Chapter 9

Morality Versus Ethics

in the Urban Development of Exarcheia

Leonidas Koutsoumpos
Assistant Professor, School of Architecture
National Technical University of Athens
Patision 42, 10682, Athens, Greece
lkoutsoumpos@mail.ntua.gr

This chapter presents a case of moral geography in the urban environment of

Exarcheia, a neighborhood of downtown Athens that is well known for political
riots and social disorder. A historical overview is made of the urban development
of the area during focusing on the period immediately after the transition from the
Ottoman Empire to the Modern Greek State. Two different notions of ethics are
exposed in the urban environment: The first, urban morality, is the outcome of a
designing actor, through a top down approach that takes place through a deliberate
design that results in a 'drawboard' way of development of the city. The second,
urban ethics, is a spontaneous way of developing the city, impromptu, without a
pre-existing plan based on tradition, habit and disposition and follows a bottom
down approach. These two notions are found to be in constant confrontation in
the public realm of the city and their conflict becomes visible in the urban fabric
of our case study area.

1. Introduction

"Architecture has an ethical function in that it calls us out of the everyday, recalls us to the
values presiding over our lives as members of a society; it beckons us toward a better life,
a bit closer to the ideal. One task of architecture is to preserve at least a piece of utopia, and
inevitably such a piece leaves and should leave a sting, awaken utopian longings, fill us
with dreams of another and better world." (Harries, 1997)

Urban design and architecture are, before anything else, limiting enterprises. Their
task is to create boundaries; and boundaries create separations which, of course,
have ethical implications. But this is only half of the story, the other half lays in
the closing lines of this chapter. In order to make the two halves meet one needs to
go through what lays in between.

1
2 L. Koutsoumpos

In urban design and architecture ethical problems are raised exactly because they
have the power to produce the obligatory framework of social life (Lagueux,
2004). In this sense ethics in the urban sphere is a discussion of being together with
others. It has to do with the community and, for this, it is about co-existence.
Richard Sennet in his book Flesh and Stone discusses urban environments through
metaphors of the body and he argues that "the city could nonetheless be shaped
into a moral geography."(Sennett 1994, my italics) Sennet maps such geographies
in different cases in the history of urban development like the compassion of the
almshouses, the hospitals and parishes of medieval Paris; the fear of touching that
created the Jewish ghetto in Renaissance Venice and the social diversity of
Greenwich Village at contemporary New York. "Lurking in the civic problems of
a multi-cultural city is the moral difficulty of arousing sympathy for those who are
Other."(Sennett, 1994)

This paper shall discuss a case of moral geography in the urban environment of
Athens, Greece. It will focus on a particular anomaly that exist in the street pattern
of a small area in the city's downtown, in the wider neighborhood of Exarcheia.
The paper will make a historical overview of the urban development of the area
and will present two different notions of ethics that manifest themselves in the
urban development of the area: The first is the outcome of a designing actor,
through a top down approach that takes place through a deliberate design that
results in a 'drawboard' way of development of the city. The second is a
spontaneous way of developing the city, impromptu, without a pre-existing plan
and for this it follows a bottom down approach. The argument presented here is
that these two concepts of ethics are in constant confrontation and the result of
which can become visible in the urban fabric. These two notions of ethics will
present a case study where it becomes obvious that the city is the place of friction,
conflict and confrontation that takes place in the public realm (Baumgartner,
1991).

Athens in our days has drawn international attention for being the focus point of
the current debt crisis that started in 2009 and which was the outcome of an
accumulation of reasons that have been piled up in Greek politics and world
economies. This crisis has often been associated in general audiences with a moral
deficiency of the Greeks who lived a luxurious life during the previous years and
their lack of conscience to pay back the money they borrowed from other
countries(The Economist, 2015). If Athens has been associated as the capital of
economic depression, the neighborhood of Exarcheia is well known as the core of
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 3

resistance and activism in the city. Exarcheia, though, even before the crisis, has
always been infamous for political riots, drugs and social misbehave.

The anomaly that I have described as our case study is located at the southwest of
the neighborhood and it is an elongated rectangular area of about 25 blocks,
bounded by the streets Panepistimiou, Themistokleous, Andrea Metaxa and
Charilaou Trikoupi. This anomaly is easily spotted by the irregular shape of the
streets, in contrast to the orthogonal grid that is laid outside. With regards to
discussing this anomaly, I will make a flashback to the modern history of Athens
and the way that its urban fabric was developed during the last two hundred years
of its history, focusing especially on the early transition period from the Ottoman
Empire to the Modern Greek State.

Fig. 1. The case study area, highlighted, in a map of contemporary Athens

4 L. Koutsoumpos

2. Neoclassical Ethics in Urban Design: Paris and Vienna

Modern Athens, despite its famous ancient historical roots, is a relatively new city
that was designed according to the predominant neoclassical views that had
prevailed in the early nineteenth century. Exarcheia, our case study, was developed
outside the neoclassical city from 1840 until around 1900.Before going into details
about the urban development of Exarcheia, it is useful to put the case of Athens in
an international context. Most of the time frame that we examine has its origins in
what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called the “Age of the Revolution” (1789-
1848) and extends to the Age of the Capital (1848-1875). The former was given
its name through a series of political revolutionary movements, springing from the
laboring poor and leading to the peak of 1848, that hit Europe like a great wave
"leaving little behind except myth and promise."(Hobsbawm, 1975) Nevertheless,
the ruling classes of Europe learned a good lesson: in order to be able to be in
charge they would have to control and manipulate public opinion(Hobsbawm,
1975). One of the ways that the state defended itself from its own citizens took
place through urban design and the restructuring of major cities. In order to get a
deeper grasp of the notion of urban ethics as I have described it above, I will focus
on the changes that took place in two big cities: Paris and Vienna.

