On first glance, a typical Athens polikatoikia doesn’t necessarily look like the answer to a host of urban issues. Built quickly and on the cheap — mainly from the 1950s to the 1980s — these modernist apartment buildings (pronounced “Pol-i-kat-i-KEE-A”) line street after street in the Greek capital, their repeated concrete facings and endless lines of unfurled balcony awnings giving the city an appearance of remarkable consistency. They may lack the elegance of Athens’ earlier neo-classical housing, but they have helped to create a city that is vibrant, socially integrated and (until recently) affordable, in which most residents’ housing offers broadly good living conditions. It’s probably fair to say, however, that the buildings have managed all this more or less by accident.
When the polikatoikias (the term simply means condominium) were spreading across Athens in the 1950s, they did so in a city with urgent housing needs and little money to spend. At the time, people were flooding to Athens from the provinces — a trans-European phenomenon made more intense in Greece by the civil war that finally ended in 1949, which provoked many to flee a partly devastated countryside. New Athenians needed homes fast, but the state lacked the funds and will to construct public housing, and banks were offering few loans.
To solve this conundrum, Greeks created their own funding system called antiparochi, in which developers saved themselves the cost of buying land by giving landowners a share of the constructed units when they were completed. “The best translation of the term is probably ‘flats for land,’ or as some people say, ‘quid pro quo,’” says Panos Dragonas, an architect and professor at Greece’s University of Patras. “The system saw landowners hand over their property, and in return get, say, two to five apartments back in the completed building to live in, or rent or sell. It was a bottom-up system of housing development not created by any law change by the government, though the state did offer motives for construction by granting tax breaks.”
To keep costs down, developers adopted a modernist construction model — the Le Corbusier-developed Dom-Ino system, in which reinforced concrete pillars freed a building of the need for load-bearing interior walls. In Athens, this permitted the creation of a sort of modernist tenement. Industrial in construction, it was still aligned to a traditional street in densely packed urban neighborhoods, with differing building heights and lengths giving a haphazard, un-regimented impression.
