and the ‘Holy Lands’.
23 “Islands are the territorialised nodes of a de-territorialised power – one distributed through military, political or financial networks.” (In: Eyal Weisman and Anselm Frank, “Islands. the Geography of Extraterritoriality,” Archis. org, June 1, 2003.)
24 Paul Virillio, reflecting on the limits of human control over complex systems, linked technologies with their “accidents and catastrophes” As such the invention of the ship coincided with that of the shipwreck. (See: Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York: Columbia University, 1986).)
25 Ibid.
26 See: Asdrachas in Vas Vl Sphyroeras et al (1985)
the sovereignty of Venice, the Archipelago’s Dukate19 was established through castles on the islands thatoperated autonomously and secluded from insular communities that maintained their feudal economic system20 Complemented by networks of watchtowers, their design extended the territorial construction toward the sea, strategically appropriating the terrain21 to construct a field of optic surveillance on the water surface, its traversing routes and natural bays available for anchorage (fig.23). As such, they became an system, operating from land to control movement and access while acting as protected overnight stops on routes connecting the period's commercial hubs22 Maps, routes, ports, and settlements constructed an extra-territorial assembly of technologies that modified land to organise the sea optically and mentally. Through this process, islands became territorialised nodes of a de-territorialised power’23 and the Archipelago’s Sea was organised as a system of nodes and lines.
However, the described geopolitical technologies came with their ‘accidents and catastrophes’24 The organisation of the sea coincided with the definition of its parasite: piracy. Naturally emerging from the innate precarity of the sea, nomadic subjects of unregulated mobility were represented either as pirates, privateers, traders or national war heroes, depending on their announcer. Responding to both the war machine and the need for subsistence, pirates utilised (illegal) trade as an interface between local communities and inter- or extra-island maritime circuits. Parasitic relationships, acting as thermal exciters25 catalysed mobility patterns, demonstrating how smooth and striated space exist in mixture. As anchorage points developed into organised ports, secondary networks of interdependence and specialisation appeared parallelly to central naval routes, transforming the Archipelago’s structure to a ‘dispersed urbanity26’.
Fig.19 Privateers attack a ship,1727, Jean de Thevenot (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.21 Buondelmondi Christoforo 1420 Naxos, the administration centre of the Dukate of the Cyclades.(Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.20 Tinos castle, 15th Century. Aegean castles were placed either on top of a hill or directly on the coastline in order to operate as panoptic devices.(Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.22 Naxos Castle, placed on the highest spot of the harbour.
Adjacent to the castle a secondary settlement developed.(Redrawn by Author.)
Fig.23 Fields of scopic control from primary settlements of the Cyclades and primary routes during the 18th century. (Author, edited from: Belavilas, Nikos. Ports and settlements at the Archipelago of Piracy: 15th- 19th century. Athens,1997).
27 See: Michel Foucault and Alan Sheridan, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 2020).
28 Military expeditions initiated during the Greco-Turkish war were usually accompanied by an extended scientific survey of the territory of the new Greek State. Geography, Geology, Zoology, Botanology, Acheaeology, Architecture, Sculpture were the categories through which the territory was described in scientific manner. The first exemplary maps of the new State of Greece were published by E.Blouet in 1831. (See: Guillaume-Abel Blouet, Expedition Scientifique de Morée: Ordonnée Par Le Gouvernement Français: Architecture, Sculptures, Inscriptions et Vues Du Péleponèse, Des Cyclades et de l’Attique (Paris: Didot, 1835))
Following the Greek Revolution in the early 19th century, the administrative fragmentation of the Archipelago was brought under the central control of the nation-state. The restructuring of the sea, guided by the concept of national waters, enabled state’s territorial accumulation transforming the Aegean from a connective medium to a border between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Through the development of scientific cartography and law, the concept of panopticism gave way to institutionalisation27 suggesting a new mode of territorial control. Mappings and surveys conducted by Western scientific expeditions28 analysed the Aegean islands in a comprehensible, measurable, and exploitable manner. This laid the foundation for the emergence of an economic pseudo-colonial regime, operating in close relation with Western forces that guided the country's initial development. Political maps of the period, overlaying geographical grids homogeneously on land and sea, clearly depicted the solid borders of the state. However, in the Cyclades, sea borders were placed either on the coastline of the islands, as its recursive offset, or as an abstract line on the sea, highlighting the precarious nature of sovereign rights in the absence of international law.
29 These legislations demonstrate how custom houses taxed on behalf of the king, illegal movement was defined and ports were organised as a network owned by the state. (See: Greek Government Gazettes: 4Α 1834
The impossibility of materially delimitating the Aegean territory required the production of a power structure, directed from the mainland, that would modulate mobilities. Defining weighted nodes according to the economic and geopolitical significance of each island, the Aegean network was prepared to host a taxable economy of maritime, industrial and material extraction flows. Modern waters were formulated with the assistance of modern institutions and were put in place through urban planning state-led initiatives. Under the regime of the Bavarian King Otto, Otto issued the legislations “On Port Authorities” and “On custom houses,”29 distributing institutions to the islands and controlling mobile bodies and materials on behalf of the state.
During the 19th century, forty coastal cities were re-constructed in the Archipelago, imposing internal hierarchies and giving centres to movement patterns30 In the Cyclades, the island of Syros was identified as the central authority and was demarcated through the construction of a new city, Hermoupolis31 that became the test ground for the state's governance model The town became a territorial, representational and institutional device that declared the state’s ownership of the Archipelago. Built without walls, it was designed in neo-classical language, carrying the symbolic forms of the new state and drawing subliminal links with Greek antiquity32 The plan was structured around a central axis that connected the coastline to the municipal hall and its central square (fig.27).It expanded horizontally through a grid of plots, dividing state-owned land proportionally to the distance from the coastline. Within the hierarchised grid, civic buildings like schools, markets, hospitals and public clocks facilitated the construction of a “modern” city, transforming islanders into modern Greeks.
Drawing by W. Von Weiler for the construction of the jetty in the harbour of Syros, 1841. (Source: Travlos et. Al, 1984)
Most importantly, though, the port of Hermoupolis’ Bay was expanded through artificial land and was punctuated by a series of administrative buildings that projected the state’s control towards the sea (fig.32). A transit warehouse (1834) was the first public building of the new state, built-in direct contact, and its architectural form reflects its role as a storage and taxation device for materials without directly affecting the internal economy of the island33 Similarly, the Quarantine station (1839) became the first public hosting apparatus on the islands. Embedding within its plan the differentiation of travellers according to their
Fig.24
Fig.26 Map of Greece by E.Blouet, 1831. The first map of the new Greek State. (Source: Expédition scientifique de Morée, Ordonnée par le Gouvernement Français)
Fig.25 Syros port plan, highlighting with yellow and pink the presence of managing institutions,19th century. (Source: General State Archives)
34 The Quarantine station’s southern wing contained large rooms addressed to Western travellers, while its northern wing was composed of small cells addressed to hamaritime workers from the East or South. (See ‘Syros’ in A Handbook for Travellers in Greece (London, 1845))
identity. It incorporated a parallel function as a hospitality infrastructure and a carceral system34. Their administration buildings, the sanitary office, and the customs house (1859) were drawn on the same facade, signifying the state’s extra-territorial administrative authority and the treatment of mobile bodies and materials as codified flows.
35 Today the port hosts a passenger port, a cruise terminal, a commercial port, a cargo hub, a vehicle transit station, a shipyard, a fish market and logistic centres. (Source: https://www. olp.gr )
Modern territorialisation, as tested in the Cyclades, was composed of reproducible devices that organised land through land surveys and conceptualised mobility in quantifiable flows. Under the governance of the nation-state, territorial centres could be mobilised. Enabled by the extended range of steamboat travel, intermediate stops at the islands became obsolete. As such, the port and city of Piraeus were reconstructed as the new maritime administration centre during the 19th century, following principles similar to those of Hermoupolis and directing flows toward the capital. Triggered by intense internal and external migration, it developed as the productive and administrative centre of the Aegean, eventually stripping islands of their workforce and production modes, leading to their eventual touristification. In the post-war period, the port of Piraeus was segmented into functional sections35 dedicated to respective flows, reflecting the institutional separation of sea movement and its re-structuring in discrete volumes.
Fig.28 Plan of the City of Piraeus, 1834 by Stamatis Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubertt. (Source: Piraeus municipality Archives)
Fig.27 New Port of Syros, highlighting public buildings and neoclassical houses, redrawn by I.Travlos 1985 (Source: Ioannis Travlos and Angeliki Kokkinou,1986)
Fig.30 Syros Lighthouse. The construction of lighthouses throughout the Archipelago, reversing the function of the watchtowers of the past, signalled the presence of the state while becoming a necessary part of the 19th century maritime apparatus.
Fig.31 19th century commercial and industrial centres and primary routes.
(Author, Redrawn from: Belavilas, Nikos,in ‘The Dispersed Urbanity of the Aegean Archipelago,2006.) Industrial Centres Extraction sites
Custom House, A.Georgantas, 1859
Transit Warehouse, Johan Erlacher 1834
Quarantine House, Johan Erlacher 1839
Fig.32 A switch taxonomy’. Syros 19th Century. (Author)
Sanitary Office, A.Georgantas, 1859
36 The Treaty of Tordesillas (1493) and the Mare Liberum (1609) were two initial proposals of international rights in the sea. (See: Henry Jones, “Lines in the Ocean: Thinking with the Sea about Territory and International Law,” London Review of International Law 4, no. 2 (June 17, 2016): 307–43
37 The process through which different institutions overlay different regimes of control upon a social structure have been described under the notion of institutional differentiation.
“Differentiation is, like complexity or specialisation, first of all a classificatory concept. It describes the ways through which the main social functions or the major institutional spheres of society become dis-associated from one another, attached to specialised collectivities and roles,and organised in relatively specific and autonomous symbolic and organisational frameworks within the confines of the same institutionalised system” See: S. N. Eisenstadt, “Social Change, Differentiation and Evolution,” American Sociological Review 29, no. 3 (1964))
38 Term borrowed from: Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, no. 2 (2015): 247–64
39 The article 34 of European regulation 508/2014 provided economic motives for local fishers to abandon their activity and destroy their traditional vessels which were declared as obsolete.
40 See: John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
The development of bathymetry and geographical information systems (GIS), which have their roots in the two World Wars, allowed for the accurate definition of territories in the sea. In parallel, the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982) defined maritime zones in an international process of sovereignty clarification, actualising concepts that have existed since the 15th century36
Codifying the sea in a gradation of surfaces and measured offsets from the coastline, the rights of use of the sea were defined in space. Through the L.o.t.S. coastlines became vertical, projected to the sky, the sea, its body and the seafloor, dissecting space according to its geophysical properties. The segmentation of the sea became the basis for its political, functional and jurisdictional re-definition. Protocols, three-dimensional geographies and institutional differentiation37 in the ocean, abstracted the sea to self-referential, stabilised volumes, each one with its own ways and laws of operation.
Exclusive economic zones, continental shelf, areas of fishing, sub-sea cables, Natura zones or the high seas compose different wet ontologies38 allowing the treatment of the sea’s volumes as ‘free’, exploitable or preservable natural assets. Ultimately three-dimensional borders and international legal agreements determine the Archipelago's ability to host or exclude vessels and productive activities, fundamentally transforming the sea's occupation (figs. 36-40). For example, within the context of European environmental and maritime protection laws, multiple traditional fishing vessels were withdrawn and destroyed, effectively decreasing a long-lasting, productive activity from the Archipelago39 Spatially control is carried by automatic identification systems, international coast guards and passports that determine ‘legitimate’ mobilities and activate invisible borders that manifest occasionally in transgressions and violence40 Geometric, bio-metric and digitised contemporary modes of control in the sea create a nexus of sweeping protocols, that can exist independently from the mechanisms of land territorialisation; architecture is replaced by digits, segmenting the sea in institutionally differentiated logistic circuits. In this way, mobility systems are based on increasingly expert and alienating forms of knowledge detached from the space they occupy. As optimised trade flows are pushed away from the ‘internal waters’ of the Cyclades, nationally operated passenger-boat routes define the Archipelago's contemporary structure, and thus connected by touristic flows (fig. 41).
In the Archipelago, amphibious modes of habitation and territoriality interplayed, constructing unified regions and overlaying networks. Political technologies, charts, institutions, and surveillance devices drew immaterial lines on the sea, managing mobility and, thus, the Archipelago's sociopolitical and economic structure. Triggering parasitic ways of existing within the loosely defined territory, the islands’ urban form was transformed to accommodate its economisation. Terrains, striation techniques and extra-territorial forces produced a human and natural assembly that performed the travel territory through mobility.
Fig.34 Territorial sovereignty definition according to the international Law of the Sea. (Author)
Fig.35 Territorial waters (6 mile radius) in Greece. (Author)
(Data Source: ENDOMODNDO
(Data Source: ENDOMODNDO EU)
(Data Source: ENDOMODNDO EU)
Suez Canal & South Mediterranean
Suez Canal & South Mediterranean
Fig.41 Routes of Trade (Left) and Routes of Tourism (Right). (Author)
41 For an extensive review of theoretical approaches to bring volume back into the questions of territoriality (See: Stuart Elden, “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power,” Political Geography 34 (May 2013): 35–51.)
42 See: Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books & Media, 2021)p. 26
During the Aegean Archipelago’s territorial structuring, island terrains became carriers of surveillance devices, and respectively, the sea has been handled as an empty space to accept its organisation. Nodes, lines or volumes ultimately reduced the sea to mappable overlapping surfaces and composed an apparatus that influenced the Archipelago's structure, mobilities and activities. However, this approach of treating the territory as a succession of abstract surfaces is insufficient to unravel the interplay between people, sea, land and power structures. Several discourses argue that to truly understand this interrelation, we must ground the territory in physical reality, recognising its operation through volume and verticality41. In the Archipelago, where the sea is routed and interrupted by island coastlines, the geometry of the edge materially reflects crossing capacities and territorial dynamics.
Coastlines serve a dual role for the islands as both bounding lines and porous thresholds, facilitating their connection to the sea. The coastline, existing within the tidal zone, is a precarious, fractal, and fluctuating entity42 Its definition is not a fixed concept, but rather a product of the observer's intervention. In historical cartographic representations, coastlines have often been depicted as fixed lines, thickened and shadowed to resemble a vertical surface, a border (fig.42). However, if we view the coastline as a boundary, then ports disrupt its continuity. Ports, therefore, can be seen as active terrains that, through their performative programming, facilitate and regulate access to the island.
43 Harbour charts, along with portolans and isolaria originate in the 13th century. The three types of documentation were used together, enabling navigation. (See: Vas Vl Sphyroeras et al., Maps and MapMakers of the Aegean (Athens, Greece: Olkos Editions, 1985).p.21))
44 See: Michael Nikolakakis, Tourism and Greek Society: 1945-1974, 2013
Harbour charts43 allow for a reading of the port that carries an initial, threedimensional understanding of the coastline and its capacity. Unlike maps, they obliquely depicted the shape of bays, the surrounding landscape, characteristic built structures and numbered anchorage points. These charts embody a system of knowledge that aids in recognising, approaching, anchoring, and violating the coastline, thereby facilitating the appropriation of the seashore. They were shaped as utilitarian catalogues of ports, and reflect how sea movement is directed by ports and the geophysical environment, composing the territory. The Archipelago’s dromocratic organisation is projected onto the coastline, with infrastructure space filtering access to the island.
Focusing on the evolution of transportation infrastructures in Mykonos, the research studies their production and their historical, political and economic background. The switches of the touristic circuit prepare the island to accept increased fluxes and accelerate the crossing of the coastline. As projective plans, they aim to activate the economic potential of touristic mobility. Therefore, in the absence of state planning for the tourist-industry, the development of mass tourism in small islands can only be attributed to their existing infrastructure inheritance44 Ports and airports in Mykonos surpass their function as mobility infrastructure and have dictated distribution practices on the islands, labour, and networks in the Archipelago. The flux increase is reflected in coastlines' material hardening and stabilisation through artificial land extrusions or its complete outstripping from the air.
Fig.42 Coastline (extract) by Choiseul Goufier 1782. (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.44 Port of Mykonos, 1717, J. Tournefort (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.43 J.Roninj: Harbour chart of the islands of the Aegean, hand coloured copper engraving, 1694. (Source: Maps and Mapmakers of the Aegean 1985.)
Fig.45 Mykonos coastline evolution, Tourlos bay.
Fig.46 Mykonos old Port, Baud Bovy,1919 (Source: Laskaridis Foundation Archives)
A harbour chart of the 18th century indicates how the port fortress of Mykonos, among others in the Cyclades, was initially left in its natural state as a beach (fig.44). The soft sea floor and its gradual rise were actively resistant to the passing from sea to land. Without docking infrastructure for large vessels, the port capacity was determined by smaller vessels bridging the final passing between sea and land, modulating flows of people and goods. The architecture of the port imposed physical frictions in access and validated the function of the bay and its settlement as an overnight anchor point on longer lines. In this context, the sandy terrains of Mykonos, before their transformation to bathing sites, were a ground of coastal mobility, hosting productive and commercial activities.
45 Mass tourism in the Aegean was initially tested from the Thomas Cook company in 1869 that in the context of the ‘Grand tour in Anatolia’ it introduced within its itinerary Athens and selected Greek islands. (Thomas Cook Archives)
The port of Mykonos operated in this mode up until the second half of the 20th century, hosting the stops of the Grand Tours and the initial flows of modern mass tourist movement45 Tourism appropriated mobility in the sea, linking it with particular representations that became parts of the travel ritual. Interwar and early post-war cruises addressing royals, intellectuals and elite travellers mark the first collective leisure practices in the Aegean. They were organised as independent entrepreneurial experiments that, in the lack of infrastructure, tested an exclusive consumption and recreation model in the Cyclades on the boat. In this context, the 4th CIAM Cruise (1933), through its organisation, routes, narratives and reproduction, was operative in shaping the imaginary of ‘Aegeaness’ through a fleeting gaze towards the vernacular landscape. However, the short stays of cruising rituals could not generate enough capital to justify the development of mass tourism, which, in response, required the production of interfaces to mobilise the masses towards the islands.
