THE CITY AS A PROJECT - The Absence of Plan

Continues the journey into The city as a project, this time a long-distance dialogue between Platon Issaias professor of Urban design at The Bartlett School of Architecture (you can find his work in the Greek pavilion At the Venice Biennale) and Fabiano Micocci based in Athens and professor at LAU in Beirut.

Platon Issaias

The Absence of Plan as a Project.

On the Planning development of Modern Athens: 1830-2010

di Fabiano Micocci

Modern Athens cannot be considered a typical modern city because it hasn't follow Modern principles of planning and urban growth. Therefore it cannot be studied using urban and landscape paradigms typical of Western culture because its history is completely different from most of European cities. Some years ago Harvard Professor Sarkis Hakis suggested a new way of looking at Athens to rediscover its inner qualities, the potentialities and the beauty embedded in the actual urban environment. This condition is made possible by eschewing traditional paradigms unable to read the complexity of today’s urban questions. On the other hand he invited to go through the distinctive history of places by detecting specific conditions and by having the knowledge of the city's own qualities and its prevalent development methods in order to construct identities by design processes. Modern cities indeed are collective compositions with a narrative power and it is necessary revisiting their image starting from the city itself.

Platon Issaias in "The Absence of Plan as a Project. On the Planning development of Modern Athens: 1830-2010," a chapter in the rich collection of essays edited by Pier Vittorio Aureli "The City as a Project" narrates the Modern History of Greece through the construction of the built form of Modern Athens. Issaias draws a line of continuity starting from the proclamation of Athens as the Capital City of the new born Greek State under the Sovereignty of the first King, the German Otto, in the 1830s until nowadays in a sort of epic narration of the Greeks. To have a clear comprehension of the forces and the methods that sustained the transformation of the city from a small village during the Ottoman Rule to the actual Mediterranean metropolis with an extended geographical structure, the relationship between local and global economic dynamics with the social dimension represented by the population who inhabits the place is investigated to offer a more complete and exhaustive reading of the evolution of the city.

A crucial statement by Issaias is that Athens is not a city without a plan, as it is generally proclaimed, but it is the product of a clear economical agenda and of a ambitious political project based on private property, social division of labour and methods of productions promoted by capitalistic interests. Following a Marxist background of social and urban studies, the spatial form of Athens performs the interests of the dominant class accordingly to given mode of productions and to a specific mode of development. This dual system is well illustrated by Issaias with the distinction between "Archetypes" and "protocols" that helps to clarify the overall project behind the growth of the city and to redefine the apparent definition of "informal." "Archetypes" are the generic architectural objects that compose while "protocols" are the systems of norms and the planning apparatus that constitute the basic platform and the general framework managed by the public actor. The application of "protocols" and the use of these "Archetypes" can be traced all along the Modern History of Athens: the use of Hypodamian grids for land parcelization and the capital coming from the abroad trigged the proliferation of single architectural objects and an economy based on housing market and land transactions. Furthermore, during the last 60 years a laisse-faire ideology has been implemented as a collective manifestation with the role of mediation between the state and the citizens to avoid social conflicts. Indeed both left and right parties have aimed to support this situation so that uncontrolled urban activities cannot be considered only as an illegal phenomenon but as an embedded structured system. Notwithstanding the presence of illegal buildings, pollution and underrated public transportation, this process has conferred to Athens its social and geographical legitimacy.

The stunning physical appearance of Athens today is the result of the assemblage of a myriad of small elements working together to produce a collective form. The city is indeed generally composed of intervention at the small scale, first of all the proliferation of the polykatoikia, the typical Greek multi-storey apartment buildings, typology spread by the use of raw and cheap method of constructions and a favourable legislation (antiparochi) that promoted small familiar investments. This accumulation ended into creating the actual urban form of Athens that extends homogeneously as a coated mantle that couple the original topography all over the valley until where constructions were allowed at the edges of the surrounding mountains and the sea. There thus exists a strong relationship between these micro-intervention and their epiphenomenal interaction to larger processes. In the text a critical thinking to understand principled of development elucidates the role of architecture in constructing the city as a whole, and bringing the attention to the city as a wide horizontally extended geographical artefact where the small scale of the buildings and the territorial scale of urban expansions are interwoven.

The merit of this study is to re-shape the field of intervention of architectural practice in the city in continuity with the mechanism that generated the actual urban shape. The diffuse interest in the urban landscape goes beyond its actual economical crisis and its effects on daily life but has roots in previous decades of production of the urban environment, as it is clearly reported in the text. As since 2008 the construction sector has slowed down, this essay offers a complete and critical retrospective of the methods and the "project" that sustained the generation of Athens as it appears today. The re-evaluation of the maison domino system of the polykatoikia, promoted as a new Greek icon at the 2012 Venice Biennale, brings to the fore "the system’s simplicity, generic structural framework and inclusive spatiality [that] cannot be linked to any formal, modernist canon, architectural style, or local particularity." But the importance of this archetype is wider because it is "a medium of spatial production" that replaces the notion of the masterplan in the construction of the built environment. From this point of view Issaias offers a precious contribution on assuming Athens as a new paradigm to understand mechanisms behind the design of capitalistic production of contemporary cities controlled by political agendas of neo-liberal governmental operations and on the other side he points out at the urban materials that can be used to develop new strategies of interventions inside the urban fabric.