INSTEAD postgraduate program 2014-15 

Athens seeks to define today the character of its decay and some answers related to the questions opened by its urban decline. The importance of the city in the global context is linked to this elaboration of the empty field left behind in its center; the articulation of a different identity of the city has to face the financial turmoil and the traces it leaves or the designed counter reactions that it possibly introduces, after the recognition of the problematic downtown areas.

The curriculum focuses on the very historical triangle of Athens, on an area historically defined as part of the commercial centre, extending on both sides of Evripidou street located in the district that Kleanthis and Schaubert firstly designed. Evripidou connects the two middle points of the two sides of the triangle that was conceived together with the idea of a possibility for a modern capital. The thriving quarter of the second part of the 20th century, characterised by high density, mixed use (offices, textile industries, small scale manufacturing, warehouses, and gross handling and retail stores) was transformed during the past two decades; gradually emptied out of manufacturing uses the area acquired the character of an semi-abandoned urban zone in transition. The area possesses a distinct ambiance, high density abandoned urban stock, manifesting deterioration of a modern building environment, at the same time making evident the traces of its commercial past.

The Evripidou street district is not homogeneous. It manifests the urban transition from the official Neoclassical city of the Trilogy at Panepistimiou Street to the most vibrant and problematic area of Koumoundourou Square that hosts now the emblematic chinatown and some areas where immigrants of a different, recent, metropolitan Athens live. Its in-between areas are considered an emergent creative cluster since they offer a prime case of discourse on the re-articulation of labor in the context of capitalist crisis. As an urban paradigm of a deserted city centre, it comprises a test field for the current conflicting approaches to the means and ends of urban gentrification, projected to properties that sometimes have no visible possible value.

http://parapoesis.tumblr.com