46 For example statistical reports reveal that inbound visitors increased from 996,473 in 1966 to 3,177,682 by 1973 (See: Zacharatos, Gerasimos, Package Tour: Production and distribution of tourist travel(. Athens: Propompos,1999.)
47 See: 1967–1972, 5 Years of Economic Progress’(Drawn from: Michalis Nikolakakis, “The Colonels on The Beach: Tourism Policy during the Greek Military Dictatorship (1967–1974),” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 35, no. 2 (2017): 425–50)
48 With the (Legislative Decree 286 1969) state grants were designated for the development of marine transport in a region defined as an ‘unprofitable tourist ferry line’ that included the Cyclades.(Ibid.)
49 Colonel Nikolaos Makarezos, first called for the decentralisation of the state’s investment activity (1967–1972, 5 Years of Economic Progress 1972) (ibid.)
50 During the Junta almost 50% of public funding was allocated to the development of road network and charter flight system. Before Mykonos’s road network was largely underdeveloped.
The Greek Colonel’s Military Dictatorship—Junta (1968-1974) and the years after Greece's introduction into the Schengen zone (1992) mark two pivotal transformations that equipped Mykonos with the transportation capacity to accommodate its current flux. Each period is characterised by a rapid increase in arrivals triggered by a particular political and economic context46
During the Junta, rural tourism and infrastructure modernisation comprised a significant part of the state’s ideological and economic program47 Touristic mobility was used to legitimise the authoritative regime, accommodating, in parallel, the interests of the Greek shipowners, airlines and international travel agents48 Driven by international pressures for speed, openness and connectivity, the regime facilitated passenger lines upgraded or constructed rural airports and private yacht infrastructures, laying the framework for Cycladic mass tourism49 In Mykonos, a jetty was added at the old port (1969-72), enabling the direct docking of modern ferries. As the beach was shaped to a protruding straight edge, it declared a new territorial condition where travellers, starting from Piraeus, would disembark directly on solid land, bringing along private vehicles. The intervention affected the island's development, triggering the road network's sprawl and shifting local island movement from coastal waters towards the island's interior50. As coastal mobility became obsolete, yachts filled the occupational gap, and private marinas started appearing, connecting the islands' beaches into a recreational network of sea tourism.
Fig.48 Port of Mykonos Construction Jetty, 1972 (Source: Regional Plans of Mykonos, Delos and Rhenia, Kalligas et.al.1972)
Fig.47 Mykonos port settlement expansion, 17th century-1966, (Source: Regional Plans of Mykonos, Delos and Rhenia, Kalligas et.al.1972)
51 Orvar Löfgren noted how charter flights became operative for the formation of the Mediterranean touristic product. ‘Olympic Airlines’ was a company established by Greek shipowner A.Onassis as a privatised branch of the national monopoly ‘Olympic Air’ that would operate exclusively at small islands. For other Greek islands (Like Rhodes), air-travel was already established through the integration of WW2 infrastructures. As new airports were made, flows were dispersed outside the already established touristic centres. (See: Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). and Angelos Vlachos, Touristic Development and Public Policies in Modern Greece (1914-1950), 2013,)
52 The ratification of leisure by the UN Declaration of Human rights subdivided equally the week day in time for work, leisure and sleep and protected the right of workers for a 2week vacation per year giving rise to the subject of the mass-tourist. Given the strict time frame, the Aegean before its infrastructural equipping was not a viable option for central European travellers who were directed in other destinations (primarily Italy) that were better connected.
53 The massive expansion of the charter industry in Western Europe was therefore the driving force behind the pressure for the expansion of tourist infrastructures in Greece, as an entrepreneurial innovation that was trying to cover the demand for vacations in the southern part of the continent.
54 Currently there are 72 vehicle hiring locations spread throughout he island, evidencing the importance of touristic mobility within the island during the season and the creation of an assisting economy.
55 The privatisation of the Port and airport in Mykonos was a result of the post-crisis period with the creation of the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund. Both are considered infrastructures of ‘international importance’ (See: HRADF, in https://hradf.com/en/, accessed, 02/2023)
Respectively, the production of the airport (1973) by ‘Olympic Airlines aimed to take exclusive advantage of legislation enabling charter flights51 It expropriated fields in the inland and was initially equipped with a dirt corridor and a small terminal. Triggering the multiplication of international arrivals of Mykonos, small aeroplanes accelerated crossings, surpassing the coastline through air space. The company introduced links that exclusively addressed wealthy Western travellers. Through the systematisation of both international and domestic flows, the island became a viable destination for the fluxes of Greek middle-class tourists52 and foreign European and American travellers53
With the introduction of Greece in the Schengen area (1992), a system of border checks and visas facilitated European flows within the Archipelago. The new port of Mykonos was designed as a response to the frictionless touristic wave and the development of commercial international cruises. Occupying the northern side of the greater bay, the port was made as an artificial island, connected to the land through a bridge, declaring its autonomy. The port was securitised and programmed as a mechanised space, with specified passenger and vehicle movement areas and a fence, demarcating its eastern part as a Senghen zone border. It became a device of increased capacity, with docking spaces for one cruise ship, seven ferries and multiple yachts, effectively obsoleting the old port that re-developed as a tourist coastline. Respectively and within the same international movement and acceleration context, the airport terminal was expanded and modernised to accommodate commercial flights and private jets. Both infrastructures acted as gatekeepers, attractors of urbanisation and through road networks, were linked to the island’s tourist sites. Around their connection, a local transportation economy of rentable vehicles, taxis and mini-vans was developed54 Ultimately privatised and directed by international legal frameworks, Mykonos’ port, marinas, and airport operation falls outside local jurisdiction55 They function as extra-statecraft and economic machines, interrupting the territorial continuity of the state, aiming to increase fluxes, and colliding with the island's local limited capacity.
Fig.49 Opening of the Rural Airport of Mykonos by the Minister of Transportation of the Dictatorship, 1971 (Source: National Audiovisual Archives)
Fig.50 Old Port Parking expansion and Marina (Source: Mykonos Port Authority)
Fig.51 Mykonos New Port (Source: Mykonos Port Authority)
Fig.55 Map of
Anafi
Fig.56 Mykonos road network expanding from the areas of the old port, cruise terminal and airport.Alogn with settlements and Mykonian beaches, infrastructures of mobility appear as centres of sprawl effects.
Fig.57 Mykonos Old (Bottom) and New (Top) Ports. (Author)
Mykonos-OldPort
Fig.59 Mykonos Old Port. (Author)
Mykonos-Newport
Fig.58 Mykonos New Port. (Author)
Fig.60 Mykonos Cruise Terminal. Artificial land insertions. (Author)
National Border
1_Passenger terminals
dock
boat dock
dock
56 The Island currently accepts more than 2 million tourists yearly.(excluding cruise ship disembarkations that make up to another 1 million) (Source: INESTE, “Regional and National Data. ” (Athens, 2023). )
Through a series of infrastructural insertions and political forces, Mykonos' tourism economy evolved to host the second most intense flux in the Cyclades56 To trace the effects of increased connectivity, an attempt to dissect the incoming fluxes aims to trace particularities and nuances in mobility, framing it beyond its transit operation. The purpose is to demonstrate how touristic movement carries social and political implications for the islands, expanding from mobile bodies to the scale of the territory.
57 For example the intentionally slow and un-routed movement of recreational sailors indicates their ability to buy time and consume the coastline. The competitive advantage of speed of jet-setters becomes the sign of their exclusive identity The cramping of passengers and vehicles within the ferry’s garage before disembarkation manifests their treatment as a profitable flow. The fleeting nature of cruising becomes the privilege to quickly consume landscapes. The forced movement of migrants marks their compulsory dislocation.
58 Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no.1 (2010): .p21
59 [Seasonality] implies an incomplete and unbalanced utilisation of the means at the disposal of the economy, and this is similar to the imbalance of the business cycle, where the economy is either overheated or running under full potential at different phases of the cycle.’ (See: Raphael Raymond Baron, “Seasonality in Tourism: A Guide to the Analysis of Seasonality and Trends for Policy Making,”)
60 Thanasis Kizos, provided an extensive analysis calculating the difference in approach time for each island during different seasons, demonstrating the effects of seasonality in movement. He notes how smaller and more remote islands are more susceptible to phenomena of isolation. (See: “Island Lifestyles in the Aegean Islands, Greece: Heaven in Summer, Hell in Winter?,” Landscape Series, n.d., 127–49,
61 On average a cruise ship carries 3000 passengers and up to 9 cruise ships can anchor on the coastline of mykonos at any point. The flow of 27.000 tourists in a day on an island of a 10.000 inhabitants is obviously threatening the balance.
62 Before the touristic season, seasonal hospitality workers flood the island in preparation for the arrival of tourists. Students and certain public workers leave the island to pursue vacation elsewhere similarly to permanent
Each phase of infrastructural development in Mykonos introduced the capacity to accommodate different vessels and travellers, each carrying its movement, representations and practices. Ferries, yachts, sailboats, commercial aeroplanes and private jets composed a constellation of mobility modes that, when looked at in relation, became the vehicle of the differentiation of travellers57 Mobile bodies disprove the supposed homogeneity of flux and carry degrees of political authority within their performances. In general terms, the politics of mobility emerge from the differences in one’s motive force, speed, rhythm, route, experience and friction. Passports, vessels, equipment, and infrastructures are conjoined with bodies in motion, determining their ability to occupy the travel territory. Speeds, slowness, and immobilities are all related in ways that are thoroughly infused with power and its distribution58 and demonstrate how the touristic apparatus is a structure that mobilises or impedes travellers to ensure their high expenditure and economic capacity.
Complementary, through the operation of transportation infrastructure and the rhythms and sizes of crossings, the island’s seasonal operation can be read59 Conditioned to synchronise with the touristic season, summer recreation also determines the social realities on the islands60 As winter fluxes are less intense, connections are thinned out, and passenger routes service more islands. During the winter, connections to small islands are reduced significantly in relation to their larger, more popular counterparts. As the passenger ferry is the only carrier of both people and resources, it enforces a state of dependency from a private mobility network operated from the capital. As a result of the virtual increase in distances in the Archipelago, mobility directs the islands’ seasonal isolation and scarcity (fig.62). On the contrary, during the summer, the Archipelago is re-connected, and its population rises. Over-congestion manifests in variable intensity and qualities from March to September. For example, during the high season, multiple daily cruise ships can dock at Mykonos’ introducing large waves of travellers that momentarily flood the island, exceeding its capacity.61 Seasonal oscillations and connections re-compose island population and ways of living. Different subjects occupy different time spaces and vessels in relation to their role in the islands’ leisure or productive processes: seasonal workers, tourists, builders and permanent inhabitants experience the island separately62 (figs.63,64).
Mykonos has served as the testing ground for Cycladic touristification and thus is connected daily to the capital, moving increased numbers of travellers during the summer. However, within the mono-functionalisation of insular economies, the detected dynamics can be traced variably across the territory. Mobile and seasonal geographies guide the hierarchy of the Archipelagos territorial diagram, where flux sizes and infrastructural capacities are distributed according to a place’s attractive force, directing movement and, therefore, capital (fig.67). As the Archipelago slows down during the winter, it accelerates during the summer; space and time around the islands unevenly shrink or expand according to their
ability to synchronise with global acceleration and desire. Spatio-temporal proximity reflects materially on the edge and its infrastructural extrusions, which become performative equipment of place, embedding crossing rituals, and carrying political meaning. More than an economised link between places, touristic mobility carries extra-territorial dynamics that define the socioeconomic structure of the Archipelago.
inhabitants, whose presence relatively immobilised. At the end of the season, they return and along with builders and farmers they re-initiate their activities(fig.63).
Fig.61 Blue Star Naxos. Ferry connecting the Cyclades with the port of Piraeus.
Fig.63 Seasonal occupation of different inhabitants of mykonos (Source: Field research and interviews, 2023)
Fig.64
Santorini
Santorini Naxos
Fig.66
Cyclades Airport Catalogue.
(Author) Naxos
Performative and functional in their purpose to embed the territorial dynamics of the Archipelago, insular coastlines have been shaped to the dimensions of the vessel they are supposed to host. Assimilating within their infrastructural nature the networks they are part of, coastlines connect and isolate, incorporating rituals of crossing that manage and differentiate mobile bodies.
Ultimately operating as switches and multipliers within the circuits of tourism, they propose the function of the sea as a liminal space preceding the moment of re-creation. Routed and rhythmic, seasonal and increasingly exclusive, movement within the canalised sea of tourism declares the Archipelagos monofunctionality. Ultimately acting as hinges of urbanisation, the endpoints of routes inscribe an extraterritorially imposed mode of operation on the islands. As the sea is re-formed and disciplined in surfaces and protocols, in rejection of its voluminosity and fluidity, the potential for its appropriation is delimited.
The first design act is placed on the sea and reflects upon the processes that organised it, leading to its eventual monopolisation by touristic flows. Challenging its conceptualisation as an empty medium of accelerated transitions, and transactions the intervention attempts to frame the circulation spaces as ‘inhabitable’, experienceable and appropriable, testing the thresholds of legitimised mobility. Identifying coastal and nomadic movement zones, it reinhabits pirate activity areas with a series of floating grounds. They are proposed as an interface for the re-
occupation of bays in Mykonos by a semi-mobile and amphibious infrastructure, stripping the coastline of its performative role to diversify crossings throughout coastal waters.
Docks are introduced in three configurations as off-shore ports of collective occupation (III). A series of jetties adjusted to plug into different island terrains diversifies crossing points and challenges the hegemony of the main terminal as the sole gatekeeper (I). Finally, modular floating piers enable the linear connection of the system into a dispersed multi-functional chain that circumscribes areas of activity around the island and modulates incoming fluxes (II). Creating an archipelago of locally operated devices, the design suggests slow, small-scale, and diversified movement patterns within a system where the port is soft, de-militarised and dispersed, the route is walkable, and the border is visible and moving.
Ultimately triggering negotiations around the use of the sea, the overlayed system is imagined as unfixed and functionally fluid, reversing its usual syntax (IV). It chooses its occupiers through the collective management of an amphibious community of naturally emerging maritime subjects. Not practical but playful, it aims to enhance instances of ‘smoothness’ in the sea as a de-territorialisation gesture. Proposing a condition of inter-dependence within the Archipelago’s urbanity, it suggests the need to think of alternative ways of living, knowing, governing, and resisting.
Fig.68 Habitable Circulation. (Author)
Fig.70 A typology of coastal lands: Rocky cliff- left & Beach-right (Author)
Fig.71 Documented events of coastal pirate activity and potential intervention areas.
Fig.77 Test 2: Mykonos Cruise Terminal _ Mediating crossing point and sailboat transit station.(Author)
Fig.78 Test 3: Ornos Bay and Beach _ Shipyard infrastructure.
(Author)
Interlude 1: Touristic Space
In 1937, four years after the members of the CIAM participated in the Aegean cruise, Charlotte Periand, in preparation for the next instance of the conference (Lois at Loisirs), argued on the production of spaces of leisure taking possession of the most privileged places’63 to provide instances of escape from (or within) the functional city. Co-incidentally, the islands in the Archipelago would, over the coming years, be identified as places of excellence, a proper counterpart to the accelerated urban environment. During the interwar period, the modernist rediscovery of the sea-scape allowed the conceptualisation of ‘Aegeaness’, offering the post-war touristic development an alternative set of attractions to include within its content. Sun, sea, sand, settlements and customs would provide the ‘authentic’ background for creating a network of commercialised recreational machines64 a dispersed touristic space. Emerging from a set of cultural disciplines, processes and criteria, touristic space aims to develop the visiting potential of areas and, as such, is not an innate property of place. Mediatised, legislated, bordered and performing touristic space can be read as an institutionally conditioned territorial entity that would place the Archipelago within a Mediterranean geography of mobility and monetary attractors.
The motive to approach a touristic space is based upon a promise, which builds anticipation for a pleasurable encounter. As such, projection and imaginary travel are preparatory procedures preceding corporeal movement. Before being performed in situ, the tourist gaze65 starts as a mediated relationship that results in the indoctrination of travellers in specific ‘ways of seeing’ the other, framing places as different and extraordinary66 Antiquity, landscape, whiteness and vernacular lifestyle became, in various phases, the ingredients of an ‘exotic’ imaginary unique to the Aegean, giving its touristic product a specific content. Media, narratives and images produced by local institutions and travellers alike became carriers of a systematised and organised gaze that selected, framed and represented those elements as objects of desire. Codified to become communicable, the Archipelago was fragmented to its ingredients that were rendered as products for visual consumption within an economy of signs67 Exclusion, abstraction and extraction of elements are natural results of these optical cuts and thus give the lens of tourism the agency to re-construct a place, implicitly embedding expectations, social practices and consumption patterns. However, the discrepancy between a sight’s desired image and its reality can be the ground of disappointment that threatens the product's value and thus requires planning and management.
The identification and advertisement of touristic places direct flows of travellers, producing mobile geographies based on a place's desirability. Attractors of movement and, therefore, capital, touristic spaces motivate the emergence of a local economic process, where the place, land, and imaginaries are raw materials of an extractive process. In this context, state institutions responsible for the definition of ‘touristic’ acquire a validating and managerial role that aims to enable and modulate rates of private touristic development to maximise capital flow while sustaining the imaginary. For example, in 1935, the Greek National Tourism Organisation was formed for this exact purpose, and it carried the power to identify and manage ‘zones of appearance’ within tourist areas68 The actualisation of
63 See: Ana Tostões, “The Right to Holidays or the Emergence of an Era of Optimism,” Docomomo Journal, no. 60 (July 1, 2019): 2–3
64 “Machines a recreer” (ibid.)