Fig. 2. Maps of the new modern city: Paris (left), Vienna (right). In the plan of Paris one can see,
apart from the new streets, the repartitioning of 20 new districts that allowed an easier control of the
city’s affairs. In the plan of Vienna, the new buildings around the Ringstrasse are contrasted with the
old medieval urban fabric.

Haussmann's renovation of Paris, for example, is famous for improving the health
of the inhabitants due to the new sewers’ system and the widening and aligning of
a lot of curvy, narrow and dark medieval streets that were overcrowded, full of
diseases, and crime (Fig. 2, left). At the same time, though, it is notorious for its
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 5

underlying political agenda that wished to control the revolutionary movements

that found refuge in the very same streets and were ready to spark in periods of
unrest (between 1830 and 1848, the Parisians took the arms, half a dozen times, in
various revolts and uprisings). Enlarging and widening the size of the streets made
the revolutionary barricades difficult to work and allowed easier maneuvers of the
tactical army and the use of artillery. Emil Zola in The Kill, a novel that describes
much of the property speculation that took place during that time, assimilates the
opening of the new streets with deep cuts in the flesh of the city:

"They’re clearing away the buildings round the Louvre and the Hotel de Ville. That’s just
child’s play! But it’ll get the public interested. When the first network is finished the fun will
begin. The second network will cut through the city in all directions to connect the suburbs
with the first network. The rest will disappear in clouds of plaster. Look, just follow my hand.
From the Boulevard du Temple to the Barrière du Trône, that’s one cut; then on this side
another, from the Madeleine to the Plaine Monceau; and a third cut this way, another that way,
a cut there, one further on, cuts everywhere, Paris slashed with sabre cuts, its veins opened,
providing a living for a hundred thousand navvies and bricklayers, traversed by splendid
military roads which will bring the forts into the heart of the old neighbourhoods."(Zola, 2005,
my italics)

An interesting question rises through the above quote: Who was the one that
performed those cuts? We often come to think that it is the architect or the urban
planner the one who cuts through the buildings or the city while drawing in order
to understand it. Nevertheless, this is not very often the case through which the
cities are created or transformed. The sword is actually being held by a hand who
has the actual power and in most cases draws upon the flesh of the city.

In the case of Paris, in 1853, the very day that Haussmann was appointed to his
office as the Prefect of the Seine, at Paris, Louis Napoleon the III handed him a
map of the city, where himself had drawn the streets that were needed to be created.
"This map, the work of Louis Napoleon alone, became the basic plan for the
transformation of the city in the two following decades."(Pinkney, 1958- as cited
in: Sennett, 1994). The city architect, Gabriel Davioud, was there only to execute
the original plan; to design a few buildings, monuments and a great number of
street furniture: benches, pavilions, bandstands, signposts and balustrades.

In Vienna, a few years later, in 1857, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria issued a
degree named "It is my Will"a expressing his decision to demolish the medieval

a "It is My will that the enlargement of the inner city of Vienna, for the purpose of a suitable
connection of the same with the suburbs, should be undertaken as speedily as possible; and also
that the improvement and adornment of my residential and capital city should be considered
6 L. Koutsoumpos

city walls of the city of Vienna in order to create a ring road that is known as the
Ringstrasse (Fig. 2, right). In this degree he went on great detail of describing the
various elements of the project and amongst other necessities, which included the
erection of a new "fortified barrack building, in which the great military bakery
and city prison are also to be located, and these barracks are to be situated in the
axial line of the road to the Augarten Bridge..." (Collins et al., 2006). These
barracks were directed not against external forces, but against the enemy within,
that was the revolutionary proletariat. Furthermore, Ringstrasse, despite its name,
is not circular but polygonic, allowing the deployment of large troops and free lines
of fire.(Friehs, n.d.)

In a different manner than what was employed in Paris, a competition was

announced for the new scheme of Vienna which was won by Ludwig Förster under
the motto "Der gerade Weg ist the beste [The straight road is the best]!"(Collins et
al., 2006). Nevertheless, the final plan was an amalgam that was finally designed
by the Ministry of Interior and was approved by the Emperor on 1859. Despite the
artistic importance of the buildings and institutions that gathered along the
Ringstrasse, the Ring was conceived far more essential in order to express
historical authenticity, greatness and dignity, and much less crucial to facilitate
modern urban functions: "It was a rendition of power in urban architectural
terms"(Hanak and Schorske, 1998).

Strong criticism arose in both cities. Camillo Sitte, the great planning theoretician
of the time, criticized the approach of 'drawing-board city' that was deployed in
Vienna. He expressed his disagreement through a distinction between the
methodical or technical view of the city in contrast to a more artistic experience of
the city; he asked for the urban designer who resembled to a traffic expert to let
the artist-urban designer to look occasionally over his shoulder or advised him to
set aside, every so often, his compass and drawing board in order to focus on the
artistic qualities of the city and give life to it. The following passage summarises
his view:
"Modern systems!--Yes, indeed! To approach everything in a strictly methodical manner and
not to waver a hair's breadth from preconceived patterns, until genius has been strangled to
death and joie de vivre stifled by the system--that is the sign of our time. We have at our
disposal three major methods of city planning, and several subsidiary types. The major ones
are the gridiron system, the radial system, and the triangular system. The sub-types are mostly

concurrently therewith. For this purpose I decree the abolition of the enclosure and fortifications
of the inner city, together with the ditches thereof." (Collins et al., 2006)
The original text can be found here:
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Die_Erweiterung_der_Stadt_Wien [2017_02_01]
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 7

hybrids of these three. Artistically speaking, not one of them is of any interest, for in their
veins pulses not a single drop of artistic blood. All three are concerned exclusively with the
arrangement of street patterns, and hence their intention is from the very start a purely
technical one. A network of streets always serves only the purposes of communication, never
of art, since it can never be comprehended sensorily, can never be grasped as a whole except
in a plan of it.... They are of no concern artistically, because they are inapprehensible in their
entirety. Only that which a spectator can hold in view, what can be seen, is of artistic
importance, for instance, the single street or the individual plaza."(Sitte, 1965- emphasis
added)

This distinction of the urban designer-engineer versus the urban designer-artist will
be useful to keep in mind while examining the case study of Athens, where a third
type of development will be found: the designer is primarily absent. And although
the design of modern Athens started only a few years before the reshaping of
modern Paris and modern Vienna, most of its development took place in parallel
with these two cities that served as emblematic paradigms for the entire Western
world of the nineteenth century.

