At the crossroads of three worlds - capitalist core, periphery and socialist Europe - Greece will surprise the historian with its antinomies, contradictions and abrupt transitions, when its history is finally recorded. I do not mean the familiar history of political events, the State or the dominant classes, which amount to the same thing; but that of the urban subordinate classes, which continue to be underestimated as an object for research. Most of the issues discussed in this book are unrecorded in Greek historiography; the population constituting its focus has remained hidden; and the period of popular spontaneity and creativity has passed irretrievably, leaving a gap in research, which contrasts with its lasting imprint on the structure of Greater Athens (the capital of Greece), Salonica, and other Greek cities.

Important differences among the three broad geo-political regions in Europe are revealed through socio-geographical analysis. Leaving aside the socialist countries, the contrast between North and South will be stressed here. There is a delicate point which renders Greece a crucial case study in such a project. As the country belongs to the eastern of Braudel's (1966) ‘two Mediterraneans’, it has been deprived of autonomous development during medieval times, and continuity has been interrupted in its history by Ottoman occupation. ‘To claim that the considerable obstacles between the two halves of the Mediterranean effectively separate them from each other would be to profess a form of geographical determinism, extreme, but not altogether mistaken’ (Braudel 1966: 134).

In a way, this is another ‘minute piece of the mosaic’, a study confined in time (the postwar period until 1981), space (Greece) and object (the transition from spontaneous urban development to a new urban pattern). Conclusions about the general applicability of findings, or about the adequacy of the model proposed for their explanation, obviously cannot be drawn from evidence about the society and economy of one city. The urban history of Athens, however, as a paradigmatic case study, highlighted some tentative hypotheses about Mediterranean cities. Research substantiated the hypothesis that spontaneous urban development was not a relic of the past, did not belong to precapitalist, peasant modes and was not related to Gramsci's folklore (chapter 1). Popular land colonization emerged with capitalist development, pertained to classes integrated in it and popular common sense, and was reproduced as long as it was causing no crucial contradictions.

We have observed the rise of the working class in urban society and politics. In this chapter its emergence in the city will be observed, from a controlled to a dominant group in urban development, from a suppressed to a creative social class in the built environment. Changes in urban development after the Second World War and until the late 1960s were less abrupt than before, but quite rapid. They were not immediately obvious in urban structure. At the surface, spatial patterns in postwar Athens appeared similar to the interwar period and reminiscent of peripheral urban formations. The distribution of social classes and economic activity in urban space did not seem to change much, the bourgeoisie concentrated in the same locations and the colonization of land by popular strata continued on a massive scale on the urban fringe. A lag between socio-economic and spatial transformation will be revealed in chapter 6.

The discussion of the political economy of Greek development in the two previous chapters indicated that each decade of the twentieth century constituted a new and different phase. Economic development, the structure of industrial accumulation, the direction of population movements and urban social structure underwent important transformations, in which the largest cities were in the forefront.

Though research presented here spans more than a decade, the book was actually written during 1985-8, as I was becoming distant from a long career in planning. Reflections on the type of our acquired urban models and their impact on a non-receptive society, spontaneous and speculative, pointed to the necessity for emancipation from Anglo-American geography. I was becoming convinced that an alternative urban development theory should be explored, not only for the Third World, as in my previous works, but also for the Mediterranean European city. The major encouragement for such a project was provided by those Greek professors of architecture, surveying, planning and engineering who actively supported my entrance into academia in 1985. I am deeply grateful for their confidence in me during a crucial period of my life.

The book was written on the occasion of a Senior Fellowship at the former Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research of the Johns Hopkins University (1986), and of a grant awarded by the Empirikion Foundation of Greece for the study of industrial growth and decline in Greek metropolitan regions (1987). I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for these awards. Besides research completed in the 1980s, this book incorporates some material from my Ph.D. thesis (parts of chapters 4, 6), submitted to the University of London, London School of Economics and Political Science (1981). I wish to thank again Emrys Jones for years of stimulating and patient supervision and subsequent continuous friendly encouragement; and Brian Robson for his support and constructive interventions from the time when he appeared as my external examiner until the final manuscript of this book was submitted.

As industrial capital becomes more mobile, the 1970s have been a period of radical transformation of cities and regions. Powerful trends in the direction of decomposition of the production process of many once vertically integrated industries, tend to reverse the trend towards integration which characterized the first decades of the twentieth century in the fordist drive for mass production and consumption (Scott and Storper 1986: 11). The consequent restructuring toward flexible accumulation creates new core/periphery hierarchies, which have much affected the NICs. In Southern Europe, restructuring involves both the formal sector, in which certain industry groups decline while others emerge, and the informal sector. Researchers have focused heavily on the latter. Informal activities have always been growing in the Mediterranean, but recently flexible accumulation revitalized small industry and articulated it in the capitalist economy.