65 “It is the gaze that orders and regulates the relationships between the various sensuous experiences while away, identifying what is visually out-of-ordinary, what are relevant differences and what is ‘other’. (See: John Urry and Jonas Larsen, “The Tourist Gaze 3.0,” 2011,)
66 See: John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1972).
67 See: Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 2002).
68 The legislation (ΦΕΚ 14, 13/1/1935 Ν. 6450) predicted that within places of particular interest to foreign travellers the appearance and mobility in space would be controlled by the G.N.T.O. in collaboration with local governments that would define its borders and the tourist police that would impose fines to whoever wasn’t complying with the proper image of place.
69 The idea of scopic control refers to the way a place is managed and divided in primary sites, available for gazing and secondary sites, to be hidden, sacrificing modes of development to preserve the sights valued by tourism. (See: Jean-Louis Déotte, Ricardo Scofidio, and Elizabeth Diller, Visite Aux Armées: Tourismes de Guerre (Caen? F.R.A.C. Basse-Normandie, 1994).)
the imaginary became the vehicle for disciplining space under a regime of scopic control69 Zones of development, tourist police forces, and local regulations would implicitly or explicitly work to sustain the profitable rituals of travel and shift the imagined into accessible. In general terms, the managerial processes of touristic space aim to preserve and (re)produce the desired look and performance of place, fixing and homogenising them under legal frameworks, labels, borders and surveillance practices. Slowly incorporated within narratives of touristic development and environmental or cultural preservation, the legal management of the geophysical would slowly fall under international control. Natura zones, UNESCO heritage sites, and protected traditional settlements highlight how touristic spaces can become sites of extra-territorial power. Legally isolated, institutionally legitimised and controlled, touristic spaces emerge within a place, internalising external desires within local realities.
70 The subject the practical master of the touristic ritual and package travelling can be understood as the process of reality construction. This role is partaken by a series of professions that seem to act as the mediators of travel. Photographers, writers, architects, hotel owners, academics, media producers are all constructors of reality in the context of tourism. However, today web-sites seems to acquire a central role within the touristic industry. (Also see: Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).)
71 See: John Urry, “The ‘consumption’ of Tourism,” Sociology 24, no. 1 (February 1990): 23–35,
Finally, touristic space, becomes the driving force for the transformation of both lands and subjects, shaping the economic activity on the islands. Mediating the interaction between visitor and place, host subjects and tourism entrepreneurs are motivated by flows of travellers and their imported capital Thus, they treat spaces of tourism as productive economic assets. Acting as practical masters of the rituals of visit, they assist in the reconstruction of space and its performance70 Tours, museums, beach bars, and tavernas all become part of the program and allow a diversity of monetised consumption rituals. Technical, social and semiotical organisations of the leisure-scape are therefore inscribed within space, not only through media and institutions but also by local communities that are absorbed within the hospitality industry. The effects of this can be traced to local specialisation and land management. As land becomes more valuable, it is privatised or exchanged, segmented and rented. From the villa to the hotel room to the sunbed, touristic space is labour-intensive, fragmented and hierarchised, maximising its monetisation potential. Threatened by over-congestion and in the scope of preservation of the product, touristic activities often are evaluated through the positionality they offer. Touristic consumption, seemingly unnecessary, is the consumption of positional good, where exclusive occupation of the landscape produces value71 Signifying its consumer’s capacity to abstain from work and spend, travel becomes a status symbol, culturally driving the re-production of the practice.
72 This is reffered to as the tourist paradox, explained in Dean MacCannell’s, “Staged Authenticity Today,” The Ethics of Sightseeing, May 19, 2011, 13–34,
73 The process has been described by J.Urry as tourism reflexivity (See: “The Tourist Gaze 3.0,” 2011,)
Touristic spaces appear to form a dispersed territorial entity that enacts spatiotemporal ruptures through optical, functional, material or legislated borders. Within its manufacturing process, hosts, guests, places and governance patterns inform and transform each other in a complex parasitic relationship. Media, infrastructure, imaginaries, subjects and institutions converge, constructing the apparatus of leisure. Aiming simultaneously at the sustenance of its authenticity and its profitable reproduction, touristic space seems innately paradoxical and self-negating72 However, it is in parallel as highly reflexive, constantly inventing new signs, rituals, and frameworks for appropriating places, leading to the constant profanation of new tourist destinations73 The territorial re-invention of the Aegean led to its evolution into a constellation of travel sites. Specific and yet repeated, insular landscapes, subjects, and ways of life became symbols of national identity, and evolved to commodified signs and imaginaries of touristic consumption. Sublimity, culture, nature, romance, hedonism, luxury, or lifestyle, each island carries a specific product, a specific mindset and a set of practices. Reduced to a brand and codified to particular elements, the territory-host results from centrally operated material and immaterial adjustments. As
touristification introduces sweeping extra-territorial development forces, the Archipelago is re-configured in an increasingly monopolised economy.
Fig.80 Framing, 2023. (Author)
Fig.81 Fixing Sands, 2023. (Author)
Fig.82 Coastline, 2023. (Author)
Fig.83 Border, 2023. (Author)
Fig.84 Life Guard, 2023. (Author)
Fig.85 Route, 2023. (Author)
Fig.86 To the beach, 2023. (Author)
Fig.87 Partying, 2023. (Author)
Fig.88 Parking, 2023. (Author)
Fig.89 Delos Artefacts, 2023. (Author)
Fig.90 Tropicana Artefacts, 2023. (Author)
Fig.91 Palm, 2023. (Author)
Fig.92 Beach Market, 2023. (Author)
Fig.93 Beach, 2023. (Author)
Fig.94 Units, 2023. (Author)
Fig.95 Panormos, 2023. (Author)
Chapter 2: Motives
Chapter two, ‘Motives’, delves into the evolution of forces that triggered the touristification of the Aegean Archipelago and examines exemplary cases of territorial modifications for the touristic development on the island of Mykonos. Sub-chapter 2.1 titled ‘Islomania: forming the Aegean product’, traces historically the evolution of practices and socio-political frameworks that constructed the Mykonian leisure-scape. Initiated as a site of academic scholarship and ultimately transformed to a stage-set of ludicism and excessive consumption, the local touristic product was produced by both institutional narratives and informal appropriations of the insular environment. Through reciprocities between hosts, guests, and landscapes, the touristic spaces of Mykonos are performed, and an assemblage of codified signs is constructed that carry its imaginary. Sub-chapter 2.2, ‘Leisure Territories: the Mykonian Beach’, studies the evolution of bathing practices in Greece and examines the Mykonian beach as a ground of territorial reinvention. Transformed from a site of sanitary rituals to a touristic space of high monetary value, the beach is read as the island's centre point of touristic development. Ultimately embedding the commodification of landscapes and bodies, the beach arises as a field of friction and negotiations for the right to the coastline. As the beach becomes a contested ground between different potential users, the second design act imagines a reclaimed unified zone of un-programmed and public beach occupations. A perpendicular ‘cut’ allows the framing of the coastline as a place of exchange, productive activities and connection between land and sea, framing it beyond its constructed and performed imaginary.
Motive, noun
1. a reason for doing something.
2. a dominant or recurring idea in an artistic work. from late Latin motivus, frommovere ‘to move’ 74
74 Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed December 1, 2023. https://www.oed. com/.
75
was
Marine Venus (London: Faber & Faber, 1978).)
Islomania is a term that describes a particular attraction or obsession with the islands and their isolated, potentially utopic condition75. While the mythologisation of the Aegean islands can be traced to the pre-modern era, the proliferation of Islomaniacs is closely related to the emergence of 20th-century mass tourism that made them accessible for consumption. Tracing how the Aegean islands, particularly the islands of Mykonos and Delos, have evolved as tourist destinations, this sub-chapter simultaneously looks at media, institutional interventions and touristic practices. The aim is to demonstrate how tourism at the islands emerged as a reciprocal relationship of the above, surpassing the simple dialectic between host and guest. Particular to the Aegean touristic product, legal, technical and human ingredients developed in parallel, interchanging between formal development and informally emergent practices that shaped the Mykonian touristic model.
76 See Subchapter 1.1
77 The “Liber insularum arcipelagi” or the book of archipelagic islands by Cristoforo Buondelmonti (1420), apart from a few ancient writings, acknowledges no sources for its descriptions. In his letter to Cardinal Orsini the author states: “I am sending this to you,so that you can have the pleasure of letting your thoughts wander when you are tired.”(Source: Tolias, George. “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century.” (2007).)
78 Before the emergence of touristic practices travelling was usually associated with movement out of necessity. (Travel: from Old French travailler (“to trouble, suffer, be worn out”-. Oxford English Dictionary. Accessed December 1, 2023. https:// www.oed.com/.)
79 the first ‘modern’ travellers were coming primarily from the UK and Later France and the rest of Western Europe.(See: Giōrgos Tolias and Aikaterine Koumarianou, British Travellers in Greece 1750-1820: Exhibition Catalogue (London: Foundation for Hellenic Culture, 1995).
The first pivotal representation that allowed the reproduction of Aegean mythologies can be traced in isolarii of the early 15th century. Their production was triggered by the Latin acquisition of the Archipelago and was informed by the expanded maritime networks and humanist-Renaissance ideas. An isolario, a book of islands, is a hybrid document of geographical and historical descriptions, travel literature and navigational documents. The “Liber insularum arcipelagi” (1420) was the prototype of a genre that would be reproduced and circulated over the 15th and 17th centuries. It was formed as an atlas, with separate maps for each island, highlighting primary structures and ancient Greek sites, blending historical and mythological descriptions. As such, it became a primary interface for the Western conceptualisation of the Aegean islands. Contrary to the navigational documents of the period76 the insularum appropriated the maritime cartographic representation, re-purposing it in a book to be read for pleasure and mind travel77
The isolarii’s focus on Greek antiquities and myths would set a pattern of gaze towards the islands that became the basis of their attractive force during the period of Western Enlightenment. Before the turn of the 20th century, scientific inquiries based on observation and empirical evidence would drive the first seemingly unnecessary travelling practices in the Aegean in the form of the Grand Tour78 Its participants, prominent male members of a Western elite class of advanced industrial countries, would appropriate navigational techniques to trace independent and curated ‘heroic’ routes79 Their gaze towards Greek and Roman antiquities was a search for the subliminal root of Western culture and Enlightenment ideals, conducted through sightseeing, scientific surveys or travel journals encapsulating their findings, impressions and disappointments. Through their ways of seeing, the island of Delos, containing the most significant archaeological space in the Cyclades, was identified as a necessary stop in the route towards the Orient. In parallel, Mykonos would only be referenced in relation to Delos, hosting its travellers.
Delos, carrying the potential for testing archaeological practices and the opportunity for original findings, would become the initial attraction in the Cyclades. As archaeology became synonymous with the touristic practice, its media reconstructed the space and its artefacts in their un-ruined form through
The term
invented by the writer Lawrence Durrell in 1953 after his visit to the Aegean island of Rhodes (See: Reflections on a
Fig.96 Mykonos (Top), Delos and Rhinia (Bottom),“Liber insularum Arcipelagi, Cristoforo Buondelmonti, 1420.(Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives.)
Fig.97 Les Cyclades pour le voyage du jeune Anacharsis. By Anville, JeanBaptiste, 1697-1782 (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives.)
80 The representations of Jacob Spon and J.P. De Tournefort, in the context of their Grand Tour (18th c) identified Delos’ archaeological interest. Later J.Stuart and N.Revett, surveyors of the Acropolis begun to scientifically depict Delian artefacts. However the most extensive documentation would be carried out in the context of the French Scientific expedition of Morea, in the aftermath of the Greko-Turkish war, establishing a long lasting presence of French institutions on the island. (See:. Guillaume-Abel Blouet, Expedition Scientifique de Morée: Ordonnée Par Le Gouvernement Français: Architecture, Sculptures, Inscriptions et Vues Du Péleponèse, Des Cyclades et de l’Attique (Paris: Didot, 1835))
81 During the 19th and 20th century, 19 foreign archaeological institutions were established in Greece and performed a series of excavation throughout the country.
82 Term borrowed from: Suit case Studies: The production of a national past Diller and Scofidio p32 in JeanLouis Déotte, *visite Aux Armées: Tourisms of War (Caen: Fonds régional d’art contemporain de BasseNormandie, 1994).
83 Romanticism and its ethic provided for a philosophy of recreation while also implying the strong separation of the subject from its surroundings. The romantic gazers, escapist in their nature, would become fundamental to the formation of identity for the modern tourist within the capitalist patterns of consumption. (See: John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0)
accurate and abstracted drawings (fig.38)80 This selective and extractive process on antiquity would become the primary motive for reproducing the tour. The establishment of the modern Greek state in the early 19th century signified the re-orientation of the country toward the West, which used antiquity to formulate the nation's identity. Under this condition, multiple foreign archaeological organisations were installed in Greece, providing an institutional interface for visiting81 Performing a series of excavations that prioritised layers of the classical period, archaeology solidified foreign perceptions of the Greek national identity on the ground. Similarly to other archaeological sites, Delos would be conceptualised as a landscape of classical ruins, an idyllic scenery of a sanitised past’82 accommodating sublime experiences of Romantic travellers of the period83 In 1873, the French School of Athens initiated the site’s excavation, triggering a series of island modifications that would re-frame its ruins not as part of a mythic past but as an extraordinary eye witnessed experience of the excavation itself. In this context, the Delos museum (1903), a canteen, a jetty for connecting Delos to Mykonos, paths through ruins, and tours have formed an assembly operating not in relation to the space itself but to its visitors (fig.102).
Fig.98 Fragments at Delos and Rhenia, Charles Robert Cockerell 1830 (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.100 Delos Excavation,Blouet Guillaume Abel, 1831 (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.99 1873 French School of Athens Excavations in Delos. (Source: FSA Archives)
Fig.101 Delos excavation. (Source: Greek Military Georgraphical Service)
Delos archaeological site (Author). The island of Delos during the summer is accepting almost 100.000 visitors. Connected with daily, privately operated, cruises with the island of Mykonos, Delos operates under a complete preservation protocol (UNESCO heritage site). Along with the an archaeological museum, the site is equipped with a canteen, a ticket kiosk and a jetty. Three routes traced on site suggest different time-frames to visit the island (1-3 or 5 hours) while organised tours are operated on daily basis. Finally, the site is marked by houses meant to host archaeologists and site-guards who are the only inhabitants of the island, constantly expanding and documenting it since the 19th century.
Fig.102
Fig.103 Delos Archaeological Museum. (Author) The museum of Delos, first constructed in 1903 and expanded in two phases 1936 and 1972. The palm tree within its courtyard is a symbolic connection with the myth of the birth of Artemis and Appolo.
84 The model of mass tourism demonstrated by the Thomas Cook that in 1896 will organise the Olympics. The Grand Tour in Anatolia itinerary included British occupied regions of Egypt, as well as Turkey, Palestine, Greece and Italy(1869). In parallel, the Handbook of Travellers in Greece by John Murray, became a pivotal, massively distributed publication that provided descriptions and guidance to visit the Greek territory and its islands. Within it Syros is mentioned first as the entry-point to the country while Delos is second due to its already established status. (See: Thomas Cook Archive UK and A Handbook for Travellers in Greece (London, 1845))
85 “The Service of Foreigners”, part of the Ministry of economy would operate in the fields of infrastructure, advertisement, ancient sites, hotel regularisation and tourism data collection giving the industry a scientific framework to develop. (See Law: 1698, 16/12/1918 )
86 Within its establishing legislation the G.N.T.O. was purposed to promote tourism in Greece through the coordination of public, local, private and entrepreneurial actions. It was granted of the power to act upon Infrastructure, legislation, fund allocation, education, advertisement, bathhouses, exhibitions, or any other sector deemed necessary. Within its council, re-presenters of public works, railway companies, custom houses, ministries of Education-Interior-Exterior, archaeological institutions,press, steamboat, industries, travel agencies, and many more, would compose an hybrid entity to facilitate the purpose of touristic development. (See: Law 4377/1929)
87 Steadily increasing from 16.858 travellers in 1919 to129.146 in 1934 (Source: Angelos Vlachos, Touristic Development and Public Policies in Modern Greece (1914-1950), 2013)
88 Bathing practices are discussed in the next sub-chapter 2.2.
89 As explained in chapter 1.2 cruises at the period where not institutionally tackled as part of tourism. However their reading informed the formation of the Aegean product.
90 See: Emilia Athanassiou et al., “The Modern Gaze of Foreign Architects Travelling to Interwar Greece: Urban Planning, Archaeology, Aegean Culture, and Tourism,” Heritage 2, no. 2 (2019)
The visual culture that developed during the Grand Tours and reproduced by the agents of mass tourism made the Greek landscape recognisable and consumable84 During the early 20th century, the development of passports, transportation, and communication media inherited from the First World War provided the framework for the touristic phenomenon. State interventions, primarily in the context of welfare states of European fascist and communist regimes of the interbellum, would be a necessary pre-condition of the systematic development of tourism. Paid vacation and the right to leisure would mark the passing from independent travellers to mass tourists, producing an ideological gap that the Greek product would have to adjust to.
Initially, the produced stereotypical antiquarian narratives were appropriated by the state, which reproduced the Western imaginary for setting up a profitable industry. In 1914, the Bureau of Foreigners and Expositions was the first state institution to tackle the touristic phenomenon. It was restructured as a formal legislative body in 191885 after the French Office Nationale du Tourisme model. However, the first systematised effort to tackle the regularisation of the tourism framework and its flows for the national economy is the creation of the Greek National Tourism Organisation (1929)86 The G.N.T.O. was provided with substantial funds and crossed institutional boundaries, combining public and private sectors to accommodate the state’s intervention in tourism’s development. As, such, greek tourism institutions would be continuously re-invented before the Second World War (fig.106). While the increase of travellers in Greece between 1919-34 was substantial87 most efforts were concentrated in the mainland, with infrastructural development (mainly roads), archaeological space improvements and a slight increase in hotels. In parallel, the touristic product would remain essentially unchanged, fixated on the polarity of archaeology (for incoming travellers) and sanitary bathing in bathhouses (for internal tourism)88
As such, the travel to the Cyclades would still follow the rotas and practices of the past. In the 30s, entrepreneurial experiments initiated by travel agencies and Greek ship owners, who acted as practical masters of the emerging industry, demonstrated the potential of Cycladic tourism through collective organised steamboat cruises89 Juxtaposing steam engines with the pre-modern landscape, the “Neptos Mediterranean recreational cruises” tested in the IV CIAM cruise (1933), reframed the Aegean as an intellectual, cultural and aesthetic experience90 As Avant Garde boarded the Atmos’ ship91 it turned its gaze towards the vernacular to find ideological confirmations of modernist ideals. Antiquity, sharp light, whiteness, and archetypical architectures were selectively looked at, providing the aestheticised ingredients for the modernist re-construction of “Aegeaness”: a locus blending modernism and past knowledge in an almost meta-physical assemblage.
