research / publication

While there is a vivid ongoing discussion on the variations of planning, urbanisation and sprawl in Europe, the recent global financial and migration crisis provides a new body of realities and challenges to be examined in the backdrop of local specificities in Mediterranean cities. These stem from their past development as well as their current dynamics.

The paper discusses urban transformation processes along the periphery of Thessaloniki (Greece) since the 2000’s. It reviews the urban condition as it derives from a series of ‘unorchestrated’ actions of multiple agents: official plans and fragmentary allocation of uses, spontaneous urban fringe forms, private investments, infrastructure development, informal practices, and initiatives from below. These have produced distinct urban forms and borderline landscapes: ruins of the past (brownfield, greyfield), enduring and newly arising peri-urban forms, dispersed housing, segregated ghettos, big-box architecture, single-use clusters, productive land, natural reserves, technological and environmental infrastructure. New types and conditions of peri-urban landscapes in unforeseen mixes are recognized.

The paper is based on a research course of parallel investigations and successive stages of fieldwork that combines and highlights institutional and historical-geographical resources with imagery, maps, plans and statistical data. Thus, it puts forward a systematic method to study fringe-belts in the context while it raises generic issues of urban resilience and crisis responses concerning planning policies of urban containment and developments in transitional peri-urban areas around metropolitan conurbations in SouthEastern Mediterranean cities.

team: C. Christodoulou and M. Oikonomou

where: Research Unit of South European Cities, A.U.Th.

when: 2017/2018

Publication: CHRISTODOULOU, C., OIKONOMOU, M. (2018) Urban sprawl typologies in medium-sized Greek cities. Α qualitative morphological analysis in the peri-urban landscape. In: Charalambous, N., Zafer Cömert, N., Hoşkara, Ş. (eds.), in: Urban Morphology in South-Eastern Mediterranean Cities: Challenges and Opportunities, Proceedings of the 1st Regional Conference: Cyprus Network of Urban Morphology, 16 -18 May 2018, Buffer Zone, Nicosia, Cyprus, Nicosia 2019, pp. 134-146. ISBN: 978-1-5136-5221-4. Available online

Public Presentation: CHRISTODOULOU, C., OIKONOMOU, M. (2017) Medium-sized cities sprawling into rural landscape in Greece: Variations of patterns and homogenizing effects across scales, 3rd International Conference on “Changing Cities” - Spatial, Design, Landscape & Socio-economic Dimensions, Syros, 26-30 June.