Part 1. A Proposal for Beginning to Repair Athens’s Damaged Urban Fabric

Introduction: urbanism and ideology

At the time of Greek independence, Athens was a fairly small town, ideal for the new government to begin erecting imposing new buildings and planning its urban structure for several decades. For the most part, Athens by the 1920s still followed the model of vibrant local neighborhoods partially connected by an electric subway (and soon to be even better connected by electric trams running on rails). Unfortunately, this balance between connective links and the built environment was shattered by both the tremendous influx of immigrants from the Asia Minor Disaster in 1922 and the onset of global economic depression at the end of the Twenties. These factors led to the overcrowding of Athens and to its future definition as the overflowing container of most of Greece’s population.

Athens’s urban collapse, coupled with the complementary collapse of villages that emptied their populations into the capital city, generated social and political forces that are still unresolved today, and gave rise to strongly ideological — and utopian — “solutions” divorced from reality. For example, the former prime minister, Kônstantinos Karamanlês (uncle and namesake of the current prime minister), eagerly dismantled the tramlines, as he obviously identified them with Athens’s past and wanted to bring the country into the future. The world’s top postwar urbanists recommended this step in order to speed up automobile traffic. But it was a mistake, as is now apparent by the reintroduction of the old tram (albeit in a technologically updated form) — affectionately referred to as “to tram tou Tritsê” (“Tritsês’s tram”), after the late mayor of Athens, Antônês Tritsês, a University of Chicago-trained urbanist himself who battled in his last years to restore this vital transport link in Athens.

While the developmental model chosen to deal with the devastation wrought by the German occupation and Greece’s civil war was wrongheaded in the extreme (based as it was, to a great extent, on construction alone), it was an obvious choice at a time of severely limited options. To be fair to the elder Karamanlês, he chose the fast — if illusory — track to rapid economic growth in the 1950s. At the same time, however, this choice inevitably contributed to urban and social degradation. Now we recognize it as an economic choice that proved disastrous in the long run.

Worst of all was the ideology of “progress,” which could only be realized by rending the previous urban fabric. Certain essential elements of Greek urban culture — old Athenian homes with courtyards, small sidestreets, small pedestrian squares, kiosks, mixed-use four-story buildings — were condemned as useless and fit only for replacement. What was chosen to replace them were models imported from Europe and the United States (the latest in urban and architectural “progress”) that consisted of isolated villas, monofunctional high-rises connected by expressways, buildings closed to the pedestrian street, and even the total elimination of the pedestrian street. Along with these changes came an architecture that deliberately disdained life, and wore an alien face of polished metal, plate glass, sheer stone, or brutal concrete.

Greeks accepted the new “look” as symbolic of architectural (and, by implication, social and economic) progress. The left saw this utopian urbanism as a rejection of the “old,” traditional urbanism, which symbolized the right’s power base, and as a necessary part of the socialist revolution that would guarantee the country a bright new future. The right, on the other hand, was equally willing to coopt immigrant settlements that housed left-wing voters by razing existing structures and replacing them with “modern” workers’ housing. As for the right’s upper-class constituencies, they wanted new highways through the city so that they could enjoy their cars. Wealthy residents eagerly embraced an isolating urbanism within their neighborhoods, since it offered protection from “crime” (real or imaginary) and a chance to avoid mixing with those less well-off. In the end, a succession of governments, advised by respected urbanists, implemented policies that destroyed the functioning urban environment in place at the end of the Forties.

While more recent history easily confirms that the left has been responsible for its own share of urban disasters (especially during the last 20 years, and in light of the looming fiasco of Olympic construction inherited from PASOK), the blame for the depredations of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies lies squarely with the political right. During a 40-year-long postwar monopoly on political and social power, right-wing governments consistently chose to apply anti-urbanist policies. Smaller cities survived better, simply because of neglect, as Athens concentrated most of the country’s resources. Many provincial centers weathered postwar urban blight much better than Athens. It would be heartening to point to local civic pride as having tempered the worst of the urban assault, but this is not the case. Whenever they had the funds, cities beyond Athens immediately did the same damage to themselves, destroying what was most valuable in their urban environments.

