4 - The ‘golden period’ of spontaneous urban development, 1950-67

Summary

In reality, even when they appear triumphant, the subaltern groups are merely anxious to defend themselves … Every trace of independent initiative on the part of subaltern groups should therefore be of incalculable value for the integral historian. Consequently, this kind of history can only be dealt with monographically …

Antonio Gramsci (1971 edn: 55)

We have observed the rise of the working class in urban society and politics. In this chapter its emergence in the city will be observed, from a controlled to a dominant group in urban development, from a suppressed to a creative social class in the built environment. Changes in urban development after the Second World War and until the late 1960s were less abrupt than before, but quite rapid. They were not immediately obvious in urban structure. At the surface, spatial patterns in postwar Athens appeared similar to the interwar period and reminiscent of peripheral urban formations. The distribution of social classes and economic activity in urban space did not seem to change much, the bourgeoisie concentrated in the same locations and the colonization of land by popular strata continued on a massive scale on the urban fringe. A lag between socio-economic and spatial transformation will be revealed in chapter 6.

The discussion of the political economy of Greek development in the two previous chapters indicated that each decade of the twentieth century constituted a new and different phase. Economic development, the structure of industrial accumulation, the direction of population movements and urban social structure underwent important transformations, in which the largest cities were in the forefront.