Yeah many of the buildings are ugly, but man, the plant-filled wide balconies are something else. I always wonder why eg LA condos haven't adopted balconies. I miss my hometown :/
The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
101–110 of 119 posts
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
>band, gear for sports and other items that contribute directly to the quality of a students education and experience You don't fiddle your way out of generations of poverty. Parents like to see their kids do extracurricular activities but technical skills (math, also physics) and communication skills (English) are what people need to succeed in life if they are coming from a background lacking in material wealth. Wh…
Children do not thrive in stale, lifeless institutions that treat them like machines to be programmed with knowledge. They require opportunities for creativity, play, exploration, and also nutritious food and exercise. Miserable, sickly children do not grow into intelligent, resilient, persistent adults who can claw their way out of poverty.
Hmm... Asian children educated in such schools seem to thrive just fine.
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is an article I found by The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/pta-fu... "PTA at a well-off school might raise a million dollars or more to pay for additional teachers’ salaries, band or orchestra instruments, a new library, iPads for classrooms, field trips, or other initiatives." "I later learned that most of the shiny extras (and even some full-time aides and specialty subject tea…
Thanks. If I was going to pick the location for the craziest such local contrast, I would for sure pick NYC. But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.
The Center For American Progress released a 2017 study[1] based on fiscal 2013-2014 data. The top 50 richest PTAs are listed in Appendix I.
[1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2017/04/180...
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Children do not thrive in stale, lifeless institutions that treat them like machines to be programmed with knowledge. They require opportunities for creativity, play, exploration, and also nutritious food and exercise. Miserable, sickly children do not grow into intelligent, resilient, persistent adults who can claw their way out of poverty.
Hmm... Asian children educated in such schools seem to thrive just fine.
I didn't believe you so I looked up estimated suicide rates per 100,000 per country from the WHO[1].
Turns out my intuition was incorrect based solely on estimated suicide data: The US has an estimated suicide rate for kids between 10-19 of 12.5 per 100K, while most other Asian country have lower estimated suicide rates (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, etc), except for India which has the 4th highest estimated suicide rate for 10-19 year olds of 23.1 per 100K.
Although I'd still argue (weakly) that most Asian children aren't exactly thriving based on anecdotal evidence, and perhaps all that the estimated suicide rates indicate are that Asian children can grind through their respective education systems. However, I can't think of any other readily available figures that could help make my case so I am checking my gut intuition at the door.
[1] https://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.MHSUICIDE5YEARAGEGRO...
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. If I was going to pick the location for the craziest such local contrast, I would for sure pick NYC. But it would be interesting to know if there are more systematic figures anywhere, that apply to cities not containing Wall Street.
The Center For American Progress released a 2017 study[1] based on fiscal 2013-2014 data. The top 50 richest PTAs are listed in Appendix I. [1] https://cdn.americanprogress.org/content/uploads/2017/04/180...
Thanks! So for these top-50 schools, it comes out to about 10% extra budget. And there are about 100_000 public schools in the USA.
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#106That's where I grew up - amid the polykatoikies! It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes. Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray, frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille w…
> where black dust covers every surface inside a home unless one dusts and brooms and slops every single day. You can't just close your windows and run an air purifier?
Of course you can, but that won't do anything. The situation is such that you
sweep the floor and in a couple of hours everything is again covered with
black dust. Unless you keep the windows (and the balcony doors and the
lightwell windows) closed and the air purifier running 24/7, year-round, you
wouldn't achieve anything in the way you propose.
Besides, keeping the windows and doors closed 24/7 during the summer months (and quite a bit of Spring and Autumn too) in Athens is suicide. You'd have to also run an AC unit 24/7. And that's expensive and pointless- there are times of the day that it is very pleasant outside, even in the heart of summer. So you close your windows in the monring, to keep the heat outside, and reopen them in the evening to let fresh air in. That saves a lot on AC costs (and energy waste) - but of course it lets the dust back in.
In general, Greece is not Dubai. It doesn't make sense to try and create a sealed environment to isolate onself from the outside, in one's home. Finally, Athens is a city of 7 million people. Implementing your proposed solution would significantly increase the cost of living for many, not least because most live in old houses that would need maintainance before they have any chance to be used in this way.
The obvious solution to the problem of course, is to improve air quality across the city. After all, at some point most people have to go out and they can't very well take with them their sealed, air-conditioned home cocoon.