In the event, what we are dealing with here is a universal notion of isolation that extends over all scales. Anti-urbanist interventions cut human connections. High-tech architectural fantasies cut people off physically and emotionally from surfaces, and from the built environment in general. We cannot solve the present crisis until we acknowledge that the architecture and urbanism of the twentieth century had as its principal goal the isolation of people, from buildings and from each other. That admission necessitates the even more difficult acknowledgment that the idols of modernism were false gods, and that several generations of planners and politicians were deceived into destroying our cities by applying inappropriate urban principles.

The New Charter of Athens

I am extremely proud to be a contributor to the New Charter of Athens 2003 (see http://www.ceu-ectp.org/e/athens), which is shamefully unknown to most government planners in Greece, who continue to work on the basis of the discredited 1933 charter of Athens written by Le Corbusier (although a group of Greek urbanists co-wrote the new charter). The European Council of Town Planners decided in 1995 that the effects of applying the 1933 charter were so disastrous for European cities that it had to prepare a new one. A draft was approved in Athens in 1998 and, after more revisions, the new charter of 2003 was presented in Lisbon (not in Athens, because the government did not give its full support — and this at a time when it was funding “fashionable” architectural and urban projects).

The new charter presents an enlightened urbanism for the new millennium: one that accommodates people’s needs and social forces; understands connective networks; promotes the principle of mixed-use; respects irreplaceable elements of the past; and tries to integrate the built and natural elements of the environment. This vision considers spatial urban form as complementary to urban connections and movement, and gives priority to understanding their interdependence. It also emphasizes monitoring dynamic changes in a living city so as to catch potential problems before they become entrenched.

The erroneous and untested ideas presented in the 1933 charter were primarily responsible for ruining cities around the world. The charter’s main purpose was to erase pedestrian urban life as defined on vibrant city streets in prewar European capitals. Its ideas are an expression of megalomania and disdain for the individual. Everyone knows the seductive images of skyscrapers sitting in vast parks that come from the 1933 charter (along with the strict segregation of uses). I should mention, however, that urbanists for several generations have been taught the principles of the 1933 charter as religious dogma, which is the reason they continue to apply them. At this moment, the Far East is fast destroying itself by following thispoleoctonic (urbanicidal) model.

Practical suggestions for solutions

We now face an urban Athens partially destroyed, perhaps more so than after the German occupation and civil war, because its population is so much greater today. The capital (and country) requires a radical reorientation if it is to survive in urban terms. I do not advocate radical, top-down intrusions, since these work only in select circumstances. The best way to save Athens is to promote a correct urban philosophy, and to help people save their own city with the government’s encouragement and backing. This solution is independent of political orientation; I see no obstacle to its being embraced by all political parties. We cannot move forward unless we recognize, and get out from under, the ideology responsible for the destruction of urban landscapes.

What I offer is merely an outline rather than an analysis. It needs to be filled in with considerably more detail and specific examples, which I leave to others. It is incredible that, for the most part, many Greek urbanists either do not know or choose to ignore the works of Christopher Alexander and Léon Krier, today’s leading urban theorists. (A summary of Krier’s ideas has been published in Greek by Richard Economakis, at the end of his book on Nisyros.) Let me outline some elements of this new approach, which can be used as a rough guide for developing more specific urban rules.

1. Urban components should follow the universal distribution of sizes: many small buildings, structures, streets, sidewalks, and parks; a medium number of intermediate size; and a few of large size.

2. Since the smallest urban components commensurate to the size of a human being are the most vulnerable, they must be rigorously protected from encroachment by the larger urban elements.

3. The majority of buildings ought to be mixed-use, combining different functions. This could be implemented by legislation or promoted by tax subsidies.