Modern Athens, though, as we are going to see, was not part of this Western world.
Nevertheless, its creation was very much a process of assimilation towards the
Western standards. At that very point in history, its predecessor, Ancient Athens,
had gradually become the dominant paradigm for arts and architecture in
opposition to the Baroque and Rococo styles that were prevalent during most of
the eighteenth century in Europe. Neoclassicism, accused the previous styles with
moral deficiency that was full of pomposity and ornamental crimes. Springing
from the principles of the Enlightenment, it chose as its foundations a morally
glorious past that was based in the forgotten Ancient Greece, marking the
historicism that took place by the turn of the eighteenth century. European
countries chose to 'discover' in Greece the roots of their civilization. These reasons,
combined with their political interest in weakening the Ottoman Empire, explain
why the three Great Powers (France, Great Britain, Russia) got directly involved
with the Greek War of Independence in favor of Greece. These same reasons,
explain also much of the way that the city of modern Athens was designed
according to the "glory and the beauty of the Ancient" (Μπίρης, 1966). These
reasons, though, as we will see, do not explain the anomaly of our case study, since
this area was not part of the plan of what it originally seemed as a promiscuous
design and a promising dream.
8 L. Koutsoumpos

3. The Planning of Modern Athens and the Urban Development of Exarcheia

When Greece was 'liberated' from the Ottomans in 1830, Athens was a small
village almost utterly destroyed by war. Most of the existing houses were located
on the north slopes of Acropolis. In 1833 Athens was selected to be the capital of
the newly established state as an outcome of the romantic wind which blew over
Europe at that time, wishing for an Ancient Greek Revival. Otto, a Bavarian prince,
was appointed by the three Great Powers to be the new King of Greece, who
arrived in Athens on the 11th of March 1833. The new kingship required a palace
and a plan for the new capital. The first urban planner who was contacted was Karl
Friedrich Schinkel who created a plan which was rejected because it proposed the
palace to be located on the archaeological site of the hill of Acropolis. After that,
two students of Schinkel, Stamatios Kleanthis with his friend Eduard Schaubert
were commissioned to prepare a first plan for the city. This plan laid the
foundations of the urban development of Athens proposing a basic isosceles
triangle whose median would be heading north from the Acropolis. The new palace
was supposed to be erected at the head of this triangle (nevertheless, its position
changed to the South East corner of the triangle, and in its place was designed to
be Omonia square). Next to it, towards the North East lays the area of our case
study that, as we can see in the original plan, was supposed to continue a
perpendicular grid of blocks with houses (Fig. 3, left).

Fig. 3. The original 1833 plan of Modern Athens by Kleanthis and Schaubert (left) and the alterations
made by Klenze in 1834. With red color, is noted an estimation of the area of our case study, which
in the final plan lays clearly out of the limits of the designed city.

The East side edge of this triangle was Panepistimiou street (also called
Boulevard), which is the limit of our case study area. This part of the design was
laying outside of the limits of the existing old city, on the empty land. The original
plan was modified in 1834 by Leo von Klenze, who kept the idea of the original
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 9

triangular form, but attempted to reduce the grandeur of the original plan (Fig. 3,
right). Part of the alterations was the keeping of a bigger part of the old city by
doing only minor adjustments in the curvy medieval urban fabric(Καλλιβρετάκης,
n.d.), by widening and aligning of just a few streets (very close to what we saw
Hausmann doing in Paris, though in a much smaller scale). Kleanthis and
Schaubert, as members of a committee which was appointed to implement the plan,
kept these alterations, but readjusted some of Klenze's design decisions. For
example, they redraw Panepistimou street to its original width of 36m that had
been reduced by Klenze to 12 meters(Μπίρης, 1966). Nevertheless, these decisions
were only lines on the paper, since the erection of the buildings that formed the
actual street was somehow completed only by the end of the 19th century. During
these first designs, and during the erection of the first buildings, two cities were
developing side by side: "a new Athens that borrowed from everywhere and came
to resemble nowhere, and the scenographic illusions of ancient Athens, ephemeral
as a dream"(Boyer, 1996). This second city was the one that existed in the minds
of the romantic architects of the time.

Nevertheless, a third, much more pragmatic and less idealistic, city, started to be
built at the same time: the area of our case study. This third city lays North East of
Panepistimiou street that was the furthermost boundary of the city. One of the first
buildings that was actually built beyond Panepistimiou street, kept the idealistic
character of the previous two cities, since it was the house of the Austrian
ambassador to Athens, Anton Graf Prokesch von Osten, that was built in 1836/7.
It was surrounded by a large garden which started from Panepistimiou street and
reached until the streets that are now known as Charilaou Trikoupi, Emanouil
Mpenaki and the Church of Zoodochos Pigi (Καλλιβρετάκης, n.d.). Hans Christian
Andersen, the well-known Danish author, who visited Athens in 1841 was invited
in the house and describes it as being "[o]ne of the furthermost buildings in
Athens"(Andersen, 1871) of the time. In order to enter the house, the entrance of
which was facing Northeast, the visitors had to turn their backs "to the extended
heath and the high mountains”(Andersen, 1871, p. 194)b that existed in the place
that it is now the area of Exarcheia, “and on seeing the polished, carpeted stairs,
we think that were at a summer residence by the Danube's imperial city. ...There
is nothing here to remind us that Athens is in its early growth. This villa may rank
with those of Naples, Vienna, and Copenhagen"(Andersen, 1871).

