7 - Athens and the uniqueness of urban development in Mediterranean Europe

Summary

There is surely no region on this earth as well documented and written about as the Mediterranean and the lands illuminated by its glow. But, dare I say it, at the risk of seeming ungrateful to my predecessors, that this mass of publications buries the researcher as it were under a rain of ash … Their concern is not the sea in all its complexity, but some minute piece of the mosaic, not the grand movement of Mediterranean life, but the actions of a few princes and rich men, the trivia of the past, bearing little relation to the slow and powerful march of history … So many of these works need to be revised, related to the whole, before they can come to life again.

Fernand Braudel (1966: 18)

In a way, this is another ‘minute piece of the mosaic’, a study confined in time (the postwar period until 1981), space (Greece) and object (the transition from spontaneous urban development to a new urban pattern). Conclusions about the general applicability of findings, or about the adequacy of the model proposed for their explanation, obviously cannot be drawn from evidence about the society and economy of one city. The urban history of Athens, however, as a paradigmatic case study, highlighted some tentative hypotheses about Mediterranean cities. Research substantiated the hypothesis that spontaneous urban development was not a relic of the past, did not belong to precapitalist, peasant modes and was not related to Gramsci's folklore (chapter 1). Popular land colonization emerged with capitalist development, pertained to classes integrated in it and popular common sense, and was reproduced as long as it was causing no crucial contradictions.