4. A “neighborhood” is defined by its geography as a compact area where each point is no more than a 15-minute walk from any other point. Major impediments to pedestrians, such as highways, giant parking lots, or impassable barriers, have to be situated on the periphery (or otherwise raised or buried).

5. Zoning regulations should encourage every neighborhood to be mixed-use. I am now talking of an area with buildings, in rather close proximity, of different uses (distinct from, and in addition to, mixed-use in a single building).

6. City areas that are vacant at night will be populated during that time by marginal elements of the population and by the underclass. This is a natural phenomenon, in which an urban void is filled by the available people.

7. Urban life occurs on the surface (sidewalk) level. This area contains pedestrian activities, and has to be protected from stronger urban elements. It is also where links to other forms of transport must originate.

8. Building fronts must act as connecting interfaces between private and public space, not as barriers. The more permeable the interface, the more intense the street life it can support.

9. Walls that are not perforated should instead be folded like a curtain, to provide a greater surface area for pedestrian nodes and interactions. Smooth, flat walls are essentially anti-urban.

10. Built elements provide the boundaries of urban space. The goal is to define a semi-enclosed outdoor space by arranging the buildings, and to avoid buildings that stand apart. Vast, open spaces are not urban spaces.

11. If two distinct, vertically separated, levels of pedestrian activity exist, one will kill off the other or both will be weakened.

12. When competing urban functions must be separated vertically because of density or danger, the pedestrian function has to occupy the ground level.

13. There is no sense in having strictly pedestrian areas larger than about 50 meters. It is essential, however, to protect primarily pedestrian areas from adjoining traffic by using physical structures such as high sidewalks, low walls, and bollards.

14. A city, like the human body, works through network flow. Efforts must be made to connect points within every neighborhood by alternative means of transport: pedestrian, private car, taxi, tram (if available), and local buses (privately run jitneys or minibuses). Transport has to integrate into a linked set of networks, each working on a distinct scale and speed and requiring different infrastructures.

15. The city consists of interconnected modes of transport, made possible by permeable interfaces that allow one type of traffic to flow while blocking another type.

16. Physically incompatible forms of transport, such as highways, the subway, and trains, should be located on a neighborhood’s periphery or be vertically separated from pedestrians, trams, and small local buses — which is necessarily expensive.

17. However, it is infinitely more expensive (because it destroys society and culture) to sacrifice the ground-floor pedestrian urban realm to automobile circulation and parking and other transport. Cars and trucks, if allowed, will occupy every available surface space. Pedestrians must be physically and psychologically protected while closely interfacing with moving and parked vehicles.

18. Any primarily residential neighborhoods within the metropolis have to repave local roads so as to reduce traffic speed, thus making it possible to extend human life onto the street. Excellent solutions have been given by the Dutch in theirwoonerven, which are vehicular streets accommodating both pedestrians and cars.

19. Where transportation paths cross, the weaker link must be protected against the stronger. This necessitates defining pedestrian paths across a street, giving a visual cue while also physically slowing down vehicular traffic.

20. Primarily pedestrian areas (such as sidewalks lined with stores and apartments) have to be fed by transport such as cars and buses; otherwise, they will die off. That means slowing traffic and making sufficient parking available nearby. The pedestrian urban element must be accessible to all transport networks.

21. Parking in the dense urban core can only be accommodated by underground garages or vertical stacking, so that it doesn’t encroach onto the ground-floor pedestrian realm. Multilevel parking garages ought to devote their ground floors to commercial use.

22. Neighborhoods need to be connected to each other by multiple transport, including cars, long-range buses, trams, subways, and trains. While the priority here is on non-pedestrian connections because of the larger scale, there must be at least one protected pedestrian connection between any two neighborhoods.

23. The government has to invest in creating crossover points between different transport types to make all competing transport possible and to ensure its seamless interconnection.

