ATHENS.

Athens became the capital of Greece in 1834. At the time, it was a small town of around twelve thousand people without economic significance, but it was chosen because of its associations with Greece's glorious ancient history. In the nineteenth century Athens was the administrative center of the country but the centers of economic dynamism (such as commerce, manufacturing, shipping) were located either in other Greek cities like Patras and Ermoúpolis (Syros island) or beyond the borders, in cities of the Ottoman Empire where vibrant Greek communities lived. In the beginning of the twentieth century Athens developed rapidly. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the urban development of Athens (and its port, Piraeus) exceeded that of other Greek cities. Between 1900 and 1920 the population of Athens grew yearly by 5.6 percent, and in 1920 there were 292,991 people living in the capital. The limits of the city extended and the fields around Athens were divided into small plots and houses were built hastily without any planning. The lower classes lived in the center of the city, in very old homes with unhygienic conditions. In 1924 a committee drafted the first comprehensive city plan for Athens, but it was never taken into consideration; for the next decades the city grew through the integration of small areas that had been divided into plots, and building occurred without prior permission from the authorities.

The 1920s represented a turning point in the history of Athens (and of Greece in general) because of the arrival of Greek refugees from Asia Minor (1922) and the compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in the wake of World War I. While most of the refugees settled in rural areas in northern Greece, a considerable number of them (130,000) settled in Athens. The settlement of the refugees presented the government with an unprecedented challenge, and it was one of the few instances in which the government worked out and materialized plans for urban and housing development. The Refugee Settlement Commission oversaw the construction of twelve large and thirty-four minor settlement areas in the outskirts of Athens, and the government facilitated the construction of new houses by providing public land and loans to individuals with favorable terms. Most of the refugees (63 percent) were housed in settlement areas. The arrival of the refugees and a growing wave of internal migration nearly doubled the size of the population of the city of Athens and the number of people living in the surrounding areas also rose spectacularly. In 1928 there were 459,211 people living in Athens, or 802,000, if one includes Piraeus and the areas around Athens.

In the 1920s and 1930s Athens was also transformed from being the administrative to the industrial center of Greece. The refugees provided abundant cheap labor that proved to be crucial for the industrial development of Athens. Nearly half of the refugees were employed in the growing industrial sector while some of the refugee settlement areas were turned into industrial sites, especially for textile and carpet factories. The economic development, however, was fragile and the endemic unemployment of a large number of workers would only grow worse with the world economic crisis of the early to mid-1930s. Class differences became apparent in the residential areas of the city: the upper classes lived in the very center of the city and in the new "garden cities" in the north, whereas the lower classes were concentrated in the new suburbs of Piraeus and in the east and northwest of the capital. At the same time the rise of the population extended the city limits geographically, from 3,264 hectares (8,062 acres) in 1920 to 11,400 hectares (28,158 acres) in 1940. Overcrowding in the center of the city and changing trends in architecture opened the way for the construction of apartment blocks and high-rise buildings, which had been rare before World War II.

On 6 April 1941 Nazi Germany invaded Greece and on 27 April German troops entered Athens. During the winter of 1941–1942 the population of Athens suffered from a terrible famine. The cessation of imports of cereals from overseas, due to the naval blockade, and the economic dislocation that the war and occupation brought deprived the population of the capital of the necessary foodstuffs. About forty thousand people died in Athens from hunger and related causes during the winter months. The situation improved in the following years thanks to the relief aid that the International Red Cross imported and distributed to the population. The distribution of relief in the capital and the destruction in the countryside caused by the occupation forces in campaigns against the resistance forces brought several thousands of destitute people to Athens—it is estimated that about 1.5 million people lived in Athens during the occupation. The leftist resistance organization, the National Liberation Front (EAM), gained a mass following among the population of the capital and often the demonstrations were violently suppressed by the occupation forces. After the liberation of the country (October 1944), Athens became the site of a civil war in December 1944 that broke out between the largely leftist resistance and government troops supported by the British army. After thirty-three days of bitter street fighting the leftist forces evacuated the capital and surrendered their arms.

The economic development in the postwar years accelerated the process of urbanization and contributed to the rapid growth of Athens. The concentration of major industries in greater Athens, and the employment opportunities that the expanding public sector offered, attracted thousands of people from villages and towns to the capital. Between 1951 and 1971 the population of greater Athens almost doubled (from 1.3 million in 1951 to 2.5 million in 1971). Internal migration increased the demand for housing and as a result Athens was once more expanded as plots of land were turned into sites of (unplanned) housing construction. Moreover, in these two decades a large part of Athens was eventually rebuilt and the architectural profile of the capital changed completely. The old houses were demolished and were replaced by apartment blocks that could house a large number of families. The construction of apartment blocks was not undertaken by the state or real estate developers but by the individuals who owned the plot of land. In this way housing construction became the best investment for the moderate savings of the middle classes. The growth of the housing sector had a positive impact on the economy in general because it contributed to the development of the related industries, like cement factories, metallurgy, chemical plants, and others. However, it was in the postwar years that the growth of Athens underlined the structural problems in the modernization of Greece. Internal migration created an uneven urbanization. Athens concentrated a disproportionately high percentage of the population of Greece, as one out of four inhabitants of the country lived in the capital. The growth of the capital together with the overcentralization of the state bureaucracy led to the demographic decline of other cities (except Salonica, which in a much smaller scale became the center in northern Greece) and the widening of the gap in regional differences between Athens and the rest of the country.

The rapid expansion and the unplanned growth of Athens were accompanied with several housing and environmental problems that became apparent in the 1980s. Air pollution, heavy traffic, and the lack of parks and communal spaces drove many Athenians out of the city center to the suburbs. The population living in the municipality of Athens fell from 885,000 in 1981 to 772,000 in 1991, whereas the population living in greater Athens rose from 2.1 million to 2.3 million in the same period. At the same time the character of economic activities changed. The economic crisis of the 1980s was coupled with de-industrialization, and numerous factories in Athens and Piraeus closed down, while at the same time there was an expansion of the commerce and, most importantly, of the service sector. In the 1990s Athens faced two major challenges. The first was that Athens had been named the host of the 2004 Olympics. There had been major construction and infrastructure projects (peripheral highways, new subway lines, new airport) that eased the transportation and improved the traffic conditions, while there were critical interventions in the city planning of the center. The second change was the arrival of economic migrants, mostly from Albania. In 2005 there were 132,000 immigrants living in the municipality of Athens, and they constituted 17 percent of the local population. Although there is a high concentration of immigrants in some neighborhoods of the center of Athens and there have been instances of xenophobia, in the early twenty-first century there are no signs of "ghettoization" as the immigrants are integrated into the social fabric, thereby adding economic dynamism and cultural diversity to the life of the capital.

See alsoAlbania; Greece; Olympic Games; Papandreou, Andreas; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burgel, Guy. Athina. I anaptyxi mias mesogeiakis proteuousas. Athens, 1976. Translated as Croissance urbaine et développement capitaliste: le "miracle" athénien. Paris, 1981.

Hirschon, Renée. Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus. Oxford, U.K., and New York, 1989.

Leontidou, Lila. Mediterranean City in Transition: Social Change and Urban Development. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.

Polymeris Voglis