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Victoria Mindova

The old centre of Athens and in particular the area behind Omonia Square is nowadays a meeting point of illegal businesses, illegal warehouses, immigrants, lawlessness, drug addicts and homeless people. This is the conclusion of the study by the young architects of SARCHA (School of ARCHitecture 4 All) titled "Another city is possible - studies on the Athens Centre." It aims to describe in detail the current state of the buildings, the residents and the microclimate in the area surrounded by Athinas and Evripidou streets and Piraeus Avenue and to map it. It is called Gerani and was known as the manufacturing and commercial heart of Athens in the 1960s. Unfortunately, there is nothing more than the old Athenians’ memories of the long-gone glory of this region, old people who half close their eyes as if in somnolence when remembering the clean summer streets and the lovely small shops in the neighbourhood they all know.

Today the streets of Gerani are filled with empty shop windows, neglected, dusty and dirty. Miserable people of different nationalities live in old ruined buildings, designed to be workshops but used as homes now. The average building has been turned into either an illegal shelter for illegal immigrants who, willing to find a better life, have fallen into the black hole of the Greek bureaucracy, or in a warehouse for the well-known itinerant goods flooding the capital. And while the Minister of Regional Development and Competitiveness Michalis Chrysohoidis and his Deputy Minister of Trade Dinos Rovlias are promising to citizens that they will be fighting and illegal trade, the young architects from SARCHA showed with mathematical precision where the heart of the illegal trade and in particular of unfair competition is beating.

However, government representatives in the face of Tina Birbili, Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change, could not wait for the results of the study and left the hall of Benaki Museum in Athens, which hosted the presentation. The study itself on the present state of Athens centre was commissioned on the initiative of Birbili in order for another plan for the renewal and recovery of the centre to be prepared, something which has been in the agenda of all governments in the past 15 years.

According to Tina Birbili herself, the SARCHA’s survey will be the base of a programme that will focus on creating conditions for citizens to participate in the design and renovation of the old Athens centre, using the buildings, human and natural resources of the area. The survey mapped the different ethnic groups and their activities, the vulnerable social groups and the criminal activities on the street. In other words, it compiled an information bank of problems that still remain unresolved and there is no specific plan to eliminate or at least reduce them.

As a resident of Athens in the last five years, the recent study "Another city is possible - studies of the Athens Centre" made me feel like a minor character from the very pessimistic and very depressing (according to me) film by Darren Arnofski "Requiem for a Dream."

On the one hand, the representatives of the open research centre described the plight of Gerani with scientific lifelessness. But once the audience asked how the problems in this and other areas can be resolved, a member of the research team displayed sensational humanity. He said something like: "The fact that you describe the case as a problem implies a negative attitude towards the developments in areas like Gerani and perhaps this negative attitude has stopped us for many years to find ways to revive these neighbourhoods."

And then I asked myself: "Which of the cases can not be described as a giant social problem – the distribution of drugs in these places; the warehouses for illicit goods from unknown countries; the dope fiends sleeping with an injection stuck in a vein on the sidewalk; the illegal shelters with 20 migrants in a room; the barefoot children begging? "Which of the described "cases" is not a problem? And when the people who have seen the seriousness of the situation are not ready to admit that problems exist and they must urgently be resolved, then it is clear that everything will remain in the haze of what we would like to see, not in the crystal clear picture of what is happening to us now. Just as in Arnofski’s "Requiem for a Dream."