4.1K+Subscribers
Popularity
20Supporters
Subscribe
In Athens, I have a learned, there is something known as antiparochi. The practice took hold in the middle of the 20th century at a time when Athens was in desperate need of new housing. Supposedly during the 1950s, an estimated 560,000 people came to Athens from the countryside in search of opportunity -- effectively doubling the population of the city. That was a bit of a problem for a city with no money to build new housing. So something needed to be done. The solution was a ground-up arrangement (i.e. it wasn't a government initiative) that allowed developers and contractors to increase the supply of new housing without having to ever pay for land. And given the time period in which this took hold, it also spurred quite the modernist building boom, leaving an architectural legacy that to this day continues to define Athens.
Here's an explanation of how antiparochi works (taken from this BBC article by Alex Sakalis):
Here’s how it worked: a contractor would approach the owner of a house and offer him a deal. He would knock down his house, and build a block of flats in its place. In return, the homeowner would be given a certain number of flats (usually two or three), while the contractor would then make his money by selling the remaining flats to Greeks who were seeking accommodation. Generally, no money was exchanged and no contracts were signed.
What’s so incredible about antiparochi is that it emerged spontaneously out of the housing crisis in Athens. “There was no specific law which told people ‘OK now you have the right to collaborate and build whatever you like’. It was the people themselves that found out this possibility,” says Panos Dragonas, professor of Architecture at the University of Patras.
Even more incredibly, the state completely accepted what its citizens had started doing, introducing only a few minor regulations, such as a maximum height for the apartment buildings – known as polykatoikies in Greek – and a ban on building over archaeological sites or on top of Athens’ seven historical hills. There were no property taxes – the state never made any direct income from antiparochi.
The elegance of antiparochi was that it appeared to solve all of Greece’s problems at once. It provided homeowners and home seekers with modern apartments, while creating enough profit for the contractors to continue investing in construction without state subsidies or bank loans.
Photo by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash
We often talk about agglomeration economies in terms of their horizontal clustering within cities. But a new paper in the Journal of Urban Economics – summarized here by Richard Florida – has looked at the other dimension: the vertical clustering of economic activity within tall buildings.
Here is an excerpt from Florida’s piece in CityLab:
Economic activity is also sorted vertically, with higher-profile and more profitable firms occupying higher building floors. Law offices are disproportionately represented on the highest floors, taking up more than a third of floor space above the 40th floor, compared to 12 percent of floor space between the second and 40th floors. Finance, insurance, and real estate take up roughly 20 percent of floor space above the 40th floor, compared to 23 percent between the second and 40th floors. Business services, engineering, and miscellaneous other industries are also more likely to take up more space below the 40th floor.
The other takeaway is that there appears to be a greater rent premium attached to higher floors (vertical movement) than for being located closer to the central business district (horizontal movement). This surprised me. But I also don’t have access to the full paper. Is the dataset just US cities?
Nevertheless, the idea of a vertical city interests me a lot. And I agree with the authors of the report that, for perhaps obvious reasons, it is far less studied compared to horizontal development patterns.
I’ve always been fascinated by questions around the origin and location of cities. How did they get their start and why did they get founded where they did? Access to water and resources are obvious factors. But it could have also been for defensive reasons.
In some cases, the location makes intuitive sense. Quebec City, for instance, is founded on high ground at the point “where the river narrows.” Both of these elements come in handy when you’re trying to fend off intruders. But in other cases, the exact location of a city or town may not be as obvious.
Thankfully, Wendover Productions – which is a YouTube channel entirely focused on explaining how the world works – recently published a video called: Why Cities Are Where They Are. (Video embedded below.) It’s about 16 minutes long and it has gotten over 1 million views at the time of writing this post.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PWWtqfwacQ?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
They also have a video that I watched today called: The Economics of Airline Class. It covers why airlines don’t care about coach and don’t make money off coach travellers. The real estate developer in me enjoyed the part about revenue per square foot for each “class” section of the plane.
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
Share Dialog