24. The city naturally divides into the car web surrounding and feeding pedestrian sidewalks and squares. The enclosed areas give priority to pedestrians, while being crisscrossed by cars constrained to specific paths. Cars are intentionally slowed within a primarily pedestrian area, but are not excluded. Occasional access to all points in pedestrian areas for delivery and emergency vehicles must be guaranteed not by a wide road, but by a road surface that gives priority to pedestrians: vehicles should be allowed access, not speed.

25. The car web contains all those functions that optimize fast automobile traffic, but are essentially hostile to human beings, including wide roads that connect such non-pedestrian nodes as heavy industry, military installations, warehouses, giant parking lots, car dealerships, garages and gasoline stations, among others.

26. The present trend to locate office buildings as isolated nodes in the car web must be reversed by tax incentives, so that offices can relocate within the pedestrian urban element. Isolating nodes that contain many people makes sense only if their activities conflict with residential and other uses, for they create a dangerous dependence on cars.

27. Using tax subsidies, light industry must be encouraged to relocate within mixed-use regions. Only heavy industry must be isolated from the city.

28. Skyscrapers (buildings higher than 10 stories) are not cost-effective, and they burden a city’s infrastructure and transportation resources in a wide region around themselves. A city can only afford to support a very small number of skyscrapers for vanity purposes.

The above propositions come from the works of Christopher Alexander and Léon Krier, as well as from my own studies. The three of us, drawing on work by others, are putting together a picture of the living city that can be used as a model for all future urban development. I have tried to orient the present essay toward the problems of the Greek city; yet most of these urban principles are, in fact, universally applicable. Joel Crawford and David Sucher from the United States, Josep Oliva from Barcelona, and Jan Gehl from Denmark have all published books of sensible advice on how to reconnect the urban fabric.

Part 2. What Went Wrong in Greek Urbanism

In the mad rush to “equality” with the US and northern Europe, automobile ownership in Greece has skyrocketed. In rural areas, this is understandable, since cars have provided an efficient connectivity, perhaps for the first time in history. In cities, however, severe problems have resulted since no thought was given to how all these cars were going to get around; as a result, roads are now choked. In parts of Athens, even the smallest side street is crowded day and night with traffic. There was also no thought given to parking all these vehicles, either for the night or once they reached their destination. The present state of commuting in Athens is the result of a monumental misunderstanding. Cities are transportation networks connecting pedestrian nodes. The quality and density of connections within and around those nodes, and connections among spatially separated nodes, are what enable a city to function. How efficiently a city works depends on the degree to which distinct transportation (including pedestrian) networks are integrated. Government planners, however, have visualized cities as buildings fitted into an abstract geometry, allowing them to cover every available space. Their idea of connectivity is to build a highway to a group of isolated villas or highrises. This philosophy naively supposes that the urban fabric will magically reproduce and expand by itself.

The old courtyard house fronted by a calm side street provided Athenian urban life with a ground-floor pedestrian realm connecting internal, private space to external, public space that was available to children and the elderly. This was replaced by the four-story apartment building, with shops on the ground floor. The street, consequently, carried a high traffic load, thus leaving only a narrow sidewalk for the urban realm. The lost pedestrian space was shifted to a number of small neighborhood parks, which represented a workable but primarily car-free solution, since the main transport in this pattern functioned through buses, trams, and subway. The increased pressure from cars promptly made it unworkable, although we were left with semi-functional pieces throughout Greece. What killed this model were greed and a total lack of government oversight.