Fig.104 Poster of Neptos SA (Source: Chris Blencowe and Judith evine, Moholy’s Edit: The Avant-Garde at Sea, August 1933 (2019).
92 Independent organisations and bourgeois clubs would play a fundamental role in the production of Greek tourism. Coming from different societal layers that would invent practices of travelling, organise excursions, publish brochures and even promote infrastructural interventions according to their own preferences. Eventually the ones closely affiliated with the Greek Urban elite (like the Hiking Club) would acquire institutional authority and influence the development of the industry. (See: Angelos Vlachos, Touristic Development and Public Policies in Modern Greece (19141950), 2013,
93 Translated as the ‘Grand idea’ or the ‘Great Concpet’ it was a 19th cen. nationalist ideologism that aspired to expand the territory of Greece, reclaiming grounds of Minor Asia and reviving the Byzantine empire.
94 The ministry was often refereed as the Ministry of Propaganda, performed as a censorship body and communicating the nationalist ideals of the regime. Touristic conciousness is a term often appearing in the periods public discourse and refers to a mode of behavioural and image control in front of tourists. Indoctrination was common in across European authoritarian regimes of the 20th century. For example both Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain utilised the tourist phenomenon for spreading ideological narratives around national identity.
95 Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari (18991998) was one of multiple prominent artists of the periodwhose work has been used in tourist media.
96 The push toward tourism was a conscious effort led by the USA that saw tourism as the main opportunity in the country, in the context of European labour division structured by the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC). I don’t believe that Greece can base its economy on the pre-war framework… But apart from agriculture, you have many resources to improve the country. Tourism is a big capital for Greece. Your country shouts for tourism! You have the most famous natural landscapes, traditional hospitality, internationally known archaeological spaces, and a wonderful climate. Of course, many things have to be done, but you will succeed if you remember you are Greek (sic)’ Interview of Paul Hoffman, Marshal Plan Representative in Greece, August 1949, in Nikolakakis, 2013)
97 See: compulsory law 1565/1950 Through these interventions foreign travellers increased from 68.000 in1951 to 1.130.000 in 1966.
A radical ideological shift was required for the Aegean landscape to acquire a more prominent position within the touristic industry. The systematised redirection of the tourist gaze toward the natural landscape of Greece originates from independent travel clubs like the Hiking Club of Greece (1921) that would formulate practices of admiration for the Greek landscape92 In the aftermath of a migration wave from Minor Asia (1922) at the loss of the Megali Idea’93 the culturally fragmented population would be discursively unified through the conceptualisation of the landscape as an intrinsic carrier of national identity. The pivotal period is identified by the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936-1941), when narratives and images from the Sub-ministry of Press and Tourism (1936) revolving around the dipole of nature-ruins were used to structure the racial, nationalist, ideological narrative of the regime, utilising them for the formation of touristic consciousness94 “Nelly’s”95 the regime’s official photographer, captured Greek temples, vernacular structures and people against sea and sky backgrounds, building an aesthetic of modern classicism. Her photos became the conduit of the regime’s propaganda and were used to advertise Greek tourism, codifying the modern imaginary toward the Greek landscape as a carrier of cultural and racial continuity.
After World War II, the ratification of leisure as a human right under the UN Declaration (1948) solidified the touristic phenomenon throughout Europe. For Greece, tourism would become a fundamental driver for its reconstruction and modernisation program under the influence of the US-led Marshal Plan Tourism evolved to a state-led national project of natural resource exploitation to form a luxurious product addressing European and American travellers96 The Four Year Plan for Tourism (1948-1951) led by Constantinos Doxiades marks the first long-term effort to organise the touristic phenomenon in Greece. Despite its partial implementation, it demonstrated a frame of actions that would later be carried by the re-established G.N.T.O. (1950)97 The first public touristic infrastructures and motives integrating the private sector were put in place through the organisation. In parallel, new areas of interest containing archaeological spaces, thermal baths, and (for the first time) potential for summer recreation officially expanded the tourist geography of Greece towards the Aegean Sea.
As such, advertisements and movies commissioned by the G.N.T.O. would now include the new signs of the touristic product: sea and sky, Cycladic vernacular structures, modern infrastructures, and beaches (fig.110). Due to its proximity to Delos, Mykonos would become the first Cycladic island was the first to become a legitimised destination. However, if advertisements and initial services showed the intention of the state to develop tourism on the island, the lack of mass mobility infrastructure would indicate its inaccessibility to the masses. As such, during the 50s and early 60s, Mykonos would remain exclusive. European Royalty cruises would frame the island as a luxury destination and associate its “untouched” landscape with a cosmopolitan experience. Through the years, politicians, Greek entrepreneurs, famous actors, intellectuals, and bourgeois communities have identified Mykonos as a bohemian place of privileged leisure away from the masses. Arriving in yachts, the elite were then building vacation houses for returning every summer. Through their presence, leisure in Mykonos was advertised as a status symbol.
Fig.108 (Right) Extract from the New York Times, 23/8/1954
Fig.109 (Bottom) Nellys’ Photo of Mykonos (Benaki Archives)
Fig.107 (Top) Queen Frederick of Greece in Mykonos (1954).
98 During the period incoming tourism rose from 1.590.543 (1966) to 3.899.083 (1973) travellers. (Source: Greek Statistical Authority Archives)
99 As described in chapter 1.2
The Greek Military Dictatorship (1967-1974) period marks a pivotal moment for the massification of tourism in the country98 Without any holistic state planning, the rise of Mediterranean mass tourism, charter flights, island infrastructural modernisation99 and public funds for private touristic development would force an informal tourist product to emerge. Mykonos, being far enough from the capital, hosted the liberal travel and consumerist habits of the first post-war tourist generation outside the ideological and behavioural censorship of the authoritarian state. Campers, and hippies started approaching the island, turning their gazes at the beach and local cultures and people, identifying them as authentic and pure, a counterpart to the rapidly urbanising and alienating urban environment. Coinciding with the Aegean’s regional impoverishment due to internal migration toward the capital and its rapid de-industrialisation, the island’s community appeared relatively open to the new kinds of travellers, identifying their movement as a means of subsistence.
100 A bar census in Mykonos (I.Spilanis, 2005, University of Aegean ) indicates steady increase of re-recreational spaces. In 1950 there were two bars, in 1978: 27, in 1988: 50 and in 1997: 130 demonstrating the slow integration of local activities to the emerging touristic phenomenon of the island.
101 See: Pola Bousiou, The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing Liminalities in a “queer” Space (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
102 See: Durell Lawrence, The Greek islands p 231, Referenced from: The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing Liminalities in a “queer” Space.
Through the interrelation of hosts and guests, Mykonos, in the coming years, would be framed as a place of antitheses; its environment and local activities would be adopted to perform the hedonist paradise of summer re-creation. Welcoming and tolerant, during the 80s and 90s, Mykonos would become the place of belonging for a variety of sub-cultures, families, tribes, queer communities, ravers and eccentric backpackers, each occupying aesthetically differentiated sites on the island and constructing their own territories. Bars, tavernas, and clubs flooded the island’s beaches and Chora (fig.112), providing new forms of labour for the islanders100 Spaces of performance and belonging for different Islomaniacs formed a new network of attraction sites assimilated within the local fabric. Pierro’s bar, the Irish bar, the Scandinavian, and many more, each grounding a unique kind of ludicism, transformed the islands imaginary around sea, sun, sand, sex, partying, drinking, drug-taking, food and any other sort of conspicuous consumption101 Durell Lawrence, the prototypical Islomaniac, framed Mykonos as a timeless space with “no style” and barely any history ‘to intimidate anyone’102 White houses and sandy beaches stripped from their original context formed an appropriable vessel for intimacy, cosmopolitanism and marginalised collectivity.
103 See: Mimi Sheller and John Urry, Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (London: Routledge, 2004).
104 See: Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).
A postmodern space par excellence, the island became the centre of Cycladic tourism, constantly attracting more visitors and value. Rapidly sub-urbanised and ultimately over-crowded, exclusive occupation returned after the millennium as a core element of the touristic product, this time multiplied in size and intensity. Generic equipment of play103 such as pools, villas, hotels, and beaches, are constructed within isolated territories from the private sector. Diffusely (dis)advertised through circulating digital imagery, reviews and travel blogs, the island’s touristic spaces became part of a global network of accelerated touristic mobilities and content exchange. Jet-setters, yacht travellers, and international celebrities whose occupied spaces and excessive consumption separate them from the masses add another layer of subjectivities that occupy the island. Reflexive and differentiating, Mykonos’ touristic spaces have become a stage set for both the elite and the mass tourist culture, accommodating any gaze its visitors have wished to perform on it. As the industry generated the Mykonian imaginary, it also, in turn, produced or absorbed the and pleasure-inducing habituses104 commodifing the bodies of its travellers and hosts through performative consumption rituals.
Fig.112 Mykonos Chora Land Use map (2023) Demonstrated how the touristified settlement is currently dominated by commercial uses. (Source: National Technical University of Athens, Urban Environment Laboratory.)
Fig.111 Mykonos Pierro’s Bar, 1980’s (Photo provided by: Dimitris Koutsoukos)
Fig.113 Mykonos “Filling the Gap” in the tourist geography of Greece. Mykonos as a Focus of tourist Activities.(See: Mykonos Delos & Rhenia Regional Development plans, Kalligas 1972.)
105 Bathing as a hygienist practice is primarily an English reformist invention.
(See: Michael Lambton Este, “Remarks on baths, water, swimming, shampooing, heat, hot, cold and vapour baths”, 1812). Untill the first decades of the 20th century, sanitary bathing was the most prescribed treatment from the majority of European doctors. The medical discourse legitimised sanitary bathing practices and rituals, defining the differences between a healing seeking bather and a novelty seeing foreign traveller. (See: Vlachos, Angelos. Touristic development and public policies in modern Greece (19141950), 2013.
106 Bathhouses would either be placed coast’s like the Faliron Bay Royal resort or close to thermal springs of Aedipsos and Kythnos island.
107 See: Susana Lobo, “From Paid Holidays to Mass Tourism: A Typological Evolution,” Docomomo Journal, no. 60 (July 1, 2019) p 4–7,
108 Two pavilions were dedicated to bathing as a hygienic practice: one on “Nature worship- Sun-Air-Sea-Water” and one on “Thermal springs and bath towns” (See:C. Tsiamis et al., “Microbiological Topics of the Hygiene Exhibition of Athens (1938),” History of Microbiology 59, no. 1 (March 1, 2014).)
109 Its contents were composed of a series of specific instructions for the occupiers of the beach: Sea Baths, Sun Baths and Sun therapy, Air therapy, Sand Baths, Mud Baths, Sports at the Baths and what is Glyfada (See “Hello Hygiene: a guide for Bathers” by Lydia Xynogala)
Performed as a summer recreation site, the Archipelago has been re-structured and its mode of operation is reflected on insular edges. On the one hand, infrastructural developments have hardened the Mykonian coastline to manage touristic mobility. On the other hand, its beaches hosted a particular mode of occupation that organised the consumption of the coastal landscape. Beaches in Mykonos, synonymous with sea and sun worship, have become sites where touristification manifests as an economic process. Within this context, the emergence of the Mykonian beach as an apparatus of cognitive and embodied engagement with the landscape can be read as an event of territorial modification, requiring labour and consumption. Material manipulations, legal borders, temporal occupations and bathing rituals have re-made the coastal landscape for tourism.
Before mass tourism reached the territory, bathing practices were uncommon in Greece, oriented to a particular sanitary and hygienist practice. During the 19th century, according to the Western conception105 of bathing as a medical prescription, the first bathing practices were formulated through state-controlled infrastructure. Mostly placed on the country’s mainland, bath-houses and bathtowns106 formulated a network of re-creation that was addressed primarily to internal travellers of the urban Greek elite, who had the privilege to abstain from work and move within the country to take part to an interiorised, sanitary and preventative ritual.
The first efforts for massive beach habitations are rooted in the interwar period when authoritarian regimes in the Mediterranean popularised bathing as a democratised leisure practice scheduled within the context of the summer’s 48hour working week107 Germophobia and hygiene became the vehicles for the the conditioning and ‘healing’ of the working-class body and the indoctrination of the masses according to a precisely programmed thermal spring or beach habitation. The Hygiene Exhibition of Athens (1938) was organised as a propagandist event from the I. Metaxas dictatorship. Within its pavilions, two were dedicated to bathing, suggesting the state’s effort to popularise the beach as a site of sanitation108 In this context, private seaside resorts also adjusted their narrative to address the masses. The Glyfada Bath Company published a leaflet titled “Enjoy- be Healthy: the Guide to bathers” as an advertisement for the Athenian coastline. The issue evidences how the worship of the sun and other beach rituals were combined with older sanitary and preventative practices, now addressing the working-class subject109 However, sites like Glyfada, would still remain exclusive to the higher and middle classes, which had developed a new sociality around the beach, moving away from the overcrowded conditions of the urbanised capital.
Fig.114 The Faliron bay was the first sea-side resort of the capital. Connected with the centre of Athens through railway, the beach's jetties were constructed in 1881 and the bay was equipped with the Aktaion hotel, designed according to the typology of the grand hotel of European bath towns (Source: Landscapes of Tourism, Re-making Greece, Archive, 2014)
Fig.115 Enjoy, be healthy’, a guide for bathers,by Glyfada bath Company.
If initial habitations of the beach were initiated as a medical practice for the urban population, the emergence of mass tourism in the country led to their reframing, expanding its potential participants. Addressing primarily to incoming, wealthy travellers, the urban elite, and the middle class, the G.N.T.O. (1950) actively promoted and codified the Cycladic sea-scape for massive consumption, initiating its tourist development from the island of Mykonos which was identified as a high-potential site. Therefore, the first public hotels, the Hotel Leto and the Xenia of Mykonos, were constructed in the 50s110 Their positioning and hospitality programming in relation to their adjacent beaches was a statelegitimised territorial gesture aiming at the touristic appropriation/ territorialisation of the coastal landscape. Sitting on the coastline, including direct paths to the sea-side and bordered through fences, public hotels, they signified the occupation and sights toward the beach as an exclusive right of their guests, framing the Mykonian beach as the de-facto anti-work place for the privileged elite.
Bathing at the beach was alien to the Mykonian population in the same period. As in the case of most Aegean islands, which were still structured around maritime and industrial economies, beaches were primarily a site of labour, hosting activities like fishing, industrial activity, and ship making. For example, the iconic beach, later named “Paradise”, was referred to as “Plintri” and was the site for local domestic laundering. As such, the use of the beach up until the 60s differentiated the local community from its guests. The re-framing of the beach as a site of massive occupation can be only attributed to the categorical expansion of travellers enabled by the Junta’s infrastructural interventions. As foreign, liberated and well-educated young travellers flooded the island, they carried a series of embodied practices. They approached the beach not as a sanitation space but as a sanctuary of hedonism, landscape admiration and liberalisation from the normalising urban environment. In the tolerant context of Mykonos, they were performing their ludic rituals, camping, getting naked, having sex, eating and washing at the beach (which they framed as a Paradise’), playfully appropriating untouched coastlines111
110 Their importance of public intervention in terms of architecture and initial touristic capacity will be analysed in the upcoming chapter 3.1.
111 Homo Ludens (1938) is a book by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga that theorises at the importance of play in formulating modern culture. In the context of tourism post war beach habitations can be understood within a general turn from sanitary practices to playful performances re-structuring the beach and its culture as a space of play.
(See:Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2022).)
Fig.116 Fishermen in Ornos Beach, 1930 (Source: Old Mykonos Group, Unknown)
Fig.118 Hotel Leto, bulti in 1953 commissioned by the by the G.N.T.O. and designed by the Architect P.Vasiliades. (Source: doma.index)
Fig.117Hotel Xenia in Mykonos, 1959, Desinged by Aris Konstadinedes. (Source: https://www. mykonostheoxenia.com/)
112 May 1967, a travel ban was issued on “any foreigner, dirty and ragged or wearing long hair” and imposed an $80 minimum as the amount of foreign currency that visitors had to have in their possession upon entering the country. (See: Michalis Nikolakakis, “The Colonels on The Beach: Tourism Policy
(1967–1974),)
113 Exemplary plans demonstrating the precise mechanisms of coastal land uses from mass tourism will be further analysed in the next chapter 3.1.
114 See: A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Rhenia: Development Plan, 1972.
As such, the potential of the beach as a site of informal and democratised leisure was communicated to the local population, who mimicked their imported practices and restructured the beach as a public space. Different subjects started inhabiting the Mykonian coastline: families were reproducing the living room, the elderly were finding a place of rest and healing, children were playing, the young developed a marital economy, and local workers took breaks at the seaside. As naked bodies erased the class distinctions through bathing and naked bodies, the monetary potential that the state was aiming at was threatened, giving rise to a set of frictions and antagonisms for the right to the beaches occupation. ‘Cheap tourists’ or immoral hippies’ were terms associated with a certain kind of moral and environmental pollution in the public discourse, creating a demonising narrative that was in line with the authoritarian regime’s conservatism112
These conditions were seen as a threat to the development model that the regime was trying to apply on the island. Mykonos was scheduled to host developments customised for a privatised luxurious mass touristic model structured around the beach113 The state's intentions to develop this particular kind of product are demonstrated in the Mykonos-Delos and Rhenia development plans (1972)114 The plan’s purpose was to program the island for mass tourism and to define the island’s economic and building potential. As such, the plan included maps and analyses of the Mykonian beaches, evaluating them according to their bathing qualities and determining the land values of their surrounding plots. The islands Touristic Zones’ were defined accordingly, interrupting zones of absolute preservation to provide building regulation relaxations and economic motives that would allow the production of mass tourism infrastructure at the southern coastlune. As such, the beach was institutionally solidified as a site of territorial and economic importance.
