The forces which curbed the dynamism of Greek metropolitan regions and affected the traditional proletariat have already been illustrated. The concrete processes which undermined working-class land control and displaced the proletariat from the city remain to be investigated. In fact, until the 1960s the strong centralist tendencies of the formal industrial sector created a favourable context for urbanization, which concentrated labour in the capital of Greece. Furthermore, speculative urban capitalism had no claims for expansion on the urban fringe; there was no conflict between its development and the growth of a popular land market in the northwestern suburbs. As long as this balance was sustained, for almost half a century after the 1920s, the social basis of urban expansion in Athens was popular. This has already ceased to be so. The concrete practices of the dominant classes during the period of dictatorial rule combined with changes in the ecological complex initiated a series of urban social, economic and spatial transformations and worked towards the erosion of working-class land control.

After the mid-1960s even surface similarities of the spatial patterns of Athens with those of peripheral cities started to be eradicated.

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.