(Ebook) Why isn’t Urban Development Sustainable? An Institutional Approach to the Case of Athens, Greece by MSc. Antonios Tsiligiannis

(Ebook) Why isn’t Urban Development Sustainable? An Institutional Approach to the Case of Athens, Greece by MSc. Antonios Tsiligiannis

Despite the rise to prominence of sustainable planning, the state of urgency and
the pressure imposed by the extreme competition between metropolitan territories
reduces sustainability to a market-oriented doctrine for deregulated urban
development. The aim of this article is an exploration of the current Athenian urban
crisis, by centring on sustainable urban development plans, territorial planning
institutions, and urban policies. To this end, the phenomenon of urban crisis is
explained as a derivative of the failure of sustainability reforms. By establishing a
link between the institutional framework governing urban development and the
success or failure of sustainability reforms, this article seeks to contribute to the
discussion around the attainability, scope and impact of sustainable urban
development plans. Through the hypothesis that as long as territorial planning is
used as means towards speculative urban development, it will only be equivalent
to that of a real estate facilitating mechanism, it is argued that the urban
development model of Athens, as well as the role that institutions have in its
shaping, is incompatible with any notion of sustainability. The main contribution
of this article is to potentially help towards developing a critical reflection on how
projects, plans, territories and sustainability should be approached.
JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY URBAN AFFAIRS (2020), 4(1), 71-78.
https://doi.org/10.25034/ijcua.2020.v4n1-7