
The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/the-design-history-of-athens-iconic-apartments
======
YeGoblynQueenne
That's where I grew up - amid the polykatoikies!

It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I
can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes.
Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from
Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray,
frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille without its top.
That's the effect of all those balconies and floors stacked on top of each
other in houses stuck next to each other, 6 to a building square.

In the summer, all this concrete makes the heat of an already pretty hot place
unberable. At the same time, the city is at its best in the height of summer,
the 15th of August (δεκαπενταύγουστος, dekapentavgoustos), when most Athenians
take their holidays to coincide with the national holiday of the Dormition of
Mary (Jesus' mother) by the Orthodox calendar. Those days, the bustling life
described in the article disappears and the streets are deserted of people and
cars both, so much so that when I found myself in Athens on the
dekapentavgoustos, I would casually walk in the middle of the largest streets
of the city, without fear of being run over.

But most of the year, Athens is an ugly, unbearable shithole. I appreciate
what the article says, about the constant, but not overwhelming, presence of
people, about the constant activity that makes the city look alive, etc. And
the summer evenings are magickal. But it's also a city of grey concrete
covered in a yellow-brown soup of smog, where there is never a quiet place
that the noise of cars stuck in kilomter-long traffic jams or the Ilektrikos
(the overground metro) doesn't reach, where trash bins overflow (even more
when the binmen are on strike) where the air smells of burned fuel and dust,
where black dust covers every surface inside a home unless one dusts and
brooms and slops every single day.

So, I miss it, yeah :) But it's an awful place to live and nothing makes it
more obvious than travelling a bit around Europe and seeing the cities and
towns of the Europeans, most of whom have preserved their beautiful
architecture, like our neoclassica, instead of replacing it with boxy concrete
monstrosities. When I was growing up in Athens, I thought everyone, in all the
world, lived in polykatoikies. Turns out, they don't.

~~~
mattcantstop
I was looking at the top image in this article and thinking "that'd be even
more amazing if all those cars were kicked off that street and it was more
pedestrianized." And in your comment you talk about the noise from the cars
too. Cities are not loud, cars are loud.

I think many of the areas of issue you discuss with this could be solved, and
many of the strengths that the article's author expresses could be maintained.

We learn something from each microexperiment in housing and city building.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Ah, I wish. Unfortunately, Greeks (not just Athenians) suffer from a horrible
case of car-i-itis, meaning they have to go everywhere by car (I swear, people
get in their car to go get milk or cigarettes) and every family must own a
couple of cars, etc. This makes it a lot harder to pedestrianise large parts
of the city, if nothing else because there's no space to put all those cars,
other than on "pedestrianised" streets.

I've seen this often. Once, I was sitting at a cafe in a "pedestrianised"
street and first one, then a second car, came through, in touching range of
where I was seated - in a narrow street half of which was already occupied
(illegally) by the cafe's chairs and tables. That has stuck into my mind
because I have a big mouth and there was an er altercation with the drivers
and some of his friends who was actually sitting at the same cafe as me and my
friends. Anyway it's a common occurrence and a hard problem to solve.

Don't even think about going around on a bicylce in Athens, of course. You'll
just cut years off your life, either because you'll be breathing cars'
exhausts constantly or because someone will just run you over.

------
psds2
The part of the article that mentioned vertical stratification to avoid
horizontal stratification hit a chord with me. I personally come from a family
of great means but due to unique circumstances spent much of my childhood
living in low income areas and having friends whose parents worked fast food
jobs. I think it's the best thing that ever happened to me and I think we
would have a better society if more people had close interactions with people
going through a different experience than themselves.

~~~
istjohn
That part jumped out at me, too.

> “There were wealthier people on the upper floors,” says Dragonas, “people
> who had just arrived from the countryside further down and poor students in
> the basement. That sort of vertical stratification inside a five-story
> building helped Athens to avoid horizontal stratification — there weren’t
> really neighborhoods that were only rich or only poor.

In the US before Brown v. Board, many cities were similarly integrated along
racial and economic lines. It wasn't necessarily integrated within individual
apartment buildings, but Blacks and whites would live in the same
neighborhoods. When Brown v. Board mandated that schools integrate, racist
whites, unwilling to let their children go to the same schools as Black
children, fled to the suburbs, taking with them their disproportionate share
of wealth and leaving behind impoverished Black ghettoes. Any Black families
with the means soon made their own escape, and the downward spiral continued.