The typical phenomenon of the highrise (four- to six-story) apartment house was both forced upon and eagerly adopted by the Greek public, for two reasons. First, it was propelled by the huge population (that is, internal-migration) pressure, which led to vertical stacking. Second, it was itself a driving force behind the construction boom that heated up the Greek economy in the Fifties and Sixties. For many citizens, the speculative building of apartment buildings became a gold mine, an employment opportunity, a route to a higher standard of living, or even all of the above. Politicians were unwilling, therefore, to criticize the postwar urban model in any way. The available ground space was far more useful (and valuable) for erecting more buildings. It might indeed be possible to return to the four-story, mixed-use apartment model. Today, however, one has to provide for underground (as well as limited surface) parking. Sidewalks have to be much wider, and urban space better defined, to enclose protected portions of the pedestrian realm. A lot more greenspace needs to be made available. Finally, balconies have to be at least two meters deep (roughly); otherwise, they don’t work as raised living spaces. These improvements would not, in themselves, solve the circulation and parking problems in the city, however. Although the destruction of any vestige of urban greenspace amounts to criminal negligence, the consequences of ignoring the parking and circulation problems are just as serious over the long term.

I cannot overemphasize that urban society forms in the pedestrian realm, which itself has to be nurtured at street level. But the postwar residential urban model evolved into new and unsustainable typologies. The height of a typical apartment building has now increased beyond four stories, which surpasses the critical limit of density capable of sustaining urban life. Above four stories, there is no visual or spoken exchange with the street level. Children and the elderly are virtually imprisoned in their apartments, thus disconnecting society.

Even more serious is the elimination of mixed use. The parking garage has replaced the traditional commercial ground floor. A cheap solution — easing parking problems at home by putting cars under apartments (but not underground) — has dealt the final blow. Today, monofunctional apartment highrises sit on stilts, with the ground floor entirely taken over by parking (following the 1922 Citrohan model of the hysterically antisocial Le Corbusier). This disconnects inhabitants from urban life, reconnecting them only through their cars. It is the same disconnection seen in North American suburbs, with their well-documented social alienation. We have vertical isolation in Greece, as opposed to the horizontal isolation of the United States. Since there is no longer any connection with the ground, sidewalks have begun to shrink, and apartment buildings stand apart from each other, thus failing to define any urban space. The pedestrian realm has been totally sacrificed to the needs of the automobile. A facile parking solution is to accommodate vehicles underneath the new, freestanding apartment buildings, but this is an illusion. Those cars start off in the morning to jam the streets and fight for nonexistent parking spaces at their destination. Some residents pretend that they need their cars only to take their families out of the concrete hell of Athens, so that they can live a “normal” life in the countryside for a few days. It never occurs to them that it is possible to live a more connected life in the city itself — with the correct geometry.

Sustainable urban models exist today. They are promoted by architects who truly understand urban and social forces. These include several distinguished Greeks who are part of the neo-traditional movement outside the country: Richard Economakis, Michael Lykoudis, Demetri Porphyrios, and Stefanos Polyzoides. To their urban solutions must be added the contemporary scientific developments of the “network city,” a concept with which I am involved. Accomplished urbanists in Greece share our visions, but they are, unfortunately, outside the circles of power. We have the solutions in our hands. It only remains to convince industry and government to implement them, not for any ideological reason, but because they are cheaper and more effective in the long run. They represent a far better investment than the madness now being pursued. The ecological dimension A radically new urban philosophy can emerge from these suggestions. It is but a small step in the direction I am proposing to bring the natural environment into the picture. This way of looking at the built environment gives priority to human beings and small-scale structures. It represents a drastic reversal of twentieth-century urbanism, which emphasized the large scale and ignored the individual. An urbanism that destroys the small scale and treats human beings as expendable objects will never respect the natural world. On the contrary, it is an expression of humankind’s arrogance regarding nature. A new urbanism, which respects our sensibilities in the built environment, would also appreciate our natural environment.

Once we begin to salvage the old, and now mostly lost, regions of our cities, we can also begin to appreciate the living elements within those cities. A tree grows naturally next to a low, crooked wall, and within a courtyard. A wide, uneven sidewalk has space to accommodate trees. An archeologically open space provides a habitat for some urban (if only avian) wildlife. This is more a philosophy of nature and of the earth than a conscious approach to urbanism. In the event, and as I said, an urbanism that is modest and respects human sensibilities will also respect the natural environment; it goes hand in hand with a modest architecture of human proportions and textures. The alien look of polished metal, glass façades, and smooth, windowless walls breeds an intolerance for living things precisely because it represents the opposite properties.

