The (master) plans of athens and the challenges of its re-planning in the context of crisis

Abstract

In the current economic crisis, cities face significant problems and planners strive for solutions. Athens, especially its Centre, faces immense problems both because of the crisis and of a series of local problems that to a great extend are related to its planning historical background. The planning of the Athens area has a long and troublesometradition and has resulted in a very dense and problematic city with uncontrollable, partly unauthorized, sub-urbanization and severe social problems in the Centre. The traditional way planning took place, i.e. physical planning, has been proven to be inadequate to face the rapidly accumulating problems. This crisis has become a trigger for deeperconsideration of the social problems of the city as especially (and spatially) expressed in the Centre. The paper goes through the various historical stages and milestones of the planning of the city progressively focusing on the current problematic, to finally raise the question on the path that the planning of the city should follow in the context of today's challenges ©2013 Archnet-IJAR, International Journal of Architectural Research.