Nikolaos YOYAS
Architect NTUA, Msc Environmental Design, Urban Planning PHD Candidate
01@yio.gr
Abstract
Classical polis was born when a collectivity showed more interest in the truth of things, rather than their use, when cohabitation ceased to be the community of needs, where desirable is the fulfillment of basic human needs, material or otherwise and took place the transition to the community of truth. The last cultural remains of this way of thinking and acting survived until very recently, with the foundation of the modern Greek state in 1830 and vanished once and for all, slowly, but steadily, after 1974, with the entrance n the European Economic Community and, finally, the Eurozone, transforming and adjusting the contemporary Greek city to the western globalized standards. In this text we will examine the “wise” illegal houses, creations of social space, of polis of the refugee settlements of 1922 and the expansions of the, initially, planned Greek city centers, which transformed slowly, but steadily into pure speculation and greed for profit. This mutation was established with the replacement of the “customary law” and what is widely called “tradition” in constructions, with the rigid Building Regulations. This transition was crucial and it was the outcome of a much greater mutation; the anthropological transformation of the Greek people, its “modernization” and its contemporary, absolute alignment with the western European standards, which have taken over every aspect of human activity, including official urban planning, but, also, unofficial, so-called illegal constructions.
Keywords: Illegal constructions, urban planning, anthropology, western civilization
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