Why Athens is ugly: history and urban planning

Athens, the European capital that defies history

How can a city with the Acropolis at its heart look like a concrete drawer? The answer lies in its history: Athens is not an ancient city, it is a new city built on the ruins of an ancient one. Until 1830 it was a village of 3,500 inhabitants, and in barely a century it became a chaotic metropolis, without urban planning and with self-built housing.

From Ottoman village to capital in 1830

When Greece gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830, Athens was a small town of 3,500 inhabitants with a mosque and a bazaar. The new state chose it as its capital, triggering runaway growth. Peasants from all over the country migrated to the city in search of work, and housing was built any way possible, with no rules or urban plans. The result: narrow streets, concrete blocks and an aesthetics some compare to a Spanish dormitory suburb.

The refugee influx of 1922

The situation worsened after the Greek defeat in Anatolia in 1922. Hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived in Athens and settled in improvised, often self-built neighbourhoods. Most of the buildings seen today date from after 1945, built by families who left the top floor unfinished, with the steel rods of the concrete pointing to the sky. This phenomenon of self-building, driven by necessity, gave Athens the look of an unfinished city, which some describe as "shabby".

The ideological clean-up: when the Frankish tower was torn down

But there is a lesser-known reason for the lack of historical layers. After independence, the Greek state wanted to restore Athens to its classical appearance, and that meant removing everything dating from after Antiquity. On the Acropolis stood a 26-metre tower built by the Dukes of Athens (1205-1458). In the 1870s, funded by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, it was demolished. The British historian William Miller called it "vandalism unworthy of a people with a sense of historical continuity". Thus Athens lost the medieval and Ottoman layers that other European cities have preserved.

Ugly or full of character?

Not everything is negative. Some argue that Athens is one of the most vibrant cities in Europe, with a special charm in neighbourhoods like Plaka and Anafiotika, and a riviera that rivals any other Mediterranean capital. The lack of planning, they say, gives it an authentic, chaotic feel, far from the uniformity of the most "perfect" cities. Others, however, consider it simply ugly and poorly maintained, with the Parthenon in ruins and the famous "nefos" pollution cloud dulling the atmosphere.

In any case, Athens is an example of how demographic pressure and necessity can triumph over aesthetics. Perhaps the next time someone complains about its ugliness, they should remember that its inhabitants had no time to make it pretty: they were busy surviving.