The Athenian apartment building (Polykatoikia)

In every city, there are one or more types of residential building which dominate the local housing scene and which are an integral part of its built history: small, identical detached, semi-detached or terraced houses in the planned suburban extensions in Western and Northern Europe and North America; large multi-storey, middle-class complexes in the cities of the Far East and South America; rough structures knocked together in the shanty towns that have sprouted up unplanned around the gigantic cities of Sub-Saharan Africa, India and Latin America.

In Athens, the apartment building built on land given to the developer in exchange for a flat (or flats) in the finished structure (the "antiparochi" system) has undoubtedly dominated the housing market for decades. It evolved rapidly following the institution of a favorable tax and legal regime which made of “antiparochi” the unique mode of production for apartment buildings; while there were only a thousand or so multi-storey apartment buildings in Athens in 1950, there were 35 times that number in 1980.

The discussion will focus on the processes which shaped the post-war reconstruction of Athens and the impact the hegemony of the apartment block has had on Athenian society and the urban landscape. It will also examine the extent to which the singularities of Athens’ built environment—the absence of a clear morphological articulation; the mixing of private and public uses at the level of the city block—are a consequence of the "antiparochi" model, as well as the impact this mode of urban development has had on the city’s social geography.