b Note that Andersen uses the same characterization twice about the area around Lycabettus "desert
heath at the foot of Lycabettus," during an excursion to the north of Athens. (Andersen, 1871)
10 L. Koutsoumpos

Hans Christian Andersen was very impressed by the rate that the city was
expanding. He even expressed this opinion to the King Otto "...that it must be
extremely interesting to him to see Athens growing up, as it were, before his eyes;
for the stranger here, every few weeks, perceives an enlargement of the
city."(Andersen, 1871) This is also communicated in a letter to his friend Carsten
Hauch, when Andersen writes that "[o]ne can almost say that Athens grows hour
by hour; houses and streets shoot up from the gravel"(Bredsdorff 1975; Strom,
et.al. 1998). Andersen was very optimistic and full of hope about the future that
laid in front of the new city and the new country overall. "We saw what Greece
could be made, and it appeared to me on this day of liberty to be a prophetic
sight"(Andersen, 1871).

It was after this visit and during the early 1840's that our case study area started to
be build(Μπίρης, 1966).But the buildings that followed had nothing to do with the
glamour of Prokesch von Osten’s villa. The first buildings were homes of the
people who worked on the big construction sites of the new neoclassical buildings
of Athens. These workers could not afford to buy a house for themselves inside the
planned part of the city. Thus, they started building self-made homes, illegally,
without any permission, just outside the boundary of the new city, creating a
suburb that was named Proastio Neapolis (that can be translated as Side-City New-
Town). These first inhabitants were actually immigrants from the very poor, at that
time, islands of Cyclades: marble men from Andros, Stonecutters and carpenters
from Andros, masons and plasterers from Karpathos, well-diggers from Skopelos,
and stonecutters from Naxos. Some of the most famous artists of the time were
also located in this area like the German-studied painter Nikolaos Gyzis.

Antoine-Marie Chenavard, who visited Athens in 1843, created a map of the city
that offers the first representation of the area of Neapolis depicting it in a very
rough way as a grey rectangle that was crossed by two perpendicular streets (Fig.
4).Nevertheless, this rectangle had nothing to do with the rectangles of the
designed part of the city that were mapped next to it. Less than ten years later,
Neapolis had become a proper neighborhood and had acquired a special character
which is summarized very eloquently by the French journalist Edmont About:
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 11

"In the triangle formed by the palace, the street of Hermes and that part of the Aeolus street
which extends towards Patissia, is situated the Neapolis or new town. This quarter of the town
is continually augmented and embellished. Pretty houses are to be met with at each step, in the
middle of gardens, and daintily ornamented with pilasters or columns. The streets are not laid
out very regularly, nor are they carefully levelled, and a great foss, in reality an open sewer,
traverses this fine quarter throughout its whole length. These little houses, though rather
pretentious, form a sufficiently smiling panorama. They are usually of three stories, of which
one is underground; the basement, like the cellars in our countries, is cool in summer, and warm
in winter: both in summer and winter the inhabitants withdraw thither to take their meals. The
receiving-rooms are on the ground floor, the bedrooms on the first floor, after that comes the
roof....The population draws to that quarter, as at Paris to the Champs-Elysees. In February
1852, I found the French school in the midst of uncultivated land; I left it surrounded by
houses."(About, 1855)

Fig. 4. Antoine-Marie Chenavard (1843) Plan of Athens (detail). Note the rough way that
'Neopolis' (sic) is depicted on the top, as four wide blocks, out of the city, without paying
attention to the curvy streets they form the urban fabric of this part of the city.

The municipality had initially suggested the banning of any building activity
beyond the Academias Str., while the landowners were obliged to keep their plots
as vineyards or gardens with the privilege of being exempted from any divestiture
or expropriation (Διπλαράκου and Παπαθωμά, 2011). Nevertheless, illegal
building activity continued during the following years. When the municipality
decided to take action, it could do nothing but adjust the original plans in order to
incorporate the irregularity of the streets that had been spontaneously created by
the owners.
12 L. Koutsoumpos

Fig. 5. Gabriel de Rumine (1859) Photograph of Athens taken from Acropolis. Detail focusing on
the hill of Strefi and Neapolis. In the center lays the building of Panepistimio.

The city plan was expanded once in 1865 to include the streets Didotou -
Zoodochou Pigis - Arachovis -Stournariand was further expanded in 1876 to
include the slopes of the Strefi hill.c From the original triangular design of the city
that was suggested by Kleanthis and Schaubert very little was actually followed.
More than 173 local adjustments were made to the plan of 1864. Two are the
fundamental reasons for these adjustments: First of all, the prevail of the private
interests of every single individual and second, the lack of the will and power of
the state and the municipality to enforce the original design. "It is to be admired,
the petty interests of the land owners who triggered these adjustments and the lack
of conscience of the politicians that satisfied them"(Μπίρης, 1966). For example,
the width of the street Kiafas that was originally designed to be 4m wide, was
reduced to 2.5m because of a request by Mr. Raktivan who owned the plot that was
on the corner of Academias Str. An even more characteristic example is the
connection of the streets Zaimi-Soultani with that of Koleti, which was "sacrificed
due to the plot owned by Smyrlis" (Μπίρης, 1966). This resulted in an organic
development of the city, where the state was legalizing a posteriori private
building activities.

The name Exarcheia was given to the west part of the Neapolis area due to a
famous grocery shop that opened at the intersection of Themistokleous and
Solonos streets, and belonged to a trader from Epirus named Exarchos. During the
mayorship of Ioannis Koniaris, a casual market of around twenty sheds was set up

c These two expansions appeared in the Newspaper of the Government on FEK 27/A/8.5.1865 and
FEK 41/A/10.9.1876
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 13

in order to serve the residents of Neapolis, which was constantly growing

(Καιροφύλας, 2002, p. 22). Furthermore, mayor Spyros Venizelos having in mind
the irregular streets of Neapolis that could not be aligned with the plan, since no
one was daring to demolish the houses that had already formed the urban fabric of
the area, he drew attention to the new builders at Neopolis and he took care of
modifying in time any flawed road that was not aligned (Καιροφύλας, 2002, p. 21).