Fig.120 Mykonos Development option A (the most radical of the three proposed). In black hatch are indicated the zones of Touristic development proposed by the surveyors that were all surrounding either the central settlement or the most highly evaluated beaches that were declared as landscape of absolute preservation (bright red). ( A. S. Kalligas et al., Plan, 1972.)
during the Greek Military Dictatorship
Fig.119 Paradise Beach, Mykonos,1979
Fig.121 Beach land evaluation (left) and bathing quality (top) scheme,1972
(Source: A. S. Kalligas et.al. 1972)
Fig.122 Super Paradise Beach, Mykonos,1985. (Source: Dimitris Koutsoukos in ‘Old Mykonos’)
115 See: S. N. Eisenstadt, “Social Change, Differentiation and Evolution,” American Sociological Review 29, no. 3 (1964))
116 Beaches are managed under the Ministry of Economy that leaseholds them every three years.According to the law ‘on the leasehold of simple use of coastline and beaches’ the right of occupations falls under: public enterprises, hotels, camping, beach facilities and removable canteens, sports organisations, sea leisure transportation means, businesses of umbrellas and sunbeds (See law: 38609 ΕΞ 2023
117 See: Flying flags, Fixing Sands by George Papam in “The Beach Machine”, Kyklada press, Athens, 2020
118 Local authorities are responsible for cleanness of the beach, lifeguard, checking and reporting illegal activity but with no enforcing powers.
119 The double tariff is a term that enables the contemporary beach economics. It refers to a process where the sun-bed set is charged separately from the consumed goods ensuring the minimum spending of its occupants. In the scope of the research it is identified as the primary mechanism enforcing the exclusivity of the beach
120 In 2023, several civil ‘Towel movements’ performed multiple activist practices in response to the rising number of illegal beach occupations by private investors. Through aerial photos and demonstrations, the beach turned into a battleground for negotiating the right to the coastline.
(See: https://kepom.wordpress.com)
Although never implemented due to the fall of the dictatorship, the plan’s projective assumptions appeared relatively accurate. In the coming years, the Mykonian beach will concentrate the country’s most valuable plots and be programmed as a profitable machine. Since the 1980s, plots around the beaches of Mykonos have been constantly subdivided and punctuated with whitewashed hospitality infrastructures. At the same time, local entrepreneurs appropriate the sandy terrains through beach bars, sea-sport centres, and monetised sunbed plots. Dimensioned to the body's size, the leisure equipment and its level of comfort dictate the performances of landscape consumption through hospitality.
Never programmed holistically, the Mykonian coastline is managed today by a layering of externally controlled protocols that determine its mode of operation and flexibility115 Greek beaches are constitutionally protected public properties116 They are institutionally defined by the bordering of their preservation zones. Blue flags and Natura areas demarcate the infrastructural or environmental quality of the coastline and certify its preservation needs according to European standards117 Municipal lifeguard posts signal the presence of the public118 and define a territory of public use around them, while the national estate services are responsible for enforcing beach laws. In parallel, private businesses tolerated by local authorities respond to fines while purchasing the right to determine their territory through fences, paths, sunbeds, beach bars and road expansions.
Yet, to reach its limit, the habitation of the Mykonian beach has been re-formed in a positional good where one’s exclusive identity and economic capacity are ensured through excessively charged beach positions, double tariffs119 and luxurious interiorised experiences. As the beach becomes increasingly militarised, bordered and inaccessible to un-profitable bodies, its occupation has become a field of negotiation between local communities, public entities and private enterprises120 The beach bar, the prototypical Mykonian tourist space, separates hosts and guests, servers and services, locals and ‘others’, the sandy grounds tourism’s frictions and differentiation effects (figs. 127-135). As territorial marks punctuate, the beach transforms into a battleground between local communities, global economic forces and private interests.
Fig.127 Panormos beach bar leisure and work spaces (Author)
Fig.129 Panormos beach bar. (Author)
Fig.131 Paradise beach bar site plan (Author)
Fig.130 Paradise beach bar leisure and work spaces (Author)
Fig.132 Paradise Beach Bar. (Author)
10m. 0
Fig.134 Paraga beach bar site plan. (Author)
Fig.133 Paraga beach bar leisure and work spaces. (Author)
Fig.135 Paraga beach bar. (Author)
The Archipelago of mass tourism was formed as a dispersed multi-layered network of leisure sites: a territory for travel. Mediatised to ignite desire through imaginaries and disciplined to meet expectations, touristic space is both performative and performed. Produced through the interrelation of hosts, guests, and landscapes but legitimised through institutional intervention, the paradoxical products of touristic consumption result in spatio-temporal ruptures that construct heterotopic conditions of re-creation.
The Mykonian beach, evolving into a machine of unnecessary consumption and embodied ludic bathing rituals, is institutionally and materially bordered to be preserved and appropriated for monetary extraction. Accumulating capital, its attracted value radiates toward its surrounding plots and manifests in recursively denser land subdivisions as it approaches the threshold between land and sea. Naked bodies, rather than eliminating their social differences, prostheticise with the athropometric equipment of bathing declaring their hierarchisation according to their consumptive capacity. As the coastline is exclusive, it produces the beach’s social structures, giving rise to frictions and surrendering its role as a ground of connection, where mutual, social and material exchanges occur.
The design confronts the coastline’s regularisation, commodification and homogenisation within tourist development. The intervention reclaims a zone of occupation to challenge the definition of the beach as a preservable and consumable space. It suggests a perpendicular cut
to the coastline to produce a gradient transition between land and sea, materialising their interconnection.
The intervention introduces a large roof structure, casting a public shadow and producing a soft and fluctuating border that halts the expansion of the beach’s segmentation in sunbeds (fig.137). Declared an open-ended public building, it is equipped with devices that expand its potential and condition the sandy ground to host alternative activities and social events. A series of reversible ground manipulations, hard surfaces, soft borders, and sitting areas punctuate the beach, suggesting its collective occupations and contradicting its divisive and normative paraphernalia (figs.142). They await their furnishing with brought objects and electrical devices. Generic equipment of play, public toilets, drinking fountains, storage spaces, and paths are introduced and spread parallel to the coastline, implying the eventual extension of the habitable zone (fig. 143).
The intervention is programmed to flood the adjacent parking plots and eventually to appropriate abandoned beach bars. Campers, canteens, and bazaars take advantage of the shadow and the new infrastructure, breaking down the image of the beach exclusively as a leisure space to introduce a place where different socialities can be performed (fig.144).
Fig.136 Zone of common use. (Author)
Fig.137 Public Shadow. (Author)
Fig.138 Intention: Perpendicular cut, the Coastline as a gradient. (Author)
Fig.139 Structure module and soft borders. (Author)
Fig.140 Intervention Diagram (Author).
01530m.
Fig.141 Elia Beach, Intervention. (Author)
Fig.142 Ground Manipulations.
Hard surface.
Path/ border
Podium.
Fig.143 Beach Equipment. (Author)
Room
Sitting Area Water Infrastructure
Fig.144 Elia beach intervention plan (Author)(
Interlude 2: Leisure Volumes
Tourism is a process of dislocation, a succession of going, experiencing and staying for a finite amount of time in a place different from one’s home. Within this succession, the place of visit is assumed to have the capacity to host the temporal flux of population. Touristic space is therefore required to mobilise and motivate and, ultimately, to carry the traveller’s temporal stasis by providing the space, resources and services required to ensure the visitor’s satisfaction. Crucial for the sustenance of the product, the above have to be achieved without negotiating the promised images and experiences121 Enabling the growth of the touristic economy, the production of capacity and the extension of its limits became central objectives for any presumed destination. Necessarily projective, building carrying capacities in tourism operates through the construction of volumes
Carrying capacity describes the maximum amount of “X” that can be contained within a particular volume122 It refers to the fullness or density that can be achieved without surpassing a threshold of collapse defined by environmental or social constraints. The finitude of space is the root of the idea, brought up in the context of early 19th-century urban over-population anxiety123 Originating from economic theories, capacity became a central notion for biological studies and was conceptualised mathematically and tested in the laboratory by economic and environmental scientists. Part of a logistical model for population growth, capacity supposes a limit at which a state of equilibrium would be achieved between guests and hosting ecosystems124 The scholarly heritage of carrying capacity became the vehicle for the naturalisation of the concept and the framing of population growth under general laws125, ultimately legitimising its political use and infiltration in other fields, such as tourism.
Space and resources are the most usual ways to define touristic carrying capacity. They are the most evident and easily quantifiable measures that tend to be exhausted within any intense, productive process. However, this definition cannot be universally applied as the density limit is strictly guided by the included parameters used to define capacity. Depending on the supposed system's scale and complexity, various delimitating factors can arise both macro- and microscopically. More than that, when considered under a subjective scope, some measures can be un-quantifiable, abstract or purely perceptual126 (i.e. “user satisfaction”), becoming evident only in the event of their exhaustion (disappointment). As such, carrying capacity as a generic attribute of space appears too simplistic to remain useful and disregards the often chaotic ways in which people, landscapes, and systems interact. Beyond its volumetric conception of empty space, capacity is a field charged with case-specific nuances, qualities and characteristics. This allows the re-definition of volume as a mechanism constantly re-invented according to the politics at play, guiding power relations between hosts and guests. Capacity in short guides distribution protocols and development practices that are put in place during the formation of the touristic product.
In tourism, the technical increase of a place’s capacity is also the primary conduit of investment and the vehicle to attract more travellers and/or capital. Constantly aiming to grow, the industry directs political and economic
121 Tourism Carrying Capacity is defined as “The maximum number of people that may visit a tourist destination at the same time, without causing destruction of the physical, economic, socio-cultural environment and an unacceptable decrease in the quality of visitors' satisfaction” (See: UNWTO, ‘Overtourism’? –Understanding and Managing Urban Tourism Growth beyond Perceptions, Executive Summary, 2018, 3,
122 See: Kimberley Peters and Jennifer Turner, “Unlock the Volume: Towards a Politics of Capacity,” Antipode 50, no. 4 (2018): 1037–56
123 Thomas Robert Malthus (19c.), a British political economist brought forward the idea of a maximum pressure that humans can place on natural resources. “The power of population is infinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” His ideas, although mostly unsupported, were largely influential for the development of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin. (See: Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Oxfordshire, England: Oxford World's Classics. p. 13)
124 However this kind of harmonic equilibrium is associated with western conceptions of natural balance and is only observable in laboratory conditions. Most species populations fluctuate, grow and collapse, stay stable or behave in chaotic ways. The level of observed stability is mostly related at the system’s examined scale. The further away one looks, the more stable any system would appear. (See: David Price, “Carrying Capacity Reconsidered,” Population and Environment 21, no. 1 (1999): p.5–26)
125 See: Raymond Pearl and Lowell J. Reed, “On the Rate of Growth of the Population of the United States since 1790 and Its Mathematical Representation,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 6, no. 6 (1920): 275–88
126 See: John Urry, “The ‘consumption’ of Tourism,” Sociology 24, no. 1 (1990): 23–35,
127 The effect of congestion differs according to the touristic experience. The difference between the ‘romantic’ tourist gaze, to be performed in solitude and the ‘collective’ tourist gaze as a group activity are both enabling kinds of touristic consumption that imply different levels of leisure ‘democratisation’. (See: John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: SAGE Publications, 2011)).
Fig.145 Carrying Capacity as an asymptotic curve reaching a state of equilibrium: (Source: David Price, “Carrying Capacity Reconsidered,” Population and Environment 21, no. 1 (1999): 5–26)
negotiations, decision-making, planning and the simultaneous management of land, resources and people. Therefore, for tourism, capacity is a self-validating mechanism, constantly being built to be surpassed; it simultaneously defines a place’s economic potential, triggers its further development or delimitates the number of its potential customers. Under this scope, touristic management and design become territorial forces that aim to appropriate and control a place's natural and human ingredients for its economic purposes. In short, space, resources, subjects, and (eco-) systems are all, in some way, capacity carriers for the touristic apparatus that determine the content of the offered product and its required forms of labour. The way those carriers affect the economy reveals that both increase and decrease of capacity and density can contribute to the economic goals of tourism127 Capacity is always the underlying organising principle, whether aiming at massifying the flux or exclusifying its customer.
In spatial terms, tourism's capacity is measured by the number of bodies a space can fit. Abstracted to the dimensions of the body and quantified in bed units, spatial capacity is the goal of hospitality infrastructure creation. It is a pre-requisite for the manifestation of the touristic phenomenon and precedes the traveller's arrival. As such, it has become the industry's primary economic and projective investment and monetisation tool. Increasing hosted travellers, however, challenges the touristic product’s character as a positional good, threatening the authenticity of the experience in the case of overcrowding. Thus, the density of beds and rooms and the amount of emptiness surrounding the resting body become two polar factors determining the quality of hospitality space and the nature of the touristic product.
In addition, responding to the demands of the hosted population and ensuring the smooth operation of the apparatus resource management also becomes a fundamental parameter of touristic capacity. Operational capacity is a field where material and immaterial resources are managed, allocated and flowed within the tourist circuit. Its excess increases the value of the touristic product while requires external inputs, creating a condition of dependency and enabling profit through trade and infrastructure. Extending the availability of resources allows for a further increase in spatial density, forming a feedback loop.
Finally, a host's ability to serve as many guests as possible becomes another field of potential capacity increase. Hosting subjects are managed to perform through the intensification of labour and its inscription within the service space. On the contrary, the ability to spend hierarchically differentiates guests according to their profitability. Therefore, potential capacity, the capacity act, is another way to profitably fill the volume. As guests and hosts become more capable, their differences are exaggerated while the overall system is intensified through increased consumption.
Within the islands' strict spatial definition and innate scarcity, the question of capacity becomes crucial and has historically guided insular subsistence practices, forming a stewardly relation to land and triggering the Archipelago’s networked ecology. The intensification of the touristic industry appears antagonistic with its contained space and natural and human resources scarcity, while its continuous growth seems paradoxical, negating its context. A managerial negotiation between sustained authenticity and profitable reproducibility, carrying capacity for the islands is ultimately a question of power and sustainability.
Fig.146 ‘Greece, an endless hotel’. (By Kostas Mitropoulos, 1973)
Fig.148 White house, 2023. (Author)
Fig.149 Pumping station, 2023. (Author).
Fig.150 Extraction, 2023. (Author)
Fig.151 Water storage, 2023. (Author).
Fig.152 Sings, 2023. (Author)
Fig.153 Signage, 2023. (Author).
Fig.154 North-east coast, Mykonos, 2023. (Author)
Fig.155 Ornos Bay, 2023. (Author).
Fig.156 Grid, 2023. (Author)
Fig.157 Detail, 2023. (Author)
Fig.158 Underground, 2023. (Author)
Fig.159 Building, 2023. (Author)
Fig.160 Dam, 2023. (Author)
Fig.161 Land, 2023. (Author)
Fig.162 White Houses, 2023. (Author)
Fig.163 Plaster, 2023. (Author)
Fig.164 Bottles, 2023. (Author)
Fig.165 Artificial Lake, 2023. (Author)
Fig.166 Marathos artificial lake, 2023. (Author)
Chapter 3: Capacities
Chapter three, Capacities’, examines the production of carrying capacity within the island of Mykonos as the primal territorial gesture of the touristification process. As the island prepares to host the fluxes of tourism, its land and building stock are modified to meet the expectations set by the touristic imaginaries successfully. Sub-chapter 3.1, named ‘Insular programming: Creating the Island Host’ investigates operative moments of capacity production on the island and highlights the pivotal role of the hospitality sector in conducting political and economic motives in different phases of touristic development. The study of operative public and private plans traces the passing from the state host to the host nation. The chapter reads capacity as a constantly re-invented term at the disposal of economic extraction. As the land is programmed to sustain its seasonal population, development zones and infrastructures become an active background for the industry’s operation. Sub-chapter 2.2 Replicas: Architectural Translations and Suburban Islands delves into the transformation of the Mykonian white house and reads its multiplication as the result of tourism's territorial modification. Building regulations enabled the democratisation of the touristic sector while producing a homogenised post-modern environment that steadily increased its volumes, leading to territorial exhaustion. As island is sub-urbanised through accelerated flows and the continuous replication of its image, its ground is subdivided and privatised. The third design act re-imagines the white house as an active follie that constructs a zone of exception around it. Plot and zone unification becomes the primary protocol to re-imagine a scenario of land use negotiations based on commoning and local resource management
Capacity, noun:
1. the maximum amount that something can contain.
2. the amount that something can produce
from Latin capacitas, from capax, capac- that can contain’, from capere‘take or hold’.
Fig.167 “Levinges apparatus”.The apparatus was designed in order to prevent infection from vermin, providing privacy from unwanted looks while allowing the visitor to be aware of their surroundings., (Source: A Handbook for Travellers in Greece (London, 1845))
129 Delos hotel was the first inn to operate in Mykonos in 1924. Aiming to accommodate travellers wishing to visit Delos it was located at the coastline of the old port to and programmed as a miniature Grand Hotel. It contained 8 rooms, a lobby hall that would operate as a restaurant as well as a boat - bar in the sea.
130 Through the Law 180/1946 “Due to natural beauties, archaeological, historical, cultural interest, sanitary baths, organised exhibitions, fests, celebrations etc or finally because of summer or winter vacations” different regions would be could be labelled as “touristic places”.
