By Nikos Vatopoulos for ekathimerini
The skyscraper going up on the development of the old Athens airport at Elliniko on the capital’s southern coast has been drawing a lot of comments, many of them contradictory. The most negative of these comments tend to put forward emotional, aesthetic and ideological arguments; they also attract the most attention. The truth is that it is way too soon to judge what the development of the Elliniko plot, as well as that of nearby Agios Kosmas, will look like once they’re done.
Personally, I am more concerned about sprawl than I am about vertical growth. I see more problems emerging from the expansion of construction activities on both sides of the coastal highway than from the construction of a high-rise. Indeed, the new skyscraper provides an opportunity to talk about the issue of breath and height in this city.
We have been taught in Greece to consider high-rise buildings as a bad thing and to overlook the fact that this is one of the very few countries in the world that doesn’t have very tall buildings (with the exception of a handful built during the 1967-1974 dictatorship, when the regime scrapped height restrictions). We have been taught to consider Athens an ugly city without being taught how to hold an organized discussion on ways to improve it.
We have also accepted that the city will keep on growing at the expense of open public space and that the suburbs will lose their country appeal. What is also clear is that those voices that do have something important or interesting to suggest are not given that much notice. The noise generated by social media also adds to the confusion and leads the discussion off-track, especially when distorted AI-generated photos grab people’s attention. If we had managed to institute a serious discussion in this country about our residential and urban environment, Athens would have been well on the way to recovery. And the Elliniko project, which will have a massive impact on the capital’s coastal zone, is injecting urgency and intensity into a discussion that should have already been advanced a long time ago.
In many of Athens’ suburbs, greenery has been reduced to a garnish of generic plants favored by importers. We know, with mathematical certainty, that very few of the one- or two-story houses still standing in the once tranquil suburbs will survive the replacement with multistory buildings. This is the reality – and it is a reality that makes a lot of money for a lot of people.
Elliniko admittedly seems to have a lot of problems, but it is also an easy target. It taps into the frustration of a large segment of the population with the destruction of the natural environment across the city and its suburbs.