Fig. 6. Pascal Sebach (c. 1874) View of Athens from the West side of Lycabettus. In the center is the
building of Polytechneio [my stitching of two separate photographs].

Neapolis, became the center of a building boom that took place during 1879. Quite
a few investors and constructors were building two and three story houses that
were "petty constructions, but with good looks"(Μπίρης, 1966, p. 198) in order to
sell them. The buyers were mainly Greek expatriates from Egypt who were
wishing to get back to Greece after fears of the upraise of the Arabs (that actually
took place in 1882, known as the Urabi revolt).

The Polytechneio complex, was built in the area of Exarcheia from 1862-1876
(Fig. 6 & 7), to house the University of Engineering and Fine Arts (nowadays
accommodates mostly the School of Architecture of the National Technical
University of Athens). Together with the National Archaeological Museum that
was build next to it, they became the emblematic public buildings of the wider
neighborhood that boosted further its development. Before that, the building of the
Panepistimio (University) had already been erected at Panepistimiou Street from
1839 to 1864. Next to it were also erected the buildings of the National Library
and the Academy, forming a trilogy of fine examples of Greek Neoclassical
buildings. The two universities worked like campuses at the outskirts of the city
and for this a lot of students inhabited the area of Exarcheia.
14 L. Koutsoumpos

Fig. 7. Pascal Sebach (c. 1874) View of Athens from the West side of Lycabettus (detail of the area
of Neapolis). The large building on the top right is Polytechneio.

In 1859 took place one of the first students' riots in Athens, called Skiadika due to
the hats (skiadia) that the students were wearing at the time. It is beyond the
purpose of this chapter to go into detail about this interesting student uprising
movement, but behind the motive of the hats, the students were actually protesting
in support for the native industry of the country and against the new ‘foreigner’
king and the intervention of the foreign countries in the Greek affairs. The
epicenter of the riots was the wider Exarcheia area with the students gathering in
front of the police department of Neapolis to set free the arrested students(Λάππας
2004).The following day the crowd took over the building of the university
forming the first occupation of building in the history of modern Greece.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the original city plan was almost completely
covered with buildings and it had expanded to occupy most of the neighboring
suburbs like that of Neapolis. Nevertheless, there were still some empty plots of
land, in some of which marble workshops were still located. At the spring of 1900
“the Athenian Neapolis was similar to Quartier Latin in Paris: a bohemian
neighborhood of poets, students and trobadours… At Neapolis lived the most
important poets and intellectuals, …since it was adjacent to the University and the
Polytechneio and all the other Universities and Libraries.” (Μπίρης, 1966).
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 15

Fig. 8. Baedeker (1894) Athens plan.

The city has expanded to include the
whole area of our key study while
the street patterns have acquired all
the characteristics as it is known
today.

4. Morality VS Ethics in the Urban Sphere

In the previous presentation of the urban development of Athens, two different

notions of ethics in the city have been described, though in a rough mode: The one
is the urban design that was introduced by Kleanthis and Schaubert through their
initial triangular plan. The second is the spontaneous development of the area of
our case study in Exarcheia. Hereafter, I will discuss further this distinction of
ethics in relation to the urban sphere.

Elsewhere, (Koutsoumpos, 2007, 2009, 2013), I have established a fundamental

distinction in the overall discourse of Ethics (note the capital E): a distinction
between the terms morality and ethics(note the small letters and the italics). By
exploiting the fact that English language has two words to describe similar
concepts, I have defined as morality the notion of explicit moral law based on
conscious deliberation and as ethics the notion of an implicit understanding of
good or bad based on preconscious adoption of established norms rooted largely
on processes of habituation. This distinction will be exploited further, here, in
relation to the topic of urban ethics.
16 L. Koutsoumpos

It has to be noted that similar distinctions between the two terms have been
proposed by various scholars(Koutsoumpos, 2009). Nevertheless, my distinction
is established on the very first appearance of the word ethics in western literature.
In the Illiad and the Odyssey, Homer uses the word 'ēthos' to mean “an accustomed
place; hence, in plural, haunts or abodes of animals”(Liddell and Scott, n.d.). In a
beautiful passage, of the sixth book of the Iliad, Homer makes a metaphor that
assimilates Paris, the Trojan hero who hastened through the city of Troy in order
to get back to the battle, to a horse that breaks loose from its stable in order to go
and meet its herd in their haunts and feeding grounds.

"Paris did not remain long in his house. He donned his goodly armour overlaid with bronze,
and hastened through the city as fast as his feet could take him. As a horse, stabled and fed,
breaks loose and gallops gloriously over the plain to the place where he is wont to bathe in the
fair-flowing river - he holds his head high, and his mane streams upon his shoulders as he
exults in his strength and flies like the wind to the haunts and feeding ground of the
mares"(Homer, 2008).

It is this accustomed place that the term ethos identifies in the Homeric language.
The escape of the horse discussed in the passageis a quest for freedom to be with
its herd, in order to experience,once again, old habits, such as bathing in that
particular ‘fair-flowing’ river. It becomes obvious that in the Homeric use of the
words ethos and ēthos there is a strong connection to animality (Ingold,
1994;Derrida and Mallet, 2008)and particularly to its spatial dimension: it is the
accustomed place with which animals are well acquainted and which through a
repeated occupation have habitually become their haunts. In the distinction
proposed here, morality refers to humans' rational property of deliberating and
distinguishing between notions of good and bad, while ethics refers to the
preconscious and almost animal nature of man, which takes some of these notions
for granted, due to its embedded habits, tradition and a tacit understanding of
things.