131 As part of the national reconstruction plan, funded by the Marshal plan 54 hotels would be built by the G.N.T.O. between 1950-67 (See: The policies of the G.N.T.O. in the period 1960-1967, Myrianthe Moussa,2013)
132 With an initial capacity of 50 rooms.
In 1854, John Murray’s “Handbook for Travellers in Greece” systematised the practices of the Grand Tour, giving the general guidelines for the period’s travellers heading toward the Archipelago. Among its contents, the necessary equipment to be brought by the visitor was enlisted. The most essential object mentioned first was “Levigne’s apparatus” a portable device used for overnight sleep. A foldable mattress, surrounded by an over-hanged fabric canopy, would create a safe area of private, temporary occupation that was strictly dimensioned to the size of the body, separating it from the foreign environment and its dangers. Hygienic, private and protective membranes of separation from the ‘Other’ were used to host the traveller's body at rest. Similarly, spaces of hospitality construct an ephemeral territory that appropriates pieces of land to accommodate the temporal stop of touristic mobility. Carriers of touristic capacity, machines of body-storage, hotels, hostels and rented rooms in Mykonos were guided by their political and economic frameworks. They shaped, through their offered volumes and arrangements, the conditions defining the guests’ experience and relationship with the visited place.
Before the Aegean’s re-configuration as a tourist destination in the 1950s, spaces for hospitality were scarce. As such, the travellers on the Grand Tour were hosted either in temporal cells, quarantine houses, or small-’Grand’ hotels129 During the post-war period, the systematisation of the touristic phenomenon at a national scale, the codification of the landscape as the product, and the creation of a capacity for high standards would lead to the development of a hospitality model tailored to the emerging tourist product. Tackling in parallel the production of bed units and the modernisation of rural areas deemed as ‘touristic 130, the G.N.T.O. (1950) set out to produce public hotels throughout the country, forming the Greek tourist geography131
As such, Mykonos would host the initial tests of the G.N.T.O. The hotel Leto (1953)132 addressed to wealthy travellers heading to Delos, was the first public hotel of the G.N.T.O. With it, the intentions and qualities of the local touristic model were communicated through architecture. Occupying a plot on the old port’s beach, the facility adopted a rational modernist language while semantically appropriating elements from local architecture to integrate into its surroundings. Built in stone and white-washed concrete surfaces, the hotel was broken into four recessing floors, following the topography of its terrain and offering views and access to the adjacent seascape.
133 More than semantic the Xenia Hotels would also be used for the practice of period’s touristic studies students. (G.N.T.O. Archives)
The principles tested in ‘Leto would later be solidified and reproduced through the G.N.T.O.’s ‘Xenia’ program that produced a national hospitality network of modernist hotels of small capacity and quality services. The organisation hired established architects for the project and utilised architecture to associate touristification with modernisation and progress. Aiming to set a standard to be followed by the private sector, architecture became an educational interface133 preparing local populations to engage in the uprising economy while integrating Greek traditional architecture as a unique property of the touristic product offered by the state host.
Fig.168 Hotel Leto, 1953 by Prokopios Vaseliades. (Source:doma.index)
134 See: Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance (1983),” Architecture and the Public World, 2024, 199–210
135 “And built the hotel with the local stone, which left in its natural hue and texture, while had the parapets on the roofs, which were reinforced concrete, whitewashed, just like the locals of Mykonos did with dry stone walls and their hump. And this in such a way, that when one saw the Xenia from afar, one would think that the Xenia buildings also were dry stone walls with their ‘hump’, among the property walls that were strewn throughout the landscape of Mykonos” (Aris Konstantinidis, G.N.T.O. Calendar, Athens, 2008)
Aris Konstantinidis, the G.N.T.O.’s head architect (1957-67), would systematise the public hotel’s architectural language within a framework later defined as critical regionalism134 Standardising rooms from their massing to their furniture and reinterpreting traditional elements to hotel design, Greek modernism would prioritise the infrastructure’s integration within the landscape, putting it at the centre of the local touristic product. As such, hospitality was shaped in a ‘vernaclularist experience for its bourgeois customers. His ideas were successfully applied in the Xenia’ of Mykonos, placed on the Chora’s adjacent hill. The hotel was of small capacity (57 rooms), fragmented into seven low-height block volumes, scattered on the landscape and constructed with un-plastered stone load-bearing walls and white-washed concrete slabs135. Rooms of minimum dimensions, single beds and simple materials would create a monastic background stripped of redundancy, directing the gaze toward the environment. The hotel would also be designed as a stand-alone experience, containing a restaurant, a bar, a path toward the beach, and two water tanks for internal use. As hotels and bodies were assimilating to their occupied terrain, the consumption of landscape was sold as an embodied experience.
136 The National Bank of Greece has in collaboration with the G.N.T.O. and the Union of Hotel owners the Organisation of Hotel Funds already since 1938 (See: Angelos Vlachos, Touristic Development and Public Policies in Modern Greece (19141950)
137 For example according to the Compulsory Law 543/1968 hotel owners were getting tax, fuel, advertisement, insurance, telecommunication and public property rental discounts.
138 The motives for the development of the tourist sector were coinciding the cancelling of agricultural debt, providing the conditions for the reinitiation of the rural economy through tourism. (See: Michael Nikolakakis, Tourism and Greek Society: 19451974, 2013,)
139 Subsidies up to 60% were allocated preferably to large scale touristic investments (10 million drachmas and up) (See: Compulsory Law 147/1967)
140 In most areas of Greece these would be implemented in the form of the mono-block hotel that would contain more than 200 rooms. (See: Tourist Facilities in Greece 1950-1975, Vasilis Kolonas in Yannis Aespos, Tourism Landscapes Remaking Greece,2015).)
The state host of the early post-war period produced instances of capacity for the island's development and modernisation by forming an elaborate touristic product without, however, providing for a holistic plan. The G.N.T.O. expected the private sector to follow up, utilising subsidisation frameworks for private touristic enterprises. However, those aspirations proved unfruitful, as Mykonian populations, still unfamiliar with the tourist industry, were hesitant to engage136 During the military dictatorship (1967-74), tourist capacity would become the interface for the democratisation of the sector. Policies for facilitating small-scale touristic enterprises were implemented137 building regulations were relaxed, and the G.N.T.O. was authorised to issue building permits, triggering the multiplication of rooms-to-let in rural areas.138 On the other hand, large hotels were legally labelled as industries’, gaining access to public funding139 and creating the framework for producing massive touristic infrastructures throughout the country140 As such, a host nation was formed during the dictatorship, generating a new class of hotel owners and facilitating the regime’s populist agenda.
141 Delos LTD was a company set by the architect in the context of the Delos Symposia: a series of yearly meetings of academics and scholars on the island of Delos. Conferences, site visits and bathing co-existed for in Delos before its legislated re-definition as an preserved space. (Source: Doxiades Archives, Delos Declaration)
142 The hotels and the bungalows would provide for an overall capacity of 639 beds, a size that was unprecedented for the island. (Source: Ayios Ioannis Bay Feasibility study in Doxiades Archives)
143 As the plan wasn't provided funding for unspecified reasons; (Source: Doxiades Letters to the G.N.T.O.)
interventions. (Source: Doxiades Archive)
The period's tendencies are demonstrated in a development plan by Constantinos Doxiades’ Delos LTD company141. Doxiades, operating simultaneously as an architect, a planner and an entrepreneur, made an in-depth study, analysing points of potential development in Mykonos, ultimately constructing a plan (1970) for the Ayios Ioannis Bay at the East part of the island. Understanding the emerging value of the Mykonian beach, the company purchased plots and planned them in layering leisure activities revolving around the coastline, taking advantage of its economic potential. The facility was intended to accommodate travellers from different social strata. It was composed of two hotels, multiple bungalows142 bathing facilities, housing complexes and villas for sale placed within plots of increasing size as they moved further from the beach. Although the plan remained unrealised143 it successfully projected future Mykonian development patterns—architectural speculation legitimised capacity creation through land accumulation and coastal zone privatisation.
Fig.172 Left, Top: Ayios Ioannis bay Mykonos Model.
Fig.173 Middle: Apollonion Mykonos Hotel D-GRE-A 32170-5 (20018)
Fig.174 Bottom:Apollonion
Constantinos
Fig.171 Agios Ioannis bay with numbered sites of
144 The plan was commissioned to a team headed by A.S.Kalligas, J.B.Politis and A.G.Romano, at the time teaching at the Architectural Association of London (AA). The design team was composed by a variety of specialists, engineers, sociologists archaeologists, architects, data analysts and 8 AA students of A.G. Romanos.(Source: A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Renhia: Development Plan, 1972)
145 According to Law 1313/1972 Greece was divided in three hierarchised zones of development that would be legible for the provision of public funds for touristic development. As such, Mykonos was for the first time officially recognised as a touristic region legible for first class development. The law was restructured in 1973 after the delivery of the Regional plan this time specifying precisely the principles laid out by the design group.
146 The study contained multiple surveys on themes like the island’s landscape, architecture, urban fabric, population, land ownership conditions etc. (Source: A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Renhia: Development Plan, 1972.)
148 The hospitality infrastructure proposed by the plan was exclusively limited to small touristic enterprises of 30-40 beds each. The author speculates that in response to the cheap’ tourists that were appearing during that period the regime set out to exclusify the Mykonian product through the provision of luxury hospitality services.
However, as Mykonos was becoming an international point of interest, it appears that the Junta, rather than through individual endeavours, would aspire to tackle the development of capacity at a territorial scale, programming the whole island complex of Mykonos- Delos and Rhenia for tourism. As such, in 1971, the government commissioned144 the island's regional plan, preparing it to be classified as a prefecture of touristic development145 An exhaustive analysis of the area146 accompanied the plan, which described areas of development, preservation and settlement expansion. A series of layouts of infrastructural networks147 and architectural proposals for hospitality infrastructure were provided within it. The whole island was framed in the plan as a touristic apparatus where the perception of the Mykonian landscape guided the division of leisure or labour activities (fig.175). As such, touristic areas were placed on the southern coast of Mykonos between areas of preservation and highly evaluated beaches. The architectural proposals gridded the dedicated zones in southfacing rectangular plots, filling them with white cubes for luxurious re-creation programming the island for an overall capacity of 6443-bed units148 The regime's dissolution (1974) halted the plan's implementation. However, its projections appeared accurate in predicting the zones for future development, the placement of infrastructural and preservable areas and most importantly, the island’s filling with small-scale white-washed hospitality volumes.
Fig.175 (Left) Physical space: its formal structure factors affecting the development of the island. (Source: A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Rehnia: Development Plan, 1972.)
Fig.177 Development proposal for the zone of Touristic Development Mykonos (Source:A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Renhia: Development Plan, 1972.)
Fig.176 (Top) General layout of water supply works, 1972. (Source:A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Rinia: Development Plan, 1972.)
149 For example the G.N.T.O.’s ‘Preservation and development program of traditional settlements was the second largest public effort to create capacity in the country. The program re-purposed abandoned settlements as touristic villages. The village of Oia in Santorini, an island south of Mykonos, is paradigmatic of this effort.
150 Their particularities will be explored in further detail in the final sub chapter.
See: Urban planning Decree 144/1976)
Through these evolutions and projective plans the Mykonian tourist space slowly found its volume, form and content. While spatial capacity remained relatively low and composed of small locally operated rooms, the infrastructural development of the early 70s triggered an influx of travellers that re-shaped the local economy. In the absence of holistic plans, tourism in Mykonos developed partially informally. However, the Juntas liberalisation policies would manifest more intensively within other touristic places. As such, in the coming years, an effort to reverse the massification effect of previous periods would lead to stricter development protocols. The touristic product returned to tradition149 and specific building regulations were put in place, controlling the morphology of new constructions for the preservation of the island’s image150 At a territorial scale, the Mykonos zoning plan was implemented in 1986, following essentially the principles of the 1972 plan. Zones of touristic development were classified as sea-side developable settlements, the Chora was expended, and infrastructural zones were pushed toward the inside of the island, dividing it into a touristic foreground and an infrastructural background. In parallel, through state subsidies and the steady increase of travellers, small-scale development rates would be sustained and controlled through protocols in a post-planning process.
151 The ENVIREG program of the EU tackled the development of regional plans for three Aegean islands (Andros-Tinos-Mykonos) (See: Law 62592/2980/10.09.1996)
152 See: Presidential Decree 07.03.2005 ‘On the definition of Zones of Settlement control’
153 The decision was issued in 2023 by the supreme court of Greece after a series of frictions that rose within the island. The ban is supposed to remain active until a new urban plan determines precise controlling mechanism for the future development of Mykonos.
154 Overall the plans are parts of foreign investments and are granted special authority in order to deem their large investment sustainable. For example a plan at the Karapetis beach (fig.178) in Mykonos predicts the creation of 192 beds in a five star hotel of an overall investment of 40 million euros. (See: Presidential Decree, 304/10.06.2020.)
155 See: Atay and Òscar Saladié, “Water Scarcity and Climate Change in Mykonos (Greece): The Perceptions of the Hospitality Stakeholders,” Tourism and Hospitality 3, no. 3 (2022): 765–87
As the most privileged land was ‘filled’ with hospitality enterprises, capacity started to have a negative connotation, threatening the authenticity of the touristic product and the island's social structure. In 1992, a ‘Special Zoning Study’ was enforced by the E.U. for the island's environmental preservation151 Ultimately, the land of Mykonos was codified in ‘Zones of Settlement control’152 (fig.181) according to its geophysical properties and development potential, imposing limitations on land uses and building volumes (fig.183). However, the momentum of touristic development appeared uncontrollable. After the millennium, building activity was intensified, ignoring the imposed regulations. Within the absence of regulatory enforcement, the post-crisis neo-liberalisation of the touristic sector allowed for an excessive increase in touristic capacity. Reaching a limit in 2023, building outside settlement zones was completely banned in Mykonos until the island's carrying capacity was precisely determined153 Within this ‘state of emergency, the state only allowed ‘organised’ and capital-intensive foreign investments to operate under the exemption. ‘Special Regional Development Plans of Strategic Importance shall create luxurious resorts within the touristic zone of the island that were authorised to surpass any building and zoning regulation154 (fig.179)
Mykonos is a small and resource-scarce island with a capacity of 25,245 beds that hosts 1.3 million visitors yearly, pushing it seasonally to its limits. Already in 1972, water scarcity was an observable issue on the island. Even after the production of artificial lakes, desalination plants, and water extraction points, the island is sustained only due to external water imports from the capital155 Resource capacity has reached its limits, proving that the notion of tourist capacity is only a validating mechanism, built, surpassed and re-defined according to the political and economic aspirations of the period. Passing from zones of development to zones of control to plans of strategic importance, building capacity in Mykonos is more of a discursive political tool rather than a sustainability measure.
Fig.180 General Urban plan of Mykonos. (Source: law 28783/1406/1987)
Fig.179 (Right) Special plans of development locations and South touristic zone,(Author)
Fig.178 (Top) Special plans of Development, Plan by Nikos Valsmakis (Source: Ministry of environment.) 5km.
Areas of protection of remarkable natural landscapes
Settlements
Urban and Infrastructural areas[2.3α.9]
Sub-urban conservation zones [2.3α.11]
Map of Zones of Settlement Control, legislated in 2022. In this legislation the current patterns and rules that dictate densities and settlement developments today are described. Zones of legal building as well as definitions of sizes of plots and buildings dictate the current model of sub-urbanisation in Mykonos.
Areas of protection of remarkable natural landscapes[2.3α.8]
Areas of Natural Landscape Conservation [2.3α.6]
Agricultural Areas [2.2.β]
Archaeological Areas [2.3α.1α]
Agriculture -Livestock Areas[2.2στ.2]
Areas of Tourism- Leisure
Areas of remarkable beaches and bathing coastlines conservation [2.3α.7]
Processing areas and Storage
Archaeological Area buffer Zones [2.3α.1.β]
Urban and Infrastructural areas
Areas of Tourism- Leisure
Areas of Natural Landscape Conservation
Areas of remarkable beaches and bathing coastlines conservation
Agricultural Areas
Archaeological Areas
Agriculture -Livestock Areas
Sub-urban conservation zones
Processing areas and Storage
Fig.181
Fig. 182 (Right) Land codification (Author)
Areas of TourismLeisure[2.1.a.1]
Processing areas and Storage[2.1.δ]
Areas of remarkable beaches and bathing coastlines conservation [2.3α.7] Agricultural Areas [2.2.β]
Agriculture -Livestock Areas[2.2στ.2]
Areas of protection of remarkable natural landscapes[2.3α.8] Urban and Infrastructural areas[2.3α.9]
Sub-urban conservation zones [2.3α.11]
Fig.183 Building sizes in Mykonos before and after the 2005 Zoning, 2023, (Source: Zones of settlement control Legislation 2005) (Author)
Fig.184 Map of Mykonos Showing, Artificial Lakes, Water infrastructure and Pools. (Author) (Data source:http:/ /lmt.ypeka.gr)
Mykonos, Marathos Artificial Lake 1992, Capacity: 2.85hm3
Mykonos, Ano Mera Artificial lake, 1997 Capacity: 0.97 hm3
Fig.185 Water infrastructures in Mykonos Image (Source: Greek Land Registy)
3.2 Replicas: Architectural Translations and Suburban Islands
156 “When […] you will be visiting our joyful Aegean islands, you will be amazed by […] the absolute simplicity, the logic of the arrangement, the sacred lines of the ancient houses of Delos, but above all, by the fascinating sight of the houses on the surrounding islands […] And you will be no less surprised when you recognise in those humble dwellings the combinations of those outlines, recesses and extrusions and the successful meeting of the planes that a modern architect would only have wished for in his compositions [...] encounters that […] were produced…] as a result of the perfect harmonisation of form and function. […] You will notice […] the absolute absence of ornament […]; a great realism that sacrifices the detail to the essential.” Extracted from: Emilia Athanassiou et al., “The Modern Gaze of Foreign Architects Travelling to Interwar Greece: Urban Planning, Archaeology, Aegean Culture, and Tourism,” Heritage 2, no. 2 (2019): 1117–35)
157 See: Dean Mac Cannell, Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class (London, 1976).
158 Aris Konstadinidis conducted an in depth study of the Mykonian rural house in 1951. His study on traditional architecture was operative in the formation of his design in the Xenia Hotel in Mykonos. (See: Aris Konstantinidis, Two “villages” From Mykonos and Some More General Thoughts with Them. (Hērakleio: Panepistēmiakes Ekdoseis Krētēs, 2011).
