ancient cities

Independence from German occupation followed
three years later, on October 12, 1944. A
bloody civil war followed, starting with the
bloody Sunday of December 3, 1944, in Athens,
when a large popular demonstration faced governmental
and allied forces’ assault and gunfire.
The civil war then raged in the mountains, and
urban guerilla clashes went on in the narrow city
streets of Athens and Piraeus refugee quarters,
where in the 1930s an important labor movement
had emerged and in the 1940s an underground
resistance movement erupted. Since the period of
German occupation, Athens had become a refuge
from retaliations in rural Hellas, and politically
induced internal migration formed the first postwar
wave of massive urbanization toward Athens.
In the years that followed, rural-to-urban migration
escalated and increased the Greater Athens
population from 453,042 in 1920 to 1,124,109 in
1940, 1,852,709 in 1961 and as high as 3,016,457
in 1981, when the capital concentrated about one
third of the Greek population. After Greece’s
accession to the European Union in 1981, internal
migration to Athens slowed, and by the 1990s it
had stabilized.
Post-Olympic Entrepreneurial Athens
Post-Olympic and entrepreneurial Athens for the
last decade at the turn of the new millennium—a
decade starting around the 1996 unsuccessful bid
for the “Golden Olympics” and culminating during
the 2004 Olympics—belongs to an era of
European urban development where neoliberal
governance and globalization stir and reproduce
urban competition. Athens has remained a tourist
city recovering from a major slump during the
1990s. The postmodern collage in its landscape
and society predominated long before there was
such a label, until the present when the city has
seen several foreign migrant quarters while adopting
entrepreneurial city marketing (on occasion
of mega-events) and postmodern iconic architecture.
Its sprawling landscape stretched to an ecological
footprint, reaching up to the Evinos River
in Fokida, as far as 500 kilometers (310 miles) to
the northwest of Athens. Before this conduit for
the transportation of water to Athens was completed
in 2001, there was a succession of infrastructural
works: the Marathon dam, built 1926
Athens, Greece
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to 1931 in Attica; the Yliki Lake pumping station,
built 1957 to 1958 in Beotia; and the dam
and reservoir constructed in the Mornos Lake in
Fokida, in the 1980s. The commodification of
nature created by a thirsty growing city is well
illustrated by the enormous expansion of its ecological
footprint.
The inner city prides itself of iconic architecture
built on occasions of major international
events, especially the 2004 Olympics. Calatrava’s
stadium faces the Acropolis with the audacity of
postmodernism, following the much-criticized
volume of the modernist Hilton Hotel, built in the
1960s. The literature on mega-events now includes
Athens as the host of the Olympics “returning to
their birthplace” just over a century after their
revival in the same city. The dual focus of cities in
similar occasions—planned revival of local heritage
for visibility on the one hand, and global
references in cosmopolitan architecture and innovative
design, on the other—has gravitated toward
the latter in the case of Athens. The city was “glocalized”
by structures built by celebrity architects
in various locations, as well as new transport
infrastructure: the international airport, the ring
motorway of Attiki odos, the Athens metro, and
an extended suburban railway system expanding
to Corinth and later to Kiato. This infrastructure
has been constructed in the context of a new
model of urban governance in the entrepreneurial
city, which is now Athens, through public–private
partnerships.
The mega-event created a new set of urban
dynamics and a new wave of urban sprawl. Illegal
urban sprawl continued in Attica, though by different
social classes. Increasing population and industry
followed new infrastructure created in antici pation
of the 2004 Olympics. Attica has been gradually
merged with the Athens basin into one major
agglomeration, bustling with businesses in mixeduse
areas around the new international airport,
as well as socially segregated communities, second
residences turned to main ones, and leapfrog developments.
Many urbanized areas, however, lacked
water runoff and sewage systems. Illegal building
continued in a new speculative—rather than popular—
guise, cooperatives created settlements, and highways
leading out of the compact city were
surrounded by sprawling activities and created surface
sealing at the expense of traditional vineyards