I am looking to the future, when we will use scientific knowledge about complex systems and their interactions to better plan our cities. Critics of such ideas dismiss them as nostalgic, belonging to the past. That is not accurate. What I propose has a striking commonality with some aspects of traditional urbanism, which accommodates human beings and not machines or abstract geometric forms. Those critics are stuck in an obscurantist mindset of inherited urbanist dogma. To them, any revolutionary proposal for progress threatens their own false promise of a “progress” possible only through modernist principles. Those principles are the same failed ideas of the 1920s, recycled over and again. Each time, cities and nations are promised that they will work now, and that their previous applications were sabotaged by factors “beyond” their planners’ control. Like a pathogen, modernist urbanism is easily recognizable once one knows what signs to look for. Some of its principal characteristics are: monolithic buildings and vast open spaces; geometrical alignment to arbitrary rectangular axes; elimination of the intermediate and smaller scales; insistence on industrial materials; insistence on the “purity” of form and surfaces. This goes hand in hand with an intolerance of whatever helps to reinforce the urban fabric, such as pedestrian spaces, semi-enclosed urban spaces, permeable interfaces, folded urban boundaries, remnants of the past, modestly-sized structures, street furniture, and anything that “clutters” an empty minimalist geometry.

Most telling is a static mindset that deceives anyone considering modernist solutions that look neatly regular on paper. A dynamic city constantly evolves because of urban forces, much like any ecosystem. Only those who are supremely arrogant assume that they can impose static, geometric solutions, and that people will follow them exactly without eventual change. The same foolish assumption is made about materials: modernists erect smooth, flat walls and complain that they stain and weather badly. They have never understood how materials age, nor how urban structure evolves in time.

Modernist prescriptions destroy cities by reversing hierarchies of connectivity. They remove organized structure and differentiation from the human scale. At the same time, they eliminate connective paths within human reach. The end result displays an artificial, mechanical movement as services have to be forced into the over-concentrated downtown office nodes. Human beings need both structures and paths on the human scale — an obvious biological fact that has escaped modernist planners. Further, as in an ecological system, when certain levels of life are missing, they are replaced by organisms from nearby strata. This has led to many downtown areas being occupied, after hours, by homeless persons and/or petty criminals. It is not their fault; there are just no socially healthier elements willing to occupy that hostile niche in the urban ecosystem. A new generation of urbanists A separate but subtler danger comes from postmodernist architects who appreciate correct urbanist principles, but misuse them to promote their own alien buildings. Such people (some of whom occupy positions of great power and influence in the architectural community) are promoting good cities with faulty pieces. What they would have us build is similar to some northern European “new towns,” where all the right urban connections are present, yet the towns are still dead because the architecture is alienating on a human scale. What we have here are high-tech parasites of the living urban fabric.

To add insult to injury, some postmodernist urbanists have appropriated the terms “ecological” and “sustainable” to denote energy-saving buildings that are entirely alien to humanity. Up close, such buildings resemble a space station — as far removed from nature as can be imagined. Nevertheless, municipalities and national governments have been duped into spending money to build high-tech monstrosities out of extremely expensive materials simply because their architects add some solar panels to them or use elementary concepts of recycling and insulation. It is a mark of public gullibility that buildings have ignored such fundamental ecological concerns for so long that they can now be promoted as “innovative.” Just like their modernist predecessors, these architects deceive us with flashy and seductive images of industrial materials.