159 The specific origin of lime-washing is uncertain. During the Byzantine era a white plaster with lime was utilised as a common stabiliser of masonry walls, while lime-washing used as a ceremonial tradition before Easter. During the 14th century, it makes its appearance as a disinfectant across the Mediterranean region.
160 See: Travelling to the Cyclades: Modernist Projections by Dimitra Kondylatou in The Architect is Absent: Approaching the Cycladic Holiday House, Kyklada Press,2020
161 Queen Frederick after her visit to Mykonos (1954), advised the then prime minister that the local houses o would be ideal for the advertisement of tourism in Greece (ibid.)
162 15/6/1972 order 13680
In 1933, before the members of the 1V CIAM departed towards the Aegean, the dean of the Architecture School of Athens, Anastasios Orlandos, prepared them for their encounter156 Directing their gaze toward the vernacular architecture of the Aegean, he communicated how the humble dwellings’ of the Archipelago were timeless manifestations of a modernist and perfect realism’ materialising a balance of simplicity, functionality and scale. Looking at the Cycladic house, the modernist gaze was pre-conditioned to see the landscape of the Archipelago as a carrier of a certain quality that could validate modernist ideals. Its example is paradigmatic in how modern narratives transform material relations into symbolic expressions within a process of cultural appropriation157 Discursively becoming archetypical, the Mykonian house, through the repetition of the above method, has undergone a typological transformation to be absorbed within the touristic apparatus. Slowly stripped from its initial context, the type was distinguished as an intrinsic sign of the local imaginary while, most importantly, it became the primary carrier of touristic capacity on the island.
The traditional houses of Mykonos have been initially developed based on the availability of materials and local construction knowledge. Small-scale, singleroom, cubic structures made with (plastered) masonry walls and flat roofs, they composed either a continuous fabric of two-floor buildings within settlements, or a dispersed sucession of large productive plots with single-storey agricultural dwellings (fig.186). Despite their minimum dimensions, the second are referred to by the locals as ‘villages’158 The term communicates a historical condition of autonomy of resources and productive activities. The plots were equipped with agricultural production and water extraction devices, while their land was modified with stone walls for water retention and cultivation. Isolated entities ‘villages’ proposed a form of habitation defined by land stewardship and resources and labour commoning among the extended family members.
The initial form of the Mykonian houses was an expression of the habitation practices that produced it. On the contrary, their distinctive whiteness, providing for their aesthetic uniformity, was initiated as a disinfection process159 and was institutionally popularised in the Archipelago during the modern era. In 1938, in fear of concurrent epidemics, I. Metaxas ordered the compulsory lime-washing of all the houses in the Aegean while requesting the painting of doors and windows in blue, similar to the colours of the national flag160 As such, the practice was enforced and was charged with nationalist connotations, signalling the Aegean's cultural unity. For the first post-war travellers, whiteness became part of the local imaginary, a sign of vernacular authenticity associated with the picturesque appearance of the island. Advertised by the imagery of the G.N.T.O.161, the sight of white houses became an expectation to be fulfilled during visits and a preservable part of the local touristic product. In 1972, with a direct order to local police stations, the dictatorship required that all houses in the Cyclades were requested to be painted white before the summer162 as such lime-washing transformed from a disinfection practice to a preparatory ritual for the touristic season. Performing for the satisfaction of tourists, the local population was behaviourally controlled, and the insular environment was homogenised, internalising the tourist gaze.
‘Among other regulations, polychromy at the exterior of houses is forbidden …the primary colour should be white…this is an obligation of all inhabitants…for the harmonisation of all the Cycladic islands’. 1972 Direct order to the police stations for the whitewashing of houses before summer. (General state archives)
Fig.187 Lime-washing, Mykonos, 1957 (Rene Burri)
Fig.186 Village in Mykonos. (In: Aris Konstantinidis, Two “villages” from Mykonos and Some More General Thoughts with Them. (Hērakleio: Panepistēmiakes Ekdoseis Krētēs, 2011).’)
Fig.188
163
164 For example between 1997-2006 the average size per building permit was 307 sqm (271 building permits) while 2018-22 was 507.9 sqm (634 building permits) (Source: Greek statistical Authrority)
Ultimately, the white house would become a legislated and compulsory morphology. As preserving the vernacular environment became a primary goal for touristic areas, in 1976, Mykonos would become the first of the Cycladic islands to acquire its own urban and morphological building regulation163 Through it, the white house was regularised from its positioning to the plot to its architectural detail and interiors. Codified to its composing elements: small volumes, white surfaces, flat roofs, rounded corners, small colourful openings, etc., the white house became abstracted and reproducible to sustain the authentic image of the island. Stripped from the initial conditions that produced it, it became a sign, a multiplier and a material manifestation of touristic imagery, formulating the insular landscape as a post-modern touristic space characterised by a white-washed facadism.
Treated as empty volumes and carriers of ‘otherness’, white houses would host the Mykonian touristic performances and consumption patterns. More than an imaginary, they became generic spatial devices, functionally differentiated and intrinsically connected with a way of inhabiting, consuming and gazing at the island. Re-purposed or newly built, they provided appropriable volumes surrounding the traveller’s body at any stage of the experience. They were filled with various programs like hotels, bars, tavernas, shops, gas stations, industries and so on; internal organisations were disguised behind the white surface, while functions were declared only through exterior signage. White houses were eventually enlarged as hospitality infrastructures164 and their interiors were subdivided to maximise the number of beds they contained, giving rise to an apartment-like plan composed of generic living spaces (fig.190). In addition, the mandatory form would trigger the development of specific building practices that adjusted modern construction techniques to the local image. Concrete skeletons and brick infills, covered with thick plaster, would allow for the reproduction of a type that would become the primary conduit of touristic investment and the carrier of the island's touristic capacity (fig.192).
See Mykonos Delos and Rheniia building regulation. (Urban Decree:336/Δ/1976)
Fig.189 Morphological Study of the Mykonian White house (Source: Kalligas et.al.1972)
Fig.191 White house, 2023 (Author)
Fig.192 Evolution of the white house construction detail from the 19th century, the 60’s and today respectively (Author)
2000’s
165 For example in 2009 a buildable plot in Ano Mera an in-land settlement would have an average price of 150 euros per sqm while one in the Ayios Ioannis Bay would go for 625 euro per sqm (Source: ‘The influence of Urban changes on land values. Application in Mykonos: Land values after the validation of Zones of Settlement control (2010) by Maria Ploumistou’)
As the white house became a device operating both semantically and functionally for the touristic apparatus, it became the vehicle for the restructuring of Mykonian lands. Triggered by post-war migration towards the capital, the availability of abandoned fields, open spaces and pasture lands allowed the transformation of the local economy and the subdivision of land whose value was now determined by their proximity to sites of leisure and views toward the landscape165 As such, they were now filled with villas, roomsto-let and small hotels, often adjacent to existing older structures (fig.200). Building regulations aimed at the preservation of the landscape did not allow the production of a dense urban fabric and limited building activity to one- or two-floor buildings. Their surrounding volume, inducing the illusion of landscape ownership to accommodate leisure experiences, transformed the enclosures of dwellings from property markers to isolative membranes for its guests. In response to the over-congestion threat, temporary insular habitation became an internalised, all-inclusive experience. Behind the enclosures, exterior spaces were equipped with devices of play, such as pools, barbecues, gardens, and utility spaces to accommodate excessive leisure consumption rituals (fig.193).
166 For example,”The Regulation of Energy Performance of Buildings” (2010) allowed the increase of buildable surfaces up to 50% on structures that where build underground, had only one facade and where covered with the material of the landscape. The regulation provided a new morphology that would extend the volumes built on the island without insulting the product.
167 The legalisation of illegal construction in Greece was implemented with the Law 4178/2013 that required a simple architectural survey on the built structures and their declaration to the local urban planning service (fig.194).
As occupied volumes became in parallel, a signifier of the traveller’s class and a measure of potential value, multiple ways to increase them were invented. Extending underground, covered with dirt or hidden behind insulated stone walls, the possible capacity building was expanded166 As such, offering more potential for economic profit, plots on steep hills acquired more value, changing the internal land-value geography of the island. In other cases, volumes were produced either by completely evading their legal obligations or by a posteriori legalised with the state's acknowledgement167 In this context, architecture and engineering have become a craft of regulatory manipulation. The increase in capacity became synonymous with a condition of regularised exemptions. Ultimately framed as a threat to the idyllic landscape, the catalysation of building activity created frictions based on carrying capacity and environmental degradation.
Fig.193 Mykonos northern coastline segment, filled with villas and pools.
(Source:Google Maps)
Fig.194 Mykonos legalisation of house areas expansion marked in green, 2013. (Source: Stavrakopoulos Family Archive)
168 Currently there are 1000 private water pumps operate in Mykonos (Ministry of Environment: http://lmt. ypeka.gr)
169 The islands population has grown from 3800 in 1971 to 10.134 in 2011 and is the result of internal migration from the capital as well as the influx of foreign populations who seek permanent dwelling on the island. The effect of increase is manifested on the fact that since 1986, Mykonos is witnessing the highest building activity in the Cyclades. (Source: Greek statistical authority)
170 As the main settlement is reprogrammed to receive functions of tourism, like shops, restaurants and hospitality infrastructure the local population is pushed away towards the suburbs. As such, the sprawl effect of Mykonos does not only affect the touristic geography of the island but its permanent population as well.
(See: Luca Salvati, “‘Rural’ Sprawl, Mykonian Style: A Scaling Paradox,” International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology 20, no. 2 (February 7, 2013)
A. S.
Through their typological transformation, units of increased complexity came with the intensification of resource consumption. Private water pumps and power generators appeared within the plots, filling the infrastructural gaps left by the absence of a plan168 In parallel, road networks, a pre-requisite for the formulation of buildable plots, sometimes projectively expand the potential habitable surfaces on the island. Simultaneously, as water, electricity and communication grids spread and connected with each house, the island is transformed into an assembly tailored for touristic consumption. Developed through fragmentary, informal private initiatives, the environment of Mykonos acquired a sub-urban form169 characterised by sprawl170 and a dis-continuous urban fabric (fig.201). As the in-land was undesirable by touristic development, it became the infrastructural background of the system collecting the central facilities of the island. On the other hand, activities are densified around the western zone of the island, at the outskirts of the central settlements, close to the airport and the new port, and within defined areas of touristic development along the southern coastline. The edge and the gate points have become become the centre point of island development and operation.
The white house, through its constant self-replication, became a dispersed territorial mark of the Archipelago's touristification. The island and its artefacts, assimilated within the industry, are now dis-located, exemplifying tourism’s reflexive ability to appropriate elements of place to form its visual culture. The house is performative, acting as a capacity carrier and interplaying within the polarity of desired authenticity and profitable reproducibility. Seasonally inhabited, its emptiness during the winter manifests its detachment from the permanent reality of the island and becomes the material indicator of local alienation. Stripped of its initial meaning, the landscape, now a lost paradise, is mentally reconstructed as an imaginary through punctual symbols of a simulated locality.“Aegeanness” exists only as a narration that links different time spaces. The Archipelagic space has accelerated and is no longer bounded by its insular condition. Still, it is becoming a suburb of its mainland while being increasingly connected to the global tourism circuit. Accepting more than 7 million travellers annually, it transforms from a place to a site of consumption while its spatio-temporal structure is liquefied within its dromological reorganisation.
Fig.195 Mykonos Road network, 1972 (Source:
Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Rhenia: Development Plan, 1972.)
Fig.196 ‘Dynamic field of town expansion’. (Source: Kalligas et al 1972.)
Fig.197 Mykonos in the 60’s (Source: Greek Military geographical service)
Fig.198 Mykonos today, (Google Maps)
Fig.200 “Village” plot evolution. In Ano Mera Mykonos (Author)
1890’s. Initial structure.
1910’s Expansion of initial house.
1970’s. Division of Plots and addition of Holiday House
1980’s.Addition of second vacation house and extensions
1990’s. Church
Fig.201 Sprawl in Mykonos, 2023, (Author)
Codified to their specific elements and strictly adjusted to self-replicate, the white houses of Mykonos carry both the ingredients for the reconstruction of local imaginaries and the excess volumes required by their capacitive role. Reproducible and yet proclaiming a certain authenticity, they become territorial marks of the Archipelago’s rising condition. As the land becomes disciplined through zones, commodified through successive subdivisions, and punctuated through the dispersal of hospitality and infrastructure, the insular landscape transforms into an economic machine. Modified, appropriated and extracted materially and economically by the extra-territorial forces of tourism, the terrain reaches states of exhaustion, leading to conditions of external dependency. Ultimately reconstructing local social realities and productive processes, touristic capacity constantly reinvents itself, disregarding the ground it occupies. Always projective and then reflexive to the emergent demands, it self-validates and grows recursively. Awaiting to host the temporary halt of touristic mobility, the mono-functional island is seasonally immobilised and constructs an alienating landscape in its effort to resemble itself.
The third design act tackles the normative and management protocols of touristification. Placed at the edges of the inactive plots produced by the fragmented sprawled fabric, it attempts a gesture of re-activation while challenging tourism’s land evaluation. The intervention parasitically inhabits plot enclosures, suggesting their unification and semi-commoning.
Also, it advocates for forming a shared resource pool, triggering negotiation and distribution processes among its occupants. Choosing sites where different legislated functional zones adjoin the design exploits the precarity of land codification, imagining zones of exemption by blending different uses.
A temporary structure, made of repurposed scaffold parts, is built on the boundaries of existing properties as a territorial mark and horizontally expands within the fields through resource distribution equipment. Dressed with a white row cover, it reads the Mykonian house as a follie, equipped with a water tank, pumping water from restored wells and electrical equipment for generating power. As such, it creates system to be managed by its temporal occupants. The initial module acts as a capacitor, establishing a relationship with land and local resources based on careful consumption.
Designed to expand with available parts and complemented with habitable infills, the device subtly performs throughout the year programmed to increase its potential capacity. Clustered, linear, and courtyard arrangements are tested within different programs, replicating the device infinitely to activate different sites, merging territories and reviving the concept of commonly managed plots. The third design act imagines a scenario where the land is common, resources are distributed, and activities are shared, re-thinking island property through land and resource stewardship.
Fig.203 Zone of exemption. (Author)
Fig.202 Un-buildable plots. (Author)
Fig.204 Intervention Axonometry. (Author)
Fig.205 Inhabiting plot boundaries in Ano Mera. Mykonos. (Author)
Fig.210 Axonometry, Basic module in Marathos lake_ Agricultural and processing use between preservation and infrastructural zones. (Author)
Fig.211 Test 2 in Marathos lake_ Storage, Habitable Module and Agricultural unit Plan
Act2_FieldHabitation
Conclusions
The thesis attempts to dissect the processes that led to the codification of the Aegean Archipelago as a territory host for leisure performances. The thesis argues for the re-conceptualisation of insular touristification not as a selfemergent condition but as an event of territorial modification. As the Archipelago’s mobilities, motives and capacities are shaped, they always disguise a latent force that organises them and is usually placed extra-territorially. Within the islands’ fragile condition, which can quickly oscillate between connectivity and isolation, the travel territory, no matter its carried content, assimilates within the insular environment. Malleable to its networks, the Archipelago does not simply present a stable structure of scattered islands in the sea. Instead, the thesis reads it as performative and performed, a place at play constantly reinventing itself to adjust to its new condition. The thesis attempts to read the above dynamics within the prototypical example of Cycladic touristic space, the island of Mykonos.
Guided by its territorial structuring, the island’s latent connectivity is activated while almost compulsorily controlled, through the necessary organisation of the sea. Within the seasonal operation of tourism, the island alternates between intense incoming fluxes and decreased connection, ultimately leading to its alienating condition. The mobilities of tourism shape the local reality, dictating its temporality and dependency conditions. Increasingly accelerated and globally interconnected, Mykonos’ spatial delimitation is dissolved while the island is integrated to the network and slowly is detached from its proximity relationships. In parallel, guided by the Archipelago's territorial forces, movement becomes a field of differentiation, where the travellers’ identities are revealed by their mode of approach. Performative and functional, the choreography of the mobile body is never emplaced, and yet, within its liminality, it is hierarchised. In response, the Archipelago itself acquires its own classification, accepting fluxes and accommodating crossings, while its coastlines become stable indicators of the mode of movement it hosts. The territorial condition passes from the region to the body through the politically and economically triggered edge modifications.
Reciprocally, the island is transformed to a host of fluxes and shifts from a place to a site of visit and thus it is codified to be conceptualised and communicated. Innately selective, separative and extractive, the tourist gaze becomes the primary force that re-organises the place, transforming it into a consumable site. As landscape elements are distinguished as carriers of a certain authenticity they accumulate value and thus require maintenance for meeting their superimposed expectations. Abstracted, mediatised, institutionally immobilised and performed touristic space creates grounds for an intensive economic process resolved in the successive segmentation of land, its excessive monetisation and ultimate exclusivity. As such, within tourism's regulated and homogenised, space subjects are increasingly differentiated according to their consumptive capacity. Constantly reflexive and ready to appropriate new signs and re-invent its content, tourism in the Archipelago has led to a multi-layered constellation of attraction sites.
As tourism disciplines the place it occupies, it also appropriates insular grounds
and manages them by producing the capacity to accept the incoming flux. Necessarily projective, hospitality production pre-disposed Mykonos to become touristic, legitimising the island’s labeling as an attraction point. As multiplied occupiable volumes challenge the thresholds between authenticity and reproducibility, the insular environment is transformed into a suburban structure. Unsurprisingly, the increase in volume that surrounds the hosted body comes with the rise in its potential to spend. However, as the sector's motives are driven by profit, the capacity to host becomes synonymous with the capacity to gain. As such, the increased luxurification of the product leads to the excessive accumulation of land that maximises the travellers' occupied territory. Always built to be surpassed, carrying capacity becomes a material manipulation that reciprocally conditions the insular population to perform the touristic ritual. Through this process, local subjects are also required to meet certain requirements, and they act as hosts that prepare the ground for the touristic performance, forming the local service sector. As the island, its subjects, artefacts, and signs are pre-conditioned, they embed the territorial conditions and perform their hosting role.
