Inside and Out: The City, The State, and Domestic Life

Contributors, Densities, Essay, Formats, Ioanna Theocharopoulou, No Density, Politics and economics, Topics, Urban Paradigms.

Athens, Community, Domesticity, Essay, Greece, History of Architecture, Identity, Migration.

Essay excerpted from Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens by Ioanna Theocharopoulou, published by Actar Publishers.

To this day almost all descriptions of Athens have at their core a contrast between the grandeur of the Acropolis and the banality of the post-Second World War city. As we see in the image opposite, Athens today consists of a vast, mostly unplanned, nondescript (and polluted) expanse that stands in stark contrast to the cultural magnificence of its famous classical monuments (Fig. 0.1). This book presents a different reading of the city, suggesting that, even if far from perfect, there is something rich and positive to discover in modern Athens that may also help us to understand and analyze other rapidly growing cities around the world.