In many states, the vast majority of school funding comes from property taxes.
So schools in wealthy neighborhoods are better funded than schools in poor
neighborhoods, and this guarantees homes in wealthy school districts maintain
their value since everyone wants their kids in those schools.

Here in Ohio, the state Supreme Court ruled that the system of public school
funding relying on property taxes is unconstitutional over a decade ago, but
nothing has changed.

I agree with you that economic segregation is huge societal ill. Studies show
that poor folks are vastly better off when they live in economically diverse
areas.

~~~
bluGill
White flight wasn't only because of fear of blacks. That was an issue, but
suburbs were in style and offered other benefits. Most people left for other
reasons if they could. This is that couldn't afford to leave were poor. Often
enough they were black as well.

Remember even a tiny minority acting in a bad direction can make the whole
that way. Don't descend too far into racism to explain a complex situation.

~~~
jungturk
These are certainly multi-factor situations, as you say, but white flight
isn't the only race-related contributor to deteriorating home prices in
predominantly non-white neighborhoods.

For example, the impact of federal policies denying mortgage loans in non-
white neighborhoods in the 1930s (aka redlining) are still detectable today.
If your pool of buyers is lower (because of the lack of availability of a loan
program) its reasonable to expect the prices would represent that, and if your
prices are growing more slowly that non-redlined neighborhoods, its reasonable
to expect prospective buyers could be concerned about investing in those
homes.

We don't have to meander too far from the facts to see this as racism
(assuming we take racism to mean the promotion of white dominance using
institutional power).

[https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-
infrastructu...](https://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-
infrastructure/gov-redlining-race-real-estate-values-lc.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining)

~~~
bluGill
True, but that doesn't mean it was racism that kept individual people out.

------
yagodragon
You can't design a new city from the ground up and make it perfect. Cities
grow organically over the time. Athens is one of the oldest inhabitated cities
in the world. Growing up in Athens I really hated this ugly architecture but
now I realize that nearly every little neighbourhood has it's own piece of
history and every street is so full of life. I wouldn't trade that with any
lifeless good-looking residential area on a European country

~~~
arethuza
Communities are interesting things - I grew up in a small fishing village in
the north of Scotland which was extremely socially integrated - everyone went
to the same school regardless if their parents were worth millions (and some
were, although I only realised this years later) or were unemployed.

Then I lived in Edinburgh's New Town for over 20 years which is utterly
gorgeous but a bit lacking in community as there is a fairly narrow band of
people who live there and school attendance is largely private and even more
stratified.

Now I am back living near a old small town and to me the whole place just
feels more "organic" than where I lived in Edinburgh (although I dearly love
the place).

~~~
ip26
My whole life growing up I was taught about how repressive the socially
integrated model was, where everybody knows everybody, and how we should
celebrate that the modern world has left it behind.

As time goes by, I'm starting to realize that while it can be very repressive
for people who don't fit in, in trying to discard that model outright we've
lost something incredibly important.

~~~
jacobr1
I think what is important is that everybody find community. And it shouldn't
be a surprise that that is easiest in the smaller settings that most humans
have lived their lives in before the modern era. But we can have both. The
great cities of the world have vibrant local neighborhoods AND "scenes" based
on common interests. And for the smaller towns and villages the internet
enables both online communities, and more importantly, the coordination of
regional communities of shared interests. More Meetup.com, less twitter.

~~~
ip26
Well, we've gone all-in on "digital community", which has the unfortunate
outcomes of 1) easy to find your echo chamber of choice and 2) limited in-
person interaction. In-person community can still be found, but it seems to be
in decline. For example, teenagers are spending less & less time with their
friends, and church congregations continue to shrink.

------
lbrito
_To solve this conundrum, Greeks created their own funding system called
antiparochi, in which developers saved themselves the cost of buying land by
giving landowners a share of the constructed units when they were completed.
“The best translation of the term is probably ‘flats for land,’ or as some
people say, ‘quid pro quo,’” says Panos Dragonas, an architect and professor
at Greece’s University of Patras. “The system saw landowners hand over their
property, and in return get, say, two to five apartments back in the completed
building to live in, or rent or sell. It was a bottom-up system of housing
development not created by any law change by the government, though the state
did offer motives for construction by granting tax breaks.”_

I'm surprised to see that this arrangement is mentioned as novel/quaint.

This kind of deal is extremely pervasive here in Brazil, and I suppose in the
rest of the world as well: developers don't acquire residential lots with
cash; rather they build up an apartment building and pay the original land
owner(s) with apartment units. This is so common I assumed it was a worldwide
"thing".