Finally, the design propositions presented in this thesis aim to challenge the existing spatial structures solidified by the touristic apparatus. These interventions re-imagine insular grounds, providing scenarios for their alternative use. Envisioned to work in synergy, they propose a de-territorialized condition where the syntactic elements of the Archipelago, the sea, the land, and the coastline collaborate not as discrete, isolated entities but as a gradient occupying the territory through a dispersed plan (fig.214). In conclusion, by examining the constituent parts of the touristic performance, its mobility, motives, and required capacity, 'Territories of travel: Performing the Cycladic Leisurescape' traces the effects of touristification as territorial processes that necessitates the simultaneous appropriation of sea, land, and coastline, and their reconfiguration through architectural interventions.
Fig.213 An Archipelago of appropriated Grounds. (Author)
Fig.214 Territorial Plan proposal. (Author)
Fig.215 Territorial Plan proposal. (Author)
Fig.1 The Aegean Archipelago,the Cyclades & Mykonos island. (Author)
Fig.2 The Cyclades, Mykonos, Delos and Rhenia island complex. (Author)
Fig.4 Baud-Bovy 1919 Kimolos (Source:Laskaridis Foundation Archives)
Fig.5 Outline of the coasts of Cythera and Anticythera islands as seen from the sea,1771. London, Printed for J. Mount, and T. Page. (Source: Laskaridis Archives)
Fig.6 Aegean Sea, 2023. (Author)
Fig.7 Piraeus Port, 2023. (Author)
Fig.8 Docking, 2023. (Author)
Fig.9 Pleasure Boats, 2023. (Author)
Fig.10 Disembarkation at Piraeus, 2023. (Author)
Fig.11 On route, 2023. (Author)
Fig.12 Garage, 2023. (Author)
Fig.13 Old Port, 2023. (Author)
Fig.14 New Port, 2023. (Author)
Fig.15 Passenger Boat, 2023. (Author)
Fig.16 Antenna, 2023. (Author)
Fig.17 Crossing, 2023. (Author)
Fig.18 Aegean Portolan by Estienne Bremond,1650. (Source: Cambridge University Library)
Fig.19 Privateers attack a ship,1727, Jean de Thevenot (Source: Laskaridis Archives)
Fig.21 Buondelmondi Christoforo 1420 Naxos, the administration centre of the Dukate of the Cyclades.(Source: Laskaridis Archives)
Fig.20 Tinos castle, 15th Century. Aegean castles were placed either on top of a hill or directly on the coastline in order to operate as panoptic devices.(Source: Laskaridis Archives)
Fig.22 Naxos Castle, placed on the highest spot of the harbour. Adjacent to the castle a secondary settlement developed.( Redrawn by Author.)
Fig.23 Fields of scopic control from primary settlements of the Cyclades and primary routes during the 18th century. (Author, edited from: Belavilas, Nikos. Ports and settlements at the Archipelago of Piracy: 15th- 19th century. Athens,1997).
Fig.24 Drawing by W. Von Weiler for the construction of the jetty in the harbour of Syros, 1841. (Source: Travlos et. Al, 1984)
Fig.26 Map of Greece by E.Blouet, 1831. The first map of the new Greek State. (Source: Expédition scientifique de Morée, Ordonnée par le Gouvernement Français)
Fig.25 Syros port plan, highlighting with yellow and pink the presence of managing institutions,19th century. (Source: General State Archives)
Fig.28 Plan of the City of Piraeus, 1834 by Stamatis Kleanthis and Eduard Schaubertt. (Source: Piraeus municipality Archives)
Fig.27 New Port of Syros, highlighting public buildings and neoclassical houses, redrawn by I.Travlos 1985 (Source: Ioannis Travlos and Angeliki Kokkinou,1986)
Fig.30 Syros Lighthouse. The construction of lighthouses throughout the Archipelago, reversing the function of the watchtowers of the past, signalled the presence of the state while becoming a necessary part of the 19th century maritime apparatus.
Fig.31 19th century commercial and industrial centres and primary routes. (Author, Redrawn from: Belavilas, Nikos,in ‘The Dispersed Urbanity of the Aegean Archipelago,2006.)
Fig.32 ’A switch taxonomy’. Syros 19th Century. (Author)
Fig.33 Map of the Northern Aegean produced by the Hydrographical Service of the Greek Navy on the Basis of British Admiralty and US Navy Charts.
Fig.34 Territorial sovereignty definition according to the international Law of the Sea. (Author)
Fig.35 Territorial waters (6 mile radius) in Greece. (Author)
Fig.36 LPG Vessels routes
Fig. 37 LNG Vessels routes
Fig.38 Tanker Vessels routes
Fig.38 Fishing Vessels routes
Fig.39 Passenger Vessels routes
Fig.40 Pleasure Vessels routes
Fig.41 Routes of Trade (Left) and Routes of Tourism (Right). (Author)
Fig.42 Coastline (extract) by Choiseul Goufier 1782. (Source: Laskaridis Archives)
Fig.44 Port of Mykonos, 1717, J. Tournefort (Source: Laskaridis Archives)
Fig.43 J.Roninj: Harbour chart of the islands of the Aegean, hand coloured copper engraving, 1694. (Source: Maps and Mapmakers of the Aegean 1985.)
Fig.46 Mykonos old Port, Baud Bovy,1919 (Source: Laskaridis Foundation Archives)
Fig.47 Mykonos port settlement expansion, 17th century-1966, (Source: Regional Plans of Mykonos,Delos and Rhenia, Kalligas et.al.1972)
Fig.48 Port of Mykonos Construction Jetty, 1972(Source: Regional Plans of Mykonos, Delos and Rhenia, Kalligas et.al.1972)
Fig.49 Opening of the Rural Airport of Mykonos by the Minister of Transportation of the Dictatorship, 1971 (Source: National Audiovisual Archives)
Fig.50 Old Port Parking expansion and Marina (Source: Mykonos Port Authority)
Fig.51 Mykonos New Port (Source: Mykonos Port Authority)
Fig.52 Air travel Arrivals 2022. Data Source: INESTE.
Fig.53 Cruise ship passengers 2022. Data source: INESTE,2023
Fig.54 Domestic Traffic in Ports 2021. Data source: INESTE,2023
Fig.55 Map of the Cyclades, showing primary ferry routes, ports and airports. (Author, multiple sources)
Fig.56 Mykonos road network expanding from the areas of the old port, cruise terminal and airport.Alogn with settlements and Mykonian beaches, infrastructures of mobility appear as centres of sprawl effects. (Author)
Fig.57 Mykonos Old (Bottom) and New (Top) Ports. Sucessive modifications of the coastline and desnity increase. (Author)
Fig.58 Mykonos New Port. (Author)
Fig.59 Mykonos Old Port. (Author)
Fig.60 Mykonos Cruise Terminal. Artificial land insertions. (Author)
Fig.61 Blue Star Naxos. Ferry connecting the Cyclades with the port of Piraeus.
Fig.62 Virtual distance between summer and winter in the Aegean. (Data Source: Kizis 2002)
Fig.63 Seasonal occupation of different inhabitants of mykonos (Source: Field research and Interviews,2023)
Fig.64 Seasonal boat arrivals per month in S.Aegean - vehicles and passengers (2017-2023). (Source: Ministry of Tourism)
Fig.65 Cyclades Central ports catalogue. (Author)
Fig.66 Cyclades Airport Catalogue. (Author)
Fig.67 Territorial diagram of mobility in the Cyclades. (Author)
Fig.68 Habitable Circulation. (Author)
Fig.69 Act 1: Sea Infrastructure.
Fig.70 A typology of coastal lands. (Beach & Rocky cliff)
Fig.71 Mykonos, Coastal areas of intervention based upon documented events of pirate activity. (Author)
Fig.96 Mykonos (Top), Delos and Rhinia (Bottom),“Liber insularum Arcipelagi, Cristoforo Buondelmonti, 1420. (Image source: Laskaridis Archives.)
Fig.97 Les Cyclades pour le voyage du jeune Anacharsis. By Anville, Jean-Baptiste ,1697-1782 (Image source: Laskaridis Archives.)
Fig.98 Fragments at Delos and Rhenia, Charles Robert Cockerell 1830 (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.99 1873 French School of Athens Excavations in Delos. (Source: FSA Archives)
Fig.100 Delos Excavation,Blouet Guillaume Abel, 1831 (Source: Laskaridi Foundation Archives)
Fig.101 Delos excavation. (Source: Greek Military Georgraphical Service)
Fig.102 Delos archaeological site (Author). The island of Delos during the summer is accepting almost 100.000 visitors. Connected with daily, privately operated, cruises with the island of Mykonos, Delos operates under a complete preservation protocol (UNESCO heritage site). Along with the an archaeological museum, the site is equipped with a canteen, a ticket kiosk and a jetty. Three routes traced on site suggest different time-frames to visit the island (1-3 or 5 hours) while organised tours are operated on daily basis. Finally, the site is marked by houses meant to host archaeologists and site-guards who are the only inhabitants of the island, constantly expanding and documenting it since the 19th century.
Fig.103 Delos Archaeological Museum. (Author) The museum of Delos, first constructed in 1903 and expanded in two phases 1936 and 1972. The palm tree within its courtyard is a symbolic connection with the myth of the birth of Artemis and Appolo.
Fig.104 Poster of Neptos SA (Source: Chris Blencowe and Judith evine, Moholy’s Edit: The Avant-Garde at Sea, August 1933 (2019).
Fig.111 Mykonos Pierro’s Bar, 1980’s (Photo provided by: Dimitris Koutsoukos)
Fig.112 Mykonos Chora Land Use map (2023) Demonstrated how the touristified settlement is currently dominated by commercial uses. (Source: National Technical University of Athens, Urban Environment Laboratory.)
Fig.113 Mykonos “Filling the Gap” in the tourist geography of Greece. Mykonos as a Focus of tourist Activities. (See: Mykonos Delos & Rhenia Regional Development plans, Kalligas 1972.)
Fig.Xenia Kythnos by Ch.Hansen 1850s. The bathhouses of Kythnos became the first formally recognised bathing site in the Aegean. (Source: ELIA Foundation)
Fig.114 The Faliron bay was the first sea-side resort of the capital. Connected with the centre of Athens through railway, the beach's jetties were constructed in 1881 and the bay was equipped with the Aktaion hotel, designed according to the typology of the grand hotel of European bath towns (Source: Landscapes of Tourism, Re-making Greece, Archive, 2014)
Fig.115 Enjoy, be healthy’, a guide for bathers,by Glyfada bath Company. Fig.116 Fishermen in Ornos Beach, 1930 (Source: Old Mykonos Group, Unknown)
Fig.117 Hotel Xenia in Mykonos, 1959, Desinged by Aris Konstadinedes. (Source: https://www. mykonostheoxenia.com/)
Fig.118 Hotel Leto, bulti in 1953 commissioned by the by the G.N.T.O. and designed by the Architect P.Vasiliades. (Source: doma.index)
Fig.119 Paradise Beach, Mykonos,1979
Fig.120 Mykonos Development option A (the most radical of the three proposed). In black hatch are indicated the zones of Touristic development proposed by the surveyors that were all surrounding either the central settlement or the most highly evaluated beaches that were declared as landscape of absolute preservation (bright red). ( A. S. Kalligas et al., Plan, 1972.)
Fig.121 Beach land evaluation (left) and bathing quality (top) scheme,1972(Source: A. S. Kalligas et.al. 1972)
Fig.122 Super Paradise Beach, Mykonos,1985.
Fig.123 Mykonos 62 Beaches across its 89 km coastline. (Author)
Fig.127 Panormos beach bar leisure and work spaces (Author)
Fig.129 Panormos beach bar. (Author)
Fig.131 Paradise beach bar site plan (Author)
Fig.130 Paradise beach bar leisure and work spaces (Author)
Fig.132 Paradise Beach Bar. (Author)
Fig.133 Paraga beach bar leisure and work spaces. (Author)
Fig.134 Paraga beach bar site plan. (Author)
Fig.135 Paraga beach bar. (Author)
Fig.136 Demarcating a zone of common use.(Author)
Fig.137 Public Shadow. (Author)
Fig.138 Intention: Perpendicular cut, the Coastline as a gradient. (Author)
Fig.139 Structure module and soft borders. (Author)
Fig.140 Intervention Diagram (Author).
Fig.141 Elia Beach, Intervention. (Author)
Fig.142 Ground Manipulations. (Author)
Fig.143 Beach Equipment. (Author)
Fig.144 Elia beach intervention plan (Author)(
Fig.145 Carrying Capacity as an asymptotic curve (State of equilibrium): Source: David Price, “Carrying Capacity Reconsidered,” Population and Environment 21, no. 1 (1999): 5–26,
Fig.146 ‘Greece, an endless hotel’. (By Kostas Mitropoulos, 1973)
Fig.147 Bars, 2023. (Author)
Fig.148 White house, 2023. (Author)
Fig.149 Pumping station, 2023. (Author).
Fig.150 Extraction, 2023. (Author)
Fig.151 Water storage, 2023. (Author).
Fig.152 Sings ,2023. (Author)
Fig.153 Signage, 2023. (Author).
Fig.154 North-east coast, Mykonos ,2023. (Author)
Fig.155 Ornos Bay, 2023. (Author).
Fig.156 Grid ,2023. (Author)
Fig.157 Detail, 2023. (Author)
Fig.158 Underground ,2023. (Author)
Fig.159 Building, 2023. (Author)
Fig.160 Dam ,2023. (Author)
Fig.161 Land, 2023. (Author)
Fig.162 White Houses, 2023. (Author)
Fig.163 Plaster, 2023. (Author)
Fig.164 Bottles ,2023. (Author)
Fig.165 Artificial Lake ,2023. (Author)
Fig.166 Marathos artificial Lake ,2023. (Author)
Fig.167 “Levinges apparatus”.The apparatus was designed in order to prevent infection from vermin, providing privacy from unwanted looks while allowing the visitor to be aware of their surroundings. , (from A Handbook for Travellers in Greece (London, 1845))
Fig.168 Hotel Leto, 1953 by Prokopios Vaseliades. (Source:doma.index)
Fig.175 Physical space: its formal structure factors affecting the development of the island. (Source: A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Rehnia: Development Plan, 1972.)
Fig.176 General layout of water supply works, 1972. (Source:A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Rinia: Development Plan, 1972.)
Fig.177 Development proposal for the zone of Touristic Development Mykonos(Source:A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Renhia: Development Plan, 1972.)
Fig.178 Special plans of Development, Plan by Nikos Valsmakis (Source: Ministry of environment.)
Fig.179 Special plans of development locations and South touristic zone,(Author)
Fig.180 General Urban plan of Mykonos. (Source: law 28783/1406/1987)
Fig.181 Map of Zones of Settlement Control, legislated in 2022. In this legislation the current patterns and rules that dictate densities and settlement developments today are described. Zones of legal building as well as definitions of sizes of plots and buildings dictate the current model of sub-urbanisation in Mykonos.
Fig.182 Land codification (Author)
Fig.183 Building sizes in Mykonos before and after the 2005 Zoning, 2023, (Source: Zones of settlement control Legislation 2005) (Author )
Fig.184 Map of Mykonos Showing, Artificial Lakes, Water infrastructure and Pools. (Author) (Data source:http:// lmt.ypeka.gr)
Fig.185 Water infrastructures in Mykonos Image (Source: Greek Land Registy)
Fig.186 Village in Mykonos. (In: Aris Konstantinidis, Two “villages” from Mykonos and Some More General Thoughts with Them. (Hērakleio: Panepistēmiakes Ekdoseis Krētēs, 2011).’)
Fig.187 Lime-washing, Mykonos, 1957 by Rene Burri
Fig.188 ‘Among other regulations, polychromy at the exterior of houses is forbidden …the primary colour should be white…this is an obligation of all inhabitants…for the harmonisation of all the Cycladic islands’. 1972 Direct order to the police stations for the whitewashing of houses before summer. (General state archives)
Fig.189 Morphological Study of the Mykonian White house (Source: Kalligas et.al.1972)
Fig.190 White Houses Plan Evolution (Author)
Fig.191 White house 2023 (Author)
Fig.192 Evolution of the white house construction detail from the 19th century, the 60’s and today respectively (Author)
Fig.193 Mykonos northern coastline segment, filled with villas and pools. (Google maps.)
Fig.194 Mykonos legalisation of house areas expansion marked in green, 2013. (Source: Stavrakopoulos Family Archive.)
Fig.195 Mykonos Road network, 1972 (Source: A. S. Kalligas et al., Mykonos Delos Rhenia: Development Plan, 1972.)
Fig.196 ‘Dynamic field of town expansion’. (Source: Kalligas et al 1972.)
Fig.197 Mykonos in the 60’s (Source: Greek Military geographical service)
Fig.198 Mykonos today, (Google maps.)
Fig.199 “Village.(Author)
Fig.200 “Village” plot evolution. In Ano Merra Mykonos (Author)
Fig.201 Sprawl in Mykonos, 2023, (Author)
Fig.202 Un-buildable plots. (Author)
Fig.203 Zone of exemption. (Author)
Fig.204 Intervention Diagram. (Author)
Fig.205 Inhabiting plot boundaries in Ano Mera. Mykonos. (Author)
Fig.206 Structure proposal, basic module.(Author)
Fig.207 Protocol Diagram. (Author)
Fig.208 Potential assemblies. (Author)
Fig.209 Test 1 in Marathos lake. (Author)
Fig.210 Axonometry, Basic module in Marathos lake_ Agricultural and processing use between preservation and infrastructural zones. (Author)
Fig.211 Test 2 in Marathos lake_ Storage, Habitable Module and Agricultural unit Plan (Author)
Fig.212 Section (Author)
Fig.213 An archipelago of appropriated Grounds. (Author)
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