If we apply this distinction in the overall discourse of Ethics in the urban sphere it
can help us to identify and give name to the two different phenomena that I have
roughly described thus far. According to this distinction urban morality refers to
what Camilo Sitte described as the 'drawing board' approach to the design of the
city that comes to be applied on the urban fabric. Kleanthis and Schaubert
triangular initial plan of Athens was very much according to this rule (as was
Haussmann's renovation of Paris and the creation of Ringstrasse in Vienna). Urban
morality becomes obvious only through a view from above, in order to understand
its logic and organising principles. On the other hand, urban ethics refers to the
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 17

spontaneous way of developing the area of Exarcheia by the dwellers of the

neighborhood. There is no mastermind behind its creation. It was created gradually
and collectively by the inhabitants themselves. There is not exterior point of view
that explains its pattern. It was built from the inside. The streets are irregular and
curvy because of the specific micro topography of the landscape, possibly by
following the paths of animals that have crossed the field before them, much like
Homer's horse.

Behind the distinction of urban morality and urban ethics lays another fundamental
distinction between reason and habit. Morality is associated with reason since the
latter is the very human property that distinguishes humans from animals. The
neoclassical architect is a paradigmatic figure in creating a design that he wishes
to apply universally on the land. Rule-based explicit forms, like the neoclassical
rhythmology of column orders, form its rationale based on contemplation and
reasoning. On the other hand, urban ethics, are in large based on habit and
disposition. The people who came from rural Greece to find work and a better life
in the new capital of Athens during the first decades of the nineteenth century,
being not able to find themselves a home (or find themselves at home) in the new
urban design, they built their houses next to it. They created a small village out of
the bounds of the city, by following the way that they traditionally were building
in their villages, using urban patterns based on adaptation in the existing landscape
and the tactile appropriation of the environment that contrasts itself with the
touristic perception of the city through sight and contemplation(Benjamin, 1992).

The architecture of the buildings of our case study was discussed in terms of Ethics
by the well-known Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis. Konstantinidis took a clear
position against the ‘foreign’ neoclassical architecture that was imposed on the
local way of building and praised the humble houses that were built by their
inhabitants according to the local customs. He found great wisdom and ethical
superiority in the dispositions of the local builders that had been created through
time, based on tradition, which was taking in account the local climate and way of
living, in contrast to the pretentious neoclassical buildings that came in Greece
through Bavaria and the trendy western capitals (like Paris and Vienna)
(Κωνσταντινίδης, 2011). Konstantinidis even went on documenting the most
interesting cases of such houses as a valuable source of architectural knowledge.
He published this documentation (a series of drawings and photographs) in a book
titled Old Athenian Houses in 1950. Three of these cases were at the wider area of
Exarcheia (Solonos 134, Charilaou Trikoupi 37, and Mauromichali 27). Especially
the house at Solonos street is exactly next to the area of our case study (Fig. 9).
18 L. Koutsoumpos

The house lays on an elongated rectangular plot whose narrow side faces the street.
A high wall up front divides sharply the private property from the public street.
The house itself is built at the far back of the plot and in between there is a
courtyard and the sunroom (liakoto), where most of the everyday life takes place.

Fig. 9.Typical house from the area of Exarcheia, 134 Solonos street, as documented by Aris
Konstantinidis: Left- ground floor plan, Center -upper floor plan, Right- photograph of the house
from the courtyard

Τhe strife between the morality of the designed city and the ethics of the
spontaneous building activity has also a political aspect that lays on the legalizing
process of the latter in order to get an official status of being part of the designed
section of the city. Especially in Exarcheia, that is our case study, the fact that the
population soon became middle class or petit-bourgeois, allowed its inhabitants to
have access to the power to 'legalise' their part of the city. On the contrary, the
western parts of the city that were populated by working class, had to wait until
the end of the century(Σκαλτσα, 1985). This meant that the illegal buildings of the
bourgeois became part of the city plan early on, in 1860, while other areas that
were built by the proletariat had to wait for much longer(Λεοντίδου, 1989).As it
has been noted by Karydis (1991), legal and illegal building activity have a
relationship that is similar to the two faces of Ianos, since they bring closer together
radical and marginal social groups towards a more homogenous middle-class way
of life. From the early days of the newborn state, until our days, different
governments have always been legalizing various sorts of illegal building activities
that never ended. It could be argued that this has been a systematic method by the
state of appropriating, or taking with its side, the poor, in order to stop them from
rioting and flirting with revolutionary movements (Σαρηγιάννης, 2000).
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 19

Behind the radial design of Neoclassical Athens and the development of Exarcheia,
lays a separation between a center and a periphery. For this it can be argued that
the urban fabric of Athens was created by two creative forces: the one is the
centripetal force of the design of the state that is related with urban morality and
the other is the centrifugal energy that was deploying during the spontaneous
building activity that took place in areas like Neapolis that is related with urban
ethics. The urban development of Athens crystallizes some fundamental pre-
revolutionary confusions between the concepts of People, Nation and State. This
is because Greece did not go through the process of the Enlightenment, which
allowed most of the Western countries to disambiguate different notions of central
power and transform gradually the empires into nation-states. Neoclassicism, as
well as modernism later on, was based on the myth of total control and total
program. In terms of urban design its foundation laid on the belief that an excellent
design will propose a solution for the citizen. But, more and more, in our days,
there is an argument that an excellent design should put the very notion of
citizenship in question (Τσιώμης, 1985).