Analysis up to this point has illustrated the transformation of Greater Athens and Salonica into the principal productive centres of Greece during the 1960s and the rise of the working class in urban society and urban growth processes.

The Mediterranean world was emerging from a period of war and revolution during the early nineteenth century. Before this, Spain and Italy were still under French control, and Greece, along with the Balkans, was under Ottoman rule. Greece was formally declared independent by the London Protocol of 3 February 1830 and Athens was declared the capital of Greece in 1834. The glorious city of antiquity entered the mid-nineteenth century as a deserted village in ruins, destroyed by four centuries of Ottoman rule. Piraeus, its port, was nothing more than a wild coastline at this time, with no inhabitants and no name (Stassinopoulos 1973: 370-1). A fact rarely acknowledged is that both Athens and Piraeus were rebuilt as new cities: there is a wistful longing for continuity with ancient times. ‘In Greece, the past will always detract from the present’ (About 1855: 6). In the 1830s the two towns started to develop interdependently and grew rapidly, especially as a result of the centralism of the Greek State: Athens and Piraeus, comprador city and its port, unproductive and productive, bourgeois and proletarian cities.

Uneven development in urban space has been reproduced all over the world. Space has always been stratified in the history of capitalism and the working class confined to residual land, lacking in basic urban services. However, this is the only universal statement that can be made about capitalist cities. The question is, why space was stratified in different ways in history and among various geographical regions. A study of urban development as the result of class-specific patterns of collective consumption and appropriation of urban space thus differs from one of distributions as approached in traditional and positivist geography. This book focuses on the social forces which have reproduced a spontaneous urban development pattern throughout the Mediterranean, and on its recent transformation through planning and class struggle.

Rather than ‘structures’ or ‘patterns’, transition, change, restructuring and development are explored, as produced by human agency rather than by personified State agencies or the impersonal forces of the market. Spontaneous urban movements and informal activities, which have usually been neutralized in social studies, are focused upon. ‘Misery’ has been stressed by sociologists, while planners and political scientists tend to moralize: ‘Unlike the cities of northern and northwestern Europe, Rome cannot build upon historical habits of civic pride, discipline and enterprise’ (Fried 1973: 40).

The Second World War (1940-5) and the Greek civil war (1946-9) left the country in ruins. The structure of underdevelopment was aggravated by destruction and was carried through to the first postwar decades. Then, however, it was soon overcome. In the 1960s the safety valve of emigration reopened, the centre of gravity of the economy moved towards industry, living conditions improved and the role of marginality and urban poverty declined. Athens began to diverge from Third World urbanization models from a socio-economic point of view, and a solid working class grew in its society. This urban proletariat, however, has been virtually ignored by researchers, hidden within an alleged parasitic urban population. Even the Left went along with stereotypes about ‘underdevelopment’, ‘parasitism’, ‘overurbanization’ and the ‘petty-medium society’. In this chapter available evidence will be combined with an analysis of census data in order to discuss the nature of the urban working class, and social classes more generally, within the political economy of Greek development until the 1960s.

This chapter is based on the results of in-depth interviews with different types of landlords owning and renting residential property in Hackney and Islington. In Chapter 3 we argued that attempts to classify landlords have often been marred by inadequate conceptualisation; that analyses have tended to accept rather uncritically the convention of classifying landlords by the number of properties they own and their legal status. We then proposed an alternative classification of landlords based upon the differences in their historical, ideological and economic characteristics, and identified six causally structured groups. Here we focus upon each of these groups in turn, to show how the actual characteristics of individual members within a group combine to admit the possibility of emergent causal powers.

If we take seriously the idea that landlords may be considered as a series of structured groups then we should be able to subject such a notion to empirical scrutiny. Indeed this is the rationale for intensive research; it offers the possibility of investigating the structural relations that bind particular groups and identifies certain social practices that would very likely be glossed over in more formal, extensive modes of research. There are, of course, attendant risks connected with this approach.

The main purpose of this chapter is to show how the particular characteristics of local housing markets at a point in time, modify, realise or constrain the emergent causal powers landlords possess by virtue of their membership of a particular group. Whether and how the causal powers of different groups of landlords operate depends upon certain social conditions, that is, upon their interaction with certain kinds of contingent circumstances and events. This chapter will attempt to unravel several different strands of this type of explanation. The first strand is the association between the different groups of landlords, inscribed with potential ways of acting, and the three possible courses of action outlined in Chapter 2: reinvestment, disinvestment and informalisation, and their various sub-trends. Whatever strategy or strategies are pursued by groups of landlords cannot be known in advance of the second strand, the nature of the housing markets in which they operate. Landlords in our extensive study, with certain exceptions, mainly operated across two local authority areas – a geographical space that is differentiated by type of property, degrees of environmental attactiveness and by accessibility to a range of local goods and services. In turn these different characteristics affect the way in which rents and house prices vary across space and so rates of profit from reletting or sale.