~~~
fennecfoxen
I think most people in the US find it more expedient to use cash for the land,
rather than take in-kind compensation. Consider, for instance: where will you
live while your apartment is under construction? And, can you actually trust
the value that the developer touts, attached to the new apartment? Financing
for this sort of up-front buyout will be readily available so there is no
major barrier.

~~~
csomar
Credit is insanely available in the US. Developers can get a significant loan;
which is a better deal than channeling your apartment through such a scheme
(assuming selling is easy).

~~~
iguy
Right, this sort of scheme is a great way to get things done without a lot of
formal banking & legal machinery. And it's pretty resilient: if building is
interrupted by (say) political unrest, or there's an episode of hyperinflation
in the middle, everyone understands the deal -- the landowner still gets his 2
flats when it's done.

------
design-of-homes
_" In poorer quality apartments, there might be full windows only along the
balcony side of the apartment, their kitchens only lit naturally by dingy
light wells."_

Housing blocks built with 1, 2, and 3 bedroom flats (apartments) are routinely
built with windowless kitchens and bathrooms today. This is regardless of
whether the housing blocks are 'architect-designed' or cut from generic
layouts.

In modern flats, the kitchen is shoved to the back of the living room away
from windows and lacks any natural ventilation. This is sold as 'open plan
living'.

Mechanical ventilation has became a crutch for many architects and
housebuilders. It lets them lay out unappealing single-aspect apartments
(including north-facing flats which should be banned). Single aspect means
windows run across only one side of the apartment as opposed to dual-aspect
design where windows run across two sides of the flat allowing cross-
ventilation.

Modern blocks of flats, including 'architect-designed' ones, show a completely
paucity of imagination when it comes to layout.

~~~
alistairSH
I frequently think I should sell my townhouse and buy a flat, but then I look
at photos in various real-estate listings and they're all dark and gloomy. It
seems you're lucky if the flat has floor-ceiling windows in the main room,
even luckier if it has a balcony. I don't know how people live in such
darkness. As it is, the dining room in my townhome sits between thee kitchen
and living room and is noticeable darker then either (and subsequently rarely
used).

------
panosfilianos
What I say to my non-Greek friends is that Athens is a really beautiful city,
because it is really ugly. I have yet to meet a person living in Athens that
likes these buildings for any other reasons than that you've grew up in them.

In fact, the houses made in what Greeks call "neo-classical" style are
considered to be a major improvement. This is the style you can find in the
area of Plaka, Metz etc.

~~~
lazyjones
Many people call Vienna beautiful, but I have a direct comparison. I spent
most of my childhood in Attica (northern suburbs, 8 Km from Syntagma square,
so basically still Athens), in 5 different polykatoikies. All of them had
balconies, bidets, elevators, good heating, plenty of light, were quiet and
relatively clean. Here in Vienna, I've had one apartment with terrace and 0
with balconies (of 6 total I've lived in), lots of noise, thin walls and dirt.
Elevators and toilets inside the apartment were often added in the last 20-30
years in older buildings, balconies are often impossible and you usually have
noisy and somewhat dangerous gas heating with boilers inside the apartment.
IOW, housing quality in Athens was significantly better even though back then
we were lower middle class (my mother was a single mother with 2 kids). The
apartment I'm sitting in right now cost me approx. €750k (for 75m²) and has no
balconies.

I don't want to go back to Athens, but apartments are typically much better
there.