Neoclassical urban design asserted that notions like that of ‘People’ and
‘democratic power’ exist as a preconception in the mind of the designer and could
never imagine that people themselves could participate in the making of the city.
This fact, together with the proposed distinction between morality and ethics,
inevitably challenges the autonomy of the designer. Autonomy has played a great
role on the creation of the western worldview, especially since the era of the
Enlightenment. According to this view every human is responsible to create the
law for himself and share it with a community of others that should also be
responsible to create and share their law. That is the close to the meaning of the
ancient Greek term 'αὐτονομία': auto-nomy, that is self-law. Nevertheless, it is
noteworthy that in ancient Greece autonomy was not the property of individual
persons, but it used to characterise the self-governing of city states (Piper, 2010).
This means that autonomy was a collective attribute and virtue that could not be
claimed by the individual citizen. Several attempts have been made during the
twentieth century to rethink moral autonomy. Cornelius Castoriadis, for example,
has defended an Ethics based on autonomy by giving the law to each individual
who is not isolated, but is related to others. Such views could be interpreted as
suggesting that the clear distinction between morality and ethics does not mean
that their limits are impenetrable. There could also be seen a possible connection
between morality and ethics as have been defined here, since autonomy provides
the means to question tradition (Garner, 2012).
20 L. Koutsoumpos

A different aspect of the idiosyncratic relationship between the morality of the

designed city and the ethics of the self-made city, through the legalizing process
of the latter, has to do with a directed attempt to share the guilt from the upper
classes towards the lower ranks of the society. This share of guilt appeared again
during the late economic crisis an explicit phrase directly from the deputy prime
minister Theodoros Pangalos who stated that “we ate it all together”(Kathimerini,
2012) This phrase is equivalent to the British saying 'we are all in it together',
arguing that the whole population is responsible for the country’s debt, shifting the
blame from the politicians to the ordinary people(Douzinas, 2013). Everyone has
participated in an original sin, despite if he or she is rich or poor, powerful or
powerless, which leads to a collective guilt. Pangalos in another instance has
argued that the Greeks who fought the War of Independence in 1821 against the
Ottoman Empire were “illiterate, simple-minded villagers who barely spoke Greek
and put in place a system of clientelism, following the revolution,” and he went on
to connect the previous statement withthe cause of today’s economic crisis, that
“public workers have their hands out for favors…”(The National Herald, 2011).
This is an ancestral fault that leads to the punishment of the descendants until now.
Furthermore, another level of interpretation is that since corruption is so
widespread, on the one hand it is, of course, condemned as bad, but at the same
time it is also tolerable.

As we saw, the area of our case study, is one of the first neighborhoods of Athens
that became the center of this political haggling between the first illegal buildings
and the official city plan, between morality and ethics. Since then, the wider area
of Exarcheia has always been putting in question the very citizenship in the city.d
The given answers, though, are far from being ideal, neither politically nor
socially. It is beyond the scopes of this paper to go into detail about the current
situation of political activity in this neighborhood; nevertheless, it is well known
that Exarcheia has always been a politically active neighborhood,ewell known for
its collective action and solidarity actions (Vaiou & Kalandides, 2016) and also a

d Note that Exarcheia has never been a neighborhood of lumpenproletariat, but has always kept a
middle class character. Integral part of this character was the students and the university life together
with an intellectual world that surrounds it. For example, nowadays, the economic activity of the area
has a significant focus on the production and consumption of books. It has been documented that in
Exarcheia 8.58% of the wider economic activity has to do with bookstores and publishing companies,
while 7.69% has to do with printing companies. If we focus on the narrow area of our case study,
these numbers are even higher. The artists that live in Exarcheia are two times more than those that
live in the rest of the city of Athens (Βασιλείου, 2009).
e The Strefi hill, during the December 1944 clashes that took place in Athens –that was the precursor

of the Greek civil war– was a stronghold of the left-wing army ELAS (Greek People's Liberation
Army). (Γιοχάλας and Καφετζάκη, 2012).
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 21

center of political riots, drugs and social misbehave. Common knowledge of the
area stands on two major pillars of 'immoral' behavior: the one has a political
dimension (anarchism) and the other has a social one (gangs, drugs, debauchery
etc). Although these two pillars are essentially different, they appear to coincide in
an imaginative topological space that is known as the verge or the marginal
(Ιωάννου, 2016).As we saw this is what Exarcheia has been since its birth: the
verge of the city –the city beyond the city. Nevertheless, Exarcheia nowadays lays
not in the verge of Athens. But although it is one of the central downtown
neighborhoods, its marginal character never ceased to exist. Indicative of this
marginality is that some of its inhabitants like to assimilate the neighborhood with
the small Gaelic village of Asterix the Gaul, that has been independent from the
Roman rule, because of the often clashes with the police around its streets. This
neighborhood is part of the (im)moral geography of the city: it is no chance that an
extended police operation that took place during 1984 wasgiven the code name
‘Virtue’, in order to offer the public opinion with the connotation of a ‘cleaning’
process of an immoral place.Obviously, fear has often been used as a tool or
vehicle of urban planning for the gentrification of various areas in order to create
new spaces of housing and entertainment that are guarded from any form of
criminality (Μίχα, 2007).

5. Concluding remarks

This chapter attempted a mapping of the moral geography of an area of twenty

blocks in the downtown area of Athens, in the neighborhood of Exarcheia. This
area shows a particular anomaly of curvy streets and uneven blocks in the
otherwise homogenous urban fabric. A historical overview of the urban
development of the area was made in juxtaposition to the urban development of
the rest of the city center of Athens, during the first years of the Modern Greek
State, after the Ottoman Empire. This overview started by widening the historical
and geographical horizon and providing a brief overview of the redevelopment of
two major European cities of the time: Paris and Vienna and seeing the moral
debate that had caused. Contrary to the previous cities, we saw that our case study
area was built outside the designed urban plan of the official city that was
developing at the same time according to the neoclassical principles of that period.
In the first years after the revolution this area was developed rapidly by illegal
building activity, as a small town next to the city itself.
22 L. Koutsoumpos

A descriptive schema was offered to represent the overall Ethical urban discourse
that separated the terms urban morality from urban ethics. Urban morality was
defined as the explicit conscious deliberation that is based on a rule-based system
and, in our case study, it was associated with the official neoclassical urban design
of the city. Urban ethics, on the contrary, was defined as the implicit understanding
of good or bad that is based on tradition, habits, tacit preconceptions and embedded
culture; this part was associated with the unplanned way of development of our
case study area, that took place by the inhabitants themselves.

