The shift to competitiveness and a new phase of sprawl in the Mediterranean city: Enterprises guiding growth in Messoghia – Athens

Lost in translation, found in entropy: An exploratory data analysis of latent growth factors in a Mediterranean city (1960–2010)

“…The increased importance of the distance from Markopoulo Messoghias e as revealed by the regression analysis e corroborates this statement. On the contrary, residents tend to settle in areas previously planned and in part already built-up (Chorianopoulos et al, 2014). Such a 'self-contained expansion' model appears in nuce a bottom-up response to planning deregulation and, ultimately, to the crisis of the contemporary (compact) city.…”

“…On the other hand, the changes could lead to a breaking point in the gradual decline of the urbanerural hierarchy, with the formation of a more balanced metropolitan region, starting from the new growth pole of Messoghia, which could be a 'new city within the city'. The economic functions that have become established in this area indicate an evolution toward advanced tertiary sectors (Chorianopoulos et al, 2014) that could promote a shift towards mature (and possibly polycentric) settlement patterns. The persistence of the conditions for economic crisis could, however, have a negative impact on the Athenian urban system, exacerbating the salient features of informality and entropy and moving it away from a spatial organization tied to economic principles that can better ensure urban competitiveness, as mentioned in the introduction (Salvati, 2014).…”

“…Athens' informal and deregulated growth has produced a compact and chaotic form, consolidating the central city and stimulating the expansion of scattered settlements on the fringe (Salvati & Carlucci, 2014), as the results of the Principal Component Analysis and hierarchical clustering outline. From the functional point of view, the metropolitan area was considered mono-centric soon after World War II (Grekousis et al, 2013) with the economic functions concentrated in the inner city and land-uses organized according to the urban gradient (Chorianopoulos et al, 2014).…”

“…These four urban centers were selected to test the importance of different spatial organization models in the AMA: (i) a strictly mono-centric structure centered on Athens ; (ii) a dual-center model based on the gravitation around Athens and Piraeus, seen as urban poles with distinct socioeconomic functions: Athens for services, Piraeus for industry, transport and logistics (Leontidou, 1990); (iii) a model based on the gravitation around the Olympic municipalities north-east of Athens (e.g. Maroussi hosting the Olympic stadium), hypothesized to represent the new urban core of the AMA (Chorianopoulos et al, 2010;Salvati, 2014); and (iv) a Salvati et al (2013) and Chorianopoulos, Tsilimigkas, Koukoulas, and Balatsos (2014). Topographic variables were measured using spatial functions such as the 'centroid' command provided by ArcGIS (ESRI Inc., Redwoods, USA) that computes the center of gravity of each municipality and measures the distance to a fixed, reference place.…”

Long-Term Urban Growth and Land Use Efficiency in Southern Europe: Implications for Sustainable Land Management

“…This can be done by facilitating the processes of urban consolidation on the fringes developed informally after World War II, as observed in Athens, especially during 1970-1980 and 1980-1990 decades. Mixed urban-rural fringe land is mostly made up of heterogeneous and fragmented areas, which can be converted to urban functions through densification processes, while maintaining a balanced socioeconomic structure and moderate environmental quality [45]. At the same time, a more effective protection of natural and agricultural land from scattered urban expansion is required for rural districts, which were identified in Attica as the places of the most recent sprawl processes [32].…”