FWIW, the house I lived in from 1985-1990 is still standing and looks exactly
the same:
[https://www.google.at/maps/@38.0225488,23.8094767,3a,65.9y,1...](https://www.google.at/maps/@38.0225488,23.8094767,3a,65.9y,1.68h,85.05t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s3_8MyvXKL4he7EzqqbAOnQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=de)

~~~
mFixman
I did a similar move from flats in Buenos Aires with balconies, bidets, and
modern lifts to flats without those things in London. I would choose the
London ones every time.

In paper they might seem worse, but in practice my current flat is much
better: London is much less noisy than Buenos Aires, nearby flats don't
usually get robbed, and I'm reasonably sure that the fire alarm works. My
large and beautiful Buenos Aires flat had an alarm that stayed silent during a
major fire.

------
michaelbuckbee
Here's a YT video showing how one of these style apartments was redone into a
very modern and style -
[https://youtu.be/JEnL2nljPdY](https://youtu.be/JEnL2nljPdY)

------
bitcurious
>The municipality of Athens only practiced zoning for heavy industry, leaving
people free to set up shop in a polikatoikia.

Really, this should be the article. Zoning is responsible for resiliency and
affordability. The actual implementation (Polikatoikias) is just an accident
of fate.

~~~
StavrosK
But the sentence you quoted says there was no zoning.

~~~
bitcurious
That’s what I meant - generous/permissive zoning is responsible.

------
0x01DEED
Athens is so ugly that it comes the other way around.

It looks like no other. When I travel around Europe I sometimes feel that all
cities look the same. When I go to Athens I feel that I am not in Europe
anymore, it's a different planet.

~~~
arethuza
"all cities look the same"

Except, of course, for the one that has as a centrepiece a huge old fortress
(still used by the local military) on the plug on an ancient volcano. ;-)

~~~
metabagel
Which city is that?

~~~
Someone
Edinburgh?
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Geology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Castle#Geology))

~~~
arethuza
Correct

 _" But Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream,

Fitful and dark,

Unseizable in Leith

And wildered by the Forth,

But irresistibly at last

Cleaving to somber heights

Of passionate imagining

Till stonily,

From soaring battlements,

Earth eyes eternity."_

------
ggm
Khrushchev apartments get a lot of bad press, but represent a statist approach
to a similar problem: mass housing needs in a hurry, in a post war recovery
economy.

I really don't want this to descend into 'private did better' because there
are climate differences as well as political and social differences. I think
the command economy ran out of the will to succeed.

------
pjc50
> To keep costs down, developers adopted a modernist construction model — the
> Le Corbusier-developed Dom-Ino system, in which reinforced concrete pillars
> freed a building of the need for load-bearing interior walls.

A modernist, Corbusier-influenced building that actually works and that people
like living in! Fantastic.

~~~
lazyjones
As far as Athens is concerned, they've also proven to be rather earthquake-
proof, which is amazing. I was in a polykatoikia in a northern suburb of
Attica myself in 1981 during a severe earthquake and while the floor was all
wobbly, the building showed just minor cracks afterwards.

------
exabrial
I think I key point underrepresented is the government and other authoritative
bodies (HOAs) stepped out of the way or weren't present to enforce laws and
policies that ensure systemic racism and inequality.

------
aloukissas
Yeah many of the buildings are ugly, but man, the plant-filled wide balconies
are something else. I always wonder why eg LA condos haven't adopted
balconies. I miss my hometown :/

------
erfgh
Athens is an extremely ugly city. It's so ugly that, if you grow up there or
live there long enough, the ugliness slowly seeps inside of you and empties
your inside, too.

Everything looks as if beauty has no role to play in our lives. The ugliness
is not confined to the buildings, people dress in ugly clothes and are poorly
groomed and rude.

Working for a Greek employer is hell. People hate working and all the time
they talk about how much they hate working. Everyone is eager to start their
own business in order to avoid having a Greek boss. This has resulted in a
fragmented economy with a huge number of self-employed people that invest
nothing.

Litter is everywhere, stray dogs are everywhere, dog shit on the pavement is a
certainty.

~~~
yagodragon
Have you ever lived on a different country? Despite it's ugliness, Athens is a
vibrant and diverse city that never sleeps. Everything you need to do is close
to your home. Jobs, night life, shops, bookstores, etc even a walk by the sea
near mikrolimano. It's an interconnected community of human randomness that
depicts the randomess of the real life.

~~~
StavrosK
I can confirm that most Greeks will agree with both comments above.

