The Housing Rehabilitation of the 1922 Asia Minor refugees in Athens and Piraeus

Abstract

The fragmented urban landscape of the metropolitan area of Athen and Piraeus with its local specificities is strongly related to demographic flows. The arrival of more than 220.000 refugees in the metropolitan area of Athens and Piraeus after the Asia Minor Catastrophe and the population exchange that followed the Treaty of Lausanne posed the great challenge of refugee rehabilitation since the population of the area almost doubled in a period of limited financial resources due to the preceding two Balkan Wars and the First World War. This led to a rapid expansion of the city, signified the beginning of the history of social housing in modern Greece, and contributed to the acceleration of the procedures for planning legislation in Athens.
46 refugee settlements resulted from the imperative need to house this population. Housing units ranging from unauthorized self-housing and almost slums to prefabricated wooden parapets, to single-family buildings, to organized apartment buildings influenced by the modernist movement, emerged. Nowadays, these morphological and typological forms have survived and constitute a considerable part of the city.
To synthetically provide information, show relations between the different forms of housing rehabilitation, and answer the question of how the refugee housing rehabilitation in Athens and Piraeus was realized and how it evolved historically this paper will analyze the urban footprint of these settlements by examining plans, maps, photographs, and through textual secondary sources, the criteria and policies that shaped them, giving an overview of the extent and influence of these areas to the contemporary image of the city. The focus will be sharpened on the architectural scale, by examining housing typologies, including self-housing and social housing, through archival material and photography. The housing typologies, which emerged will be divided into categories and analyzed based on one representative example for each of them. These will be illustrated with consideration of the actors and policies involved in the creation of the housing, the location and organization of the settlements, within which the typologies are to be found, their architectural characteristics, their transformation throughout history, and the situation encountered today.
The thesis will shed light on the origins, historic development, and transformation of these settlements throughout their 100-year long history and argue on the arising topics, mainly the involvement of the state in contrast to the lezzes faire, the influence of the settlements on the city’s urban structure, the architectural characteristics of the housing, the subsequent decline of the social housing sector in the city and the notion of sociability and neighborhood ties. The qualities and faults of these spaces and the policies that created them will be assessed. The thesis will argue for the significance of these parts of the urban fabric for the collective historic memory and their preservation and adaptation, as well as an interpretation of their qualities as a countermodel to prevailing housing developments.