Urban Transcripts 2010: Athens: urban (r)evolution through individual spontaneity in the absence of planning

From a small provincial town of no more than 10.000 people in the 1830s, Athens has transformed and reinvented itself into one of the greatest and most densely urbanised territories in Europe, home to an estimated 5.000.000 people. This process has mainly been driven by an accumulation of non-planned individual and spontaneous interventions rather than institutional planning policies; more often than not, planning followed what had already been rather than determined what would follow. The contemporary urban environment of Athens evolved through a disobedience to hierarchy and regulation and a celebration of the individual ego over collective consensus.

Urban Transcripts started as an open call to explore Athens as such a diffuse individuality-driven urbanity, an invitation to co-create a story of the city through art, research and design work. Projects including urban design proposals, methodologies of urban analysis, drawing, film, photography, poetry and research were showcased and discussed in an exhibition and a day of talks in the gallery space of Booze Cooperativa in central Athens. The event was an opportunity to bring together young architects, researchers and visual artists to share their work and generate a stimulating exchange of ideas on the city and its development.
 

“Urban Transcripts 2010. Over The Skin Of The City” interview with Yiorgos Papamanousakis (project lead), by Eugenia Fratzeskou at Digicult, no.62, March 2011

Images from top:

1. Urban Transcripts 2010
2. “Mythistorema: Fantas(ma)tic sections”, photographic narration by Maria Michou
3. “Chorographia Atheniensis: the reconstruction of the pre-modern geography of Athens”, design proposal by Fabiano Micocci
4. “Drawing the unplanned city”, drawing by Eugenia Fratzeskou
5. “Athens, the city of senses”, interactive installation by Maria Sfaellou