6 - The end of spontaneity in urban development

Summary

Their crafts and traditions may have been dying … Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

E. P. Thompson (1968:13)

The forces which curbed the dynamism of Greek metropolitan regions and affected the traditional proletariat have already been illustrated. The concrete processes which undermined working-class land control and displaced the proletariat from the city remain to be investigated. In fact, until the 1960s the strong centralist tendencies of the formal industrial sector created a favourable context for urbanization, which concentrated labour in the capital of Greece. Furthermore, speculative urban capitalism had no claims for expansion on the urban fringe; there was no conflict between its development and the growth of a popular land market in the northwestern suburbs. As long as this balance was sustained, for almost half a century after the 1920s, the social basis of urban expansion in Athens was popular. This has already ceased to be so. The concrete practices of the dominant classes during the period of dictatorial rule combined with changes in the ecological complex initiated a series of urban social, economic and spatial transformations and worked towards the erosion of working-class land control.

After the mid-1960s even surface similarities of the spatial patterns of Athens with those of peripheral cities started to be eradicated.