An Athenian Diary
30
How Does Athens Work?
Part 4: Everybody's Happy All the Time
For weeks now I have stopped by almost every
bookstore I have passed and asked the first clerk I met: can you recommend a
book that talks about the problems that Athens has had since the war, with its
growth, etc.? Economic, political, and social? I asked my last Greek teacher at
the Athens Centre, and she inquired at her local bookstore for me too, but the
answer I get is almost always the same -- no such book exists. Recently (Monday, December 1) I got a slightly different answer, from a wry
and ironic woman in another bookstore: it doesn't exist because of course we
don't have any problems in Athens! And then she added, "It's a book that someone
should write." Its non-existence, I think, says a lot, by itself.
In the nineteenth century, before Attike was
liberated from the Ottoman empire and Athens restored as capital of Greece,
Athens was a village nestled at the foot of the Akropolis. Paintings from the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show an improbable cluster of
houses at the foot of the rock, the Illisos river flowing free, shepherds in
fields, and most strikingly bare empty land, devoted to agriculture and herding.
(There's a great collection of such paintings hanging in various walls of the
Benaki Museum just a five-minute walk from our house.)
No early modern Greek shepherd would recognize
Athens today. The population of Greece in 1821 is estimated to have been
938,800; in 2001 it was 10,964,100, of which over one-third was living in Attike
(3,216,200 in 2002). Just to give some perspective, Attike bears about 2.8% of
the total surface area of Greece! (You can find some of these statistics at the
Greece section of Population Statistics.
The Statistical Service of Greece also provides data on the web.)
The problems created by this extraordinary growth
are at hand all around. Except for the big avenues (leophoroi) like
Vasilias Sofias just down the hill from us, Athens' streets are narrow,
sometimes crooked, little paths, often barely big enough for a couple of VWs to
pass in opposite directions. The result is on display daily just below our
window -- massive traffic jams.
A week or two ago Souidias Street stopped
completely when some crazy driver thought he could get his massive tour bus down
the street; it proved impossible to get the thing around the corner, and so
traffic came to a standstill for blocks. When Vasilias Sofias is blocked off
for a parade or demonstration, traffic is diverted to Souidias, and the street
becomes a free parking lot. Our problems are hardly unique. There's not a street
in Athens that doesn't get backed up with traffic on a regular basis.
The anticipated arrival of the Olympics this coming
summer has added to the construction frenzy in Athens, but much has, I think, to
do with population growth. Especially in the suburbs, buildings are flying up at
an astonishing rate. By Byron College a part of Attike that was relatively empty
not all that long ago now bristles with new housing, driven in part by the
construction of the National Road, which will tie these outer suburbs more
closely to the center. Sprawl is bad in the States, but we have nothing on
Athens -- there seems to be no planning at all (at least that I can see), in
particular no evidence that space has been allotted for public use. There are no
parks in Geraka by the kids' School, for instance.
Pollution continues to be a problem. It's not as bad
in the winter, when regular rain cleans out the air; but even a few clear days
suffice for the ozone and other byproducts of internal combustion engines to
collect in the air, and you get that reddish smoggy haze familiar from Los
Angeles (and our own Connecticut River Valley) which can be seen from the
Akrokorinthos
spreading vilely across the Athenian landscape. The Greek government has tried
various measures to deal with the smog. Years ago they finally introduced
unleaded gasoline, which used to be produced in Greece only for export; other
measures, like the failed attempt to eliminate the siesta, or the current ban
every other day on half the cars entering Athens (even/odd license plate
numbers), have had very limited success. Surrender to reality can be seen all
over central Athens, where new underground parking garages invite cars downtown;
the mayor recently inaugurated one just down the street from us, with a capacity
of over 600 vehicles. One would think the goal should rather be to make it
harder to bring a car into the city.
Many people now eschew downtown. Suburbs like Agia
Paraskeve have become "little Athenses," with all the amenities (except, of
course, the great old institutions like museums, universities, theaters, etc.)
of central Athens. We know folks from Byron whose view of central Athens is not
unlike the opinion held by many Hebronites about Hartford (without though the
tinge of racism). The suburbs are becoming self-contained worlds. You can live,
work, and be entertained there without ever coming downtown. This means sprawl,
American-style (unlike say Munich, where strict laws prevent development beyond
a certain point, and the boundary between town and country is as sharp as
between sea and sky). But in another sense, suburbanization just amplifies the
problems of crowding, smog, noise, by spreading them out like a pate over a
larger space.
The
vision of Attike from the top of Lykavetos is a vision of endless white concrete
buildings.
So are we happy all the time? Of course -- it's
Athens, after all. City of dreams, ancient, home to music and dance, excitement,
jobs, like NYC awake 24/7, as you can tell from the horns honking at 3 am. Until
that book finally gets written.
January 11, 2004
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