It has to be noted that the proposed

distinction is, of course, schematic.
The urban designer is in no case a
rational machine, like the Mechanical
Turk, following orders of a master. Of
course he has consciousness and
deliberative capabilities, but he is also
made out of habits and dispositions
that spring from his animal nature. At
the same time, the illegal houses of
our case study are not animal abodes
and require some sort of deliberation.
Most probably they were created by Fig. 10. Kempelen (1783) Mechanical Turk
Copper engraving from the book: Karl Gottlieb von
specialized craftsmen like masons and Windisch, Briefe über den Schachspieler des Hrn.
carpenters who were actually von Kempelen, nebst drei Kupferstichen die diese
educated in their craft. berühmte Maschine vorstellen.1783.

Nevertheless, because of its abstract character, this schematic distinction has the
power to create meaning by polarising the field. The polarity of this distinction
shows the tension that exists in the city, since it is par excellence the place of
friction, conflict and confrontation that takes place in the public realm
(Baumgartner, 1991). The poles are meaningful because they create tension in the
in-between space. Focusing on poles makes sense only in order to look back into
the in-between space, in trying to understand what happens in the entire field.
Actually, there, in the midtones, lays much of the interesting details.

In these midtones, lay also the role of the urban designer and the architect in our
days. The days that the profession believed that it could solve all problems of the
city through a ‘good’ design of one single mind have long been gone.
Postmodernism was valuable in this sense with its criticism against the way that
 Morality versus Ethics in the Urban Development of Exarcheia 23

modernity (including neoclassicism) had dealt with the city, especially after the
Second World War. Let’s keep in mind that both modernism and postmodernism
have accused each other on moral grounds. For example, Giedion has early enough
described postmodernism as “a kind of playboy-architecture...: an architecture
treated as playboys treat life, jumping from one sensation to another and quickly
bored with everything”(Giedion, 1974). On the other hand the postmodern critique
on modernism is summarized by Harries (1997) as "the hegemony that we have
allowed scientific rationality and technological thinking—over our lives, our
thinking, and our practices." And he further uses Helmut Jahn’s words
"Architecture, along the principles of functionalism, programmatic determinism,
and technological expressionism, produced buildings without connection to site,
place, the human being, and history"(Jahn, 1983-as quoted in: Harries, 1997).
Sometimes, though, more and more in our days, architects and urban designers are
getting lost in the midtones of a murky picture of the profession. Often, thoughtful
designers have lost their faith in the power that they have to change fragments of
the city, no matter how small. This loss of faith is a symptom of our times and for
this looking back to the poles can help to see the whole picture anew.

The urban designer and the architect cannot save the city. They will never have the
autonomy nor the complete freedom to do what they wish, and this freedom is not
something that they should ask for. Although Homer’s horse breaks free from the
stable in an act of moral emancipation, it does so in order to return back to the
ethics of its habits and customs and dispositions; the place where the others of its
kind are ‘trapped’ although they are free. This also shows the impossibility of a
total escape from any possible constraints in order to find a ‘real freedom’ or a
‘real self.’ The custom of familiarising ourselves by creating habits is necessary in
order to do all the other things that are significant for accomplishing the activities
of everyday life, since “[s]o much of what we learn consists of learning not to think
about what we are doing, so that we can concentrate on other things”(Ingold,
1994). It is exactly in the repetitive nature of the every-day that the fundamental
mechanism of acquaintance takes place, through the creation of habits and
dispositions (Butler, 1878). "We know how to behave because we have
successfully behaved in that way before; our habits can become entrenched, and
when they do so then they shape our behaviour as firmly as solid
walls"(Ballantyne, 2002).

The ethical function of urban design and architecture is inevitably a public

function(Harries, 1997). Serving this public function should be the designers’ task.
Nevertheless, if the designers let themselves been used as chessmen they can cause
24 L. Koutsoumpos

great disruptions in the body of the city. The moral division between the flesh and
the stone of modern cities has marked the "secularization of society"(Sennett,
1994). According to Sennet the city should not try to assimilate to a closed system
which is characterized by formal coherence, equilibrium and integration and rather
try to acquire the characteristics of an open system, that consists of chance events,
mutating forms, elements that cannot be homogenized and are not interchangeable.
This is what he calls an open city. “Cities fail on all these counts due to government
policy, irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local control. The city
is not its own master”(Sennett n.d.). Defeating the desire for total coherence in the
city, thus, is an important aspect of the urban designer’s task, which differentiates
it from the work of the architect. The city is the place of friction, conflict and
confrontation that takes place in the public realm(Baumgartner, 1991).A major
way of controlling this, often takes place when controlling and manipulating the
Others who do not fill the standards of sameness.

"All these aspects of urban experience-difference, complexity, strangeness-afford resistance to

domination. This craggy and difficult urban geography makes a particular moral promise. It can
serve as a home for those who have accepted themselves as exiles from the Garden."(Sennett,
1994)

Urban design and architecture are, after all, enterprises that create connections.
Their task is to create thresholds that offer choices. For this, urban design and
architecture can be liberating. But this is only half of the story; the other half lays
in the opening lines of this text. The two halves need to be connected, in the heart,
in the mind and in the practice of the urban designer and the architect, in order to
help "...those who have been exiled from the Garden... find a home in the
city"(Sennett, 1994).In any case, freedom makes sense only in contrast to some
sort of limitation. Freedom in a vacuum is unthinkable.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Nikos Doukas for copy editing the manuscript of this paper and
making valuable comments to its content.

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