Some of these prominent architects are now destroying China’s centuries-old sustainable urban fabric, replacing it with an unsustainable nightmare of concrete, glass, and steel. This will guarantee gasoline dependence and urban congestion for generations. One would think that these planners are employed by transnational oil companies to stake out profits for at least a century, but no. They have been invited, and are paid, by the Chinese government to “renew” its cities. The damage they are doing, however, far surpasses that of combined Mongolian invasions. I mention this only as a warning to the Greek government, which has been jealously looking to bring these same fashionable people to wreak havoc in Athens. The new generation of urbanists encompasses those who wrote the New Charter of Athens 2003; the neo-traditionalists; those who cling stubbornly to the old modernist dogmas; and promoters of the network city (which include me and others who propose radical solutions based on technology). Some of these persons understand how a city works, while others think they do. Some have a good understanding of urban processes on a particular scale, but grasp neither other scales nor their need to integrate into one other. Others are impostors, plain and simple. Urbanism is an easy field in which to make wild new proposals without having to prove their effectiveness.

Conclusion: toward a new urban philosophy Modernist urbanism — based on the power to impose technology over nature — is essentially destructive of what already exists. It is also profoundly arrogant in its assertion of a brutal power over something it doesn’t understand and which it disdains. Greece’s urban, social, and environmental devastation during the last two generations is due to interlinked causes. Today, progress requires a major change in worldview. The pairing of technological progress with an urbanism of alien forms is a great lie, one fanatically believed in by many “modern” Greeks. Technology can help in the reconstruction, however, when applied intelligently. Science is essential to help urban residents live like human beings once again and regenerate their environment.

Misguided urbanists applying wrong ideas have done (and continue to do) so much damage that it is impossible to know where to begin a critique. Let me touch only on the topic of automobiles. Cars will not go away; every Greek wants to own at least one and many in Athens own two. Automobiles are a tremendously useful, if very expensive, mode of transport, but they must be accommodated without destroying the pedestrian urban fabric. Since this has already been destroyed in most places, it must be rewoven. A living city connects its cars to people in a non-threatening way: automobiles should not take over a city. Planners have to understand how to interweave the car web to the primarily pedestrian urban fabric. Then they can work out how to optimize that web without destroying the rest of the city. These principles are very simple to understand.

Greece used to have a well-balanced respect for the environment (at least in the mythical days of yesteryear, when Greeks lacked the technological power to destroy it). But this respect was replaced by a new philosophy of intolerance. Old Greece stood in the way of grand urban and architectural projects deemed necessary for “progress.” We sacrificed much to this progress, however, and it is now choking us. City-building consists of a series of compromises and accommodations. This, however, is not the same as sacrificing elements of our heritage and environment to antiquated visions of the future. I would like to see the majority of Greeks repair their urban environment so that they and their children can enjoy a better quality of life. I wish to save those pieces of uniquely Greek urban fabric from the senseless destruction to which it has been condemned.

Two outstanding names in twentieth-century Greek architecture, Dêmêtrês Pikiônês (1887-1968) and Arês Kônstantinidês (1913-1993), saw the enormous value of locally evolved urban solutions. The confluence of market forces, social and esthetic needs, and materials appropriate to Greece and its Mediterranean climate gave rise to a set of typologies that respected human sensibilities and the environment much more than what replaced them. During a time of modernist hegemony, these two modernist-trained architects bravely championed solutions that the architectural mainstream furiously rejected as “unmodern.” They eventually fought openly with their colleagues to safeguard what they considered as our precious urban heritage. The solution to Greece’s urban problems is not merely contained in the points outlined above. It also lies in the adoption of a new philosophy of humankind’s relationship to nature and the environment. It is contained in the serious, scientific study of what specific rules actually generate living cities. It lies in recognizing that the ideological urbanism of the postwar years has been discredited in practice. It lies in rejecting as toxic the high-tech “look” of contemporary architecture (tolerable only in minute quantities). Once those philosophically linked steps are taken — accepting the full humility of human beings vis-à-vis their environment, their fellow beings, their historical past, and their urban heritage — everything else will follow.