Athens

A note: This blog has no followers and one page view in the last 7 months. But I've had some ideas and I might be motivated enough to consistently write them down. I'm also compelled by one of my classes to write blog posts. Might as well put them here.

Anyway.

People who know me know that I spent 3 days in Athens at the end of a Turkey-Greece trip and that I judged that to be 60 hours too long. (Stumbling on the temple below, at night, was quite pleasant though.) My overall opinion of Athens is that it has one good hill and one good museum and the rest can be more or less ignored. So it was with interest that I saw the following article on Planetizen.

It's quite lengthy, and probably not worth reading in full unless you're really interested. But the statement 'A city with no Suburbs' is alarming and worth exploring. Apparently, present day Athens had built out to its current extent by the 1970's, and since then has gone about converting low density single-family housing into 6 or 8 story apartment buildings. The numbers are convincing and staggering: the outer neighborhoods of Athens have higher densities than the central business districts of dense North American cities like Philadelphia and Toronto.
The city is also walkable and the car ownership rates are low. The article has some good data on the number of intersections and blocks per acre, an indicator of connectivity and walkability, and again they are significantly higher than North American cities noted for their intersection density. The study also compares Athens to six other European cities (Paris, London, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome, and Madrid) and finds Athens to be the densest. So far, so good.

The jump to the miserable hellhole I experienced seems to be that Athens is a walkable city, but it is not walked. The money quote is, "Athens is effectively an immense parking lot form edge to edge." Apparently, there are not enough downtown parking spaces in Athens creating a culture of illegal street parking. Up to 45% of parking in Athens is illegal; the street parking creates greater congestion and makes the sidewalks less walkable. Athens has the worst congestion of the 7 cities, despite a grid set up conducive to good flow. Its streets, crowded and miserable, are full of cars stuck in traffic.

Further miseries arise from the denseness of the city: air pollution (right) from congestion, views blocked by ubiquitous 8 story towers, and sad children whose development is impaired, by the "unsuitability of apartment living for raising children, particularly in the absence of nearby open space."

The foil to Athens is Barcelona. Barcelona is the second densest city, but has twice as much parking and wide car friendly streets and has the least congestion. By all accounts, Barcelona is a great city, and much better than Athens. The author points out that on the Mercer ranking of city quality, where Athens ranks 77th, Barcelona only ranks 42nd, which he does not think is that great. (Zurich is #1, London is #39) At a glance, I am highly skeptical of this ranking. I haven't read all the criteria, but it ranks Chicago ahead of Portland and says, "Chicago, ... [is] amongst the safest cities in the US." (I spent 4 years in Chicago and did not find it to be highly livable or particularly safe.)

Implications:
The author concludes, "[i]t appears that every single urbanist approach, which Athens exemplifies, fails to deliver anticipated results. This challenges current theoretical assumptions and design directives. Clearly, there are elements in the Athenian version of natural urbanism that produce unwelcome outcomes; they should be clearly identified as warning signs to planners."

Ready conclusions are inadvisable because the plight of Athens is so tied up with the idiosyncrasies of Greek culture and Greek dysfunction.
But here are my three reckless thoughts:
1) The easiest lesson, plentiful downtown parking seems like a good solution, but there is a raging debate on that matter which I only barely know about, let alone am informed on. My attempts to outline an argument on this matter started sprawling like Dallas, becoming almost the length of another post, so suffice to say, in my personal experience, more downtown parking seems helpful.
2) The new urbanists argue the social determinism of the urban form. One example is porches, which New Urbanist form-based code requires. So, lots of porches will cause people to sit outside, and be more social. If it is the case that Athens is dysfunctional from cultural reasons, form has not dictated mores; if it has dictated mores, then the form is clearly wrong. Either way the New Urbanists lose.
3) An implication for Austin: I am not yet on the record as against the two big changes to to the downtown street network mandated by the mobility bill, but I am about to be. One change is to make 7th and 8th street two way; the other is to great-streets-ize Lavaca and Guadalupe (completely redo the infrastructure under the streets, repave, and widen the sidewalks substantially.) The changes will arguably make the streets more pedestrian friendly, and conducive to local business and thus make the added congestion worth it; the example of congested, unhappy, Athens argues powerfully against.