Athens is Building the World's Largest City Park
Hellenikon Metropolitan Park, Artist Rendering
Over 15 years ago, I visited Athens as a teenager on my first trip to Europe. I was on a high school tour of Italy and Greece. After seeing the gorgeous architecture and lively, pristine streets of Rome, Florence, Sorrento and Capri, lets just say Athens was disappointing (and that's putting it mildly).
The Greek capital city was polluted, crowded and chaotic - and not that charming urban variety you might refer to when describing New York City or London. There was nowhere to go if you wanted to escape the crush of traffic, crowds and noise that come with living in a dense city.
In fact, my most vivid memory of Athens is standing atop the Acropolis and looking out at a smoggy sea of white buildings without a single tree or green space in sight.
Athens, Greece: see any trees on the horizon?
more Fast forward to today, and it appears that Athens has plans to finally provide its citizens with a source of respite, as it is poised to be home to the world's largest city park. Built around the Hellinikon Airport south of Athens, Hellenikon Metropolitan Park will be 2 million square meters, providing the city with the green space it desperately needs as well as a park nearly twice the size of New York's Central Park, and featuring 2 miles of Mediterranean coastline.
In addition to the giant park, a thousand hotel rooms, a high-rise residential tower, offices, shopping center, marina, and an aquarium are all part of the plan designed to draw one million additional tourists every year in Athens.
The first on-site work in the 15-to-20-year project could start as early as 2016, according to Odysseas Athanassiou, chief executive of Lamda Development SA, the Greek developer heading an investor group that acquired the site this year from the government.
Currently, the site that was once an Olympic venue is in disrepair. According to Bloomberg Business Week:
"It's been nearly a decade since crowds swarmed across the site of Athens's old Hellinikon airport, which was transformed into a venue for the 2004 Olympics. Today stray dogs wander among the decaying stadiums and buildings as a skeleton crew of security guards keeps watch. At 6.2 million square meters (1,532 acres), about three times the size of Monaco, the property is one of the largest unused tracts of urban real estate in Europe. Next to the Olympic facilities—among them baseball and softball fields and a canoeing center—sit several old aircraft hangars and terminals and a functioning marina. There are even some actual ancient ruins."
The abandoned Olympic softball venue within the Hellinikon complex (Photograph by Thanassis Stavrakis/AP Photo)
Lamda was only developer to submit a bid for the project this year, after its three competitors withdrew. With the help of private investors, the Hellenikon Metropolitan Park will be the largest private investment ever made in Greece, with an estimated cost of 7 billion Euros. In a country plagued by unemployment and economic collapse, the project promises to generate approximately 50,000 jobs in the development period from 2014 to 2025.
Not everyone in Greece is pleased with the prospect of selling public land to a private developer promising to build an enormous park. Andy Dabilis wrote in the Greek Reporter:
Here's the difference between how New York and Athens treat the invaluable worth of land: Central Park is a serene place for picnics, walking, running, bicycling, family outings, an oasis against the skyscrapers on it edges and wonderfully eccentric juxtaposition of greenery against architecture.
Where New York saw a place for perpetual beauty, Athens sees the airport as an opportunity to make a quick buck during a crushing economic crisis. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is selling off Hellenikon for development: it was supposed to be the biggest urban park in Europe but coming soon will be another vast sea of concrete and the land will be lost forever.
So now Greece has to consider that Hellenikon, which could have been an oasis of greenery and serenity next to the sea, will instead be filled with Athens' identity: concrete buildings, even gussied-up to look like to the rich people and business types who will use them.
Can Athens really build the world's biggest park and not be swayed by profit margins and private investors? Only time will tell. But a real park that offers serenity and embraces the natural environment might just persuade people like me to return to Athens one day to enjoy it.