Who were the 235 households in Hackney and the 302 in Islington who eventually gained enough points to rise to the top of the exceedingly long waiting lists in these inner city boroughs? Some of them had been registered on the waiting list for appallingly long periods, in one case almost fifty years, others for a few months only. Not surprisingly, given the overall levels of housing need in these two boroughs, the housing conditions of most applicants were appalling. The statistics in Table 1 delineate the general outlines of who lives in poor housing in the private rented sector in inner London. Colour and detail is added to the story by the case studies at the end of this appendix. The households in this sector of the housing market who eventually rise to the top of the housing waiting list are, in the main, people living in atrocious conditions of poverty. There are two main groups of people included in the samples. First, there is a group of what might be called residual or traditional tenants. These are very elderly households, single and married pensioners who have lived in the private rented sector all their lives. At the time at which they were setting up independent households, in the 1920s and 1930s mainly, the private landlord still housed the majority of British households.

In the preceding chapter we outlined our critique of the existing classification of the structure of private landlordism and proposed a new classification. In the succeeding chapters we present the results of empirical research into the structure of landlordism in two inner London boroughs – Hackney and Islington – at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, followed by a chapter that tackles the difficult question of policy recommendations to effect change in this sector of the housing market. In this chapter we outline the methods that we adopted in the empirical research. Before doing so, we wish to point out that in this type of social science research there are important interconnections between classification, empirical research and policy recommendations. Despite presenting the chapters in this order, the different processes are interconnected and we found it difficult to separate them completely.

In fact, the chapters follow a ‘logic’ of presentation rather than the overlapping sequence of our method of working. The reconceptualisation of the workings of the private rented housing market and those who organise and shape it did not take place in some autonomous realm separate from or prior to submersion in empirical detail. Working with a selection of secondary sources such as the publications of the British Property Federation, the Small Landlords Association, Shelter, government surveys, in particular Paley's Attitudes to Lettings (1978), and a number of academic sources, we built up a tentative understanding of types of landlords operating in the market.

There is no simple, unmediated relation between explanation and policy; not, that is, in the sense that actual policy recommendations are determined by the type of explanation adopted. The adoption of a particular explanatory approach however, we would argue, does influence the scope and form of policy recommendations. Central to the realist-type explanation of decline in rented accommodation set out in the preceding chapters is the notion of diversity, the diverse impact of general processes of housing change such as rental disinvestment and investment within a variety of housing markets. In particular, we have drawn attention to the complex effects of the activities of different types of private landlords in different areas. And from this focus two relatively clear policy directions would appear to follow.

First, the need to devise policies which can discriminate between different types of landlords in order to meet the variety of rented housing need in different locations. Certain types of landlords, in particular commercial landlords, are unlikely to be in a position to provide secure, reasonably priced, rented accommodation whatever the rented housing need of an area. Other groups of landlords, however, may be in a position to adequately meet certain types of rented housing need in particular areas.

The private rented sector of the housing market, for all its overall decline, has remained an object of interest and fascination to researchers in a wide range of disciplines. Each, from their own perspective, have attempted to describe and explain the key attributes of this decline. What we hope we have done here is to provide a new perspective, a different way of looking at the changes that have taken place in this sector of the market since 1945. The arguments in this book cross established disciplinary boundaries. We draw upon evidence from many areas but if we are to be classified at all we fall into what may be termed the ‘new geography’ with its concern to link the particular to the general; that is to preserve both aspects of social change in one explanation. We attempt to explain the general decline of the private rented market in Britain, the wider processes of investment and disinvestment which lie behind the decline, without losing sight of particular form that the processes have taken in different local housing markets.

This book is the end product of an enjoyable research collaboration between the two authors over a six year period at the Open University.

The declining share of domestic property owned by private landlords has been a well-established feature of the British housing market for many years. Numerous general studies, conventionally relying on analysis by tenure, have documented, in more or less detail, this decline since 1914 (Cullingworth, 1963; Eversley, 1975; Greve, 1965; Nevitt, 1966). A figure of 90 per cent of all households living in privately rented property in 1914 is generally accepted as the basis from which the decline started, dwindling to a minority provision at whatever date the various studies terminate. However, private landlords still, in 1981, housed two million households, or 4.8 million people, a sizeable minority in itself and, in addition held vacant a proportion (2 per cent of all dwellings but 40 per cent of all vacancies in England and Wales in 1977 (Bone and Mason, 1980)) of the housing stock of this country, in anticipation either of reletting or selling. As well as being a sizeable, and highly contentious phenomenon – arguments about the pros and cons of residential letting, size of returns, concentration of housing problems in this sector are legion (Cullingworth, 1972, 1979; Murie et al., 1976; Short, 1982). We argued in the introduction that the dimensions of the decline of private landlords have not yet been adequately revealed, nor have the practices of landlords themselves been fully understood.