Self-help Housing Solutions in Post_War Athens.

Abstract

The paper gives an overview of those self-help promotions that served to integrate the rural drift to the
then rapidly expanding city during the early post war years by offering cheap housing in the context of a weakly
developed welfare state. The upsurge of this self-help promotion and home-made building is held to be tightly
bound in with that Southern Europe world in which it took place where the building of cities has not been
a spin-off of industrial development and an expanding labour market but rather the upshot of a drifting in
from the countryside in the wake of war and rural decline. Housing, the paper explains, here played a much
more signal role than jobs when it came to settling in this vast influx of newcomers within the society of the
great cities of Greece. The importance of self-help building in the earliest post war years is closely tied in
with cut backs in direct state intervention, a phenomenon in marked contrast with what then held true in
the industrialised countries of Northern Europe. Reduced direct state intervention left the field open for
private Initiative, especially upon the part of families, to cater for housing needs in ways that Combined cheap
access to home ownership and clientelism, all of which gave rise to peculiar forms of social cohesion. For the
author, the legacy of self-help building in Athens could well be compared to that of the large council housing estates in other countries given that both, while having resolved an immediate crisis need have saddled society with those considerable zones of poor quality dwellings that have twilighted badly as the operation of market mechanisms came to determine the question of who dwelt where.