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#107That's where I grew up - amid the polykatoikies! It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes. Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray, frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille w…
I'm not even sure that it's fair to say that Athens failed to preserve it's architecture and replaced it with the concrete monstrosities. Athens grew so dramatically that there simply wasn't much of a city to preserve: in 1822 it had a population of ~5000 families, in the 1907 census it had a population of 167k, by the 1928 census (after the Treaty of Lausanne) it had a population of 802k. So we went from a few thous…
You're right that Athens grew a lot and it grew fast. However, the same is true for many European cities- many larger than Athens, and many of them have preserved their older architecture much better and to a greater extent than we have. They have also built a lot of modern stuff, but in pretty much every French or Italian city I've visited in the last 15 years or so (I travel by train a lot) there is always a part of town, usually the town center, where buildings are at least a century old (I'm not an expert in architecture so I wouldn't really be able to say exactly - but for example, when I step out of the station at Gare De Lyon in Paris, the majority of buildings look positively gothic to me).
In Athens, there is Plaka, of course- but even under the Acropolis you can find a mix of new and old that I haven't seen, e.g. in Bruges, or in Amsterdam, in Rouen, or certainly Venice and even Paris itself. Even London, that prides itself for its modernism, has large regions covered with older buildings. I live in a town outside of London and the house I stay in is probably from the Georgian era. etc.
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#108That's where I grew up - amid the polykatoikies! It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes. Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray, frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille w…
> In the summer, all this concrete makes the heat of an already pretty hot place unberable You may have found it unbearable because it was just really hot, but it would have been far worse in a wood building with similar density. Concrete has very high thermal mass and when thick enough and thermally coupled to the ground, significant thermal resistance, so it acts like a cave. The bigger problem with concrete landsc…
There's shade in Athens- the balconies provide plenty of it and also protection from the (sparse) rain. But from my experience, concrete buildings -probably because of their high thermal mass, as you say- trap the heat during the day an then slowly release it at night, keeping the ambient temperature higher than it would be outside the city (the lack of air flow, as you say, makes matters worse as there's not enough of it to take the heat away).
The thermal resistance is true, also. Like I say in another comment, it's common in Athens (and in Greece in general) to keep one's windows closed during the day, to keep out the heat, then open them in the night so cool air comes back in. Especially older houses with thicker walls are very good at that.
The bottom line though is that Athens in the summer is hell, at least during the day. That is the one thing I don't miss now that I've moved in colder climes.
(I miss all the stuff I moan about, above. Stockholm syndrom- or Athens syndrome, I guess)
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#109That's where I grew up - amid the polykatoikies! It's very strange to see such a positive view of Athens. I mean, growing up, I can't remember anyone ever having a good thing to say about our own homes. Looking down from Lycabetus hill, Athens -rather the entire Attican basin from Penteli to Piraeus and from Parnitha to Hymmetus- looks covered with gray, frayed, books or document binders, or perhaps a mille-feuille w…
I was looking at the top image in this article and thinking "that'd be even more amazing if all those cars were kicked off that street and it was more pedestrianized." And in your comment you talk about the noise from the cars too. Cities are not loud, cars are loud. I think many of the areas of issue you discuss with this could be solved, and many of the strengths that the article's author expresses could be maintai…
Ah, I wish. Unfortunately, Greeks (not just Athenians) suffer from a horrible case of car-i-itis, meaning they have to go everywhere by car (I swear, people get in their car to go get milk or cigarettes) and every family must own a couple of cars, etc. This makes it a lot harder to pedestrianise large parts of the city, if nothing else because there's no space to put all those cars, other than on "pedestrianised" streets.
I've seen this often. Once, I was sitting at a cafe in a "pedestrianised" street and first one, then a second car, came through, in touching range of where I was seated - in a narrow street half of which was already occupied (illegally) by the cafe's chairs and tables. That has stuck into my mind because I have a big mouth and there was an er altercation with the drivers and some of his friends who was actually sitting at the same cafe as me and my friends. Anyway it's a common occurrence and a hard problem to solve.
Don't even think about going around on a bicylce in Athens, of course. You'll just cut years off your life, either because you'll be breathing cars' exhausts constantly or because someone will just run you over.
Re: The accidentally resilient design of Athens apartments
#110What I say to my non-Greek friends is that Athens is a really beautiful city, because it is really ugly. I have yet to meet a person living in Athens that likes these buildings for any other reasons than that you've grew up in them. In fact, the houses made in what Greeks call "neo-classical" style are considered to be a major improvement. This is the style you can find in the area of Plaka, Metz etc.
Many people call Vienna beautiful, but I have a direct comparison. I spent most of my childhood in Attica (northern suburbs, 8 Km from Syntagma square, so basically still Athens), in 5 different polykatoikies. All of them had balconies, bidets, elevators, good heating, plenty of light, were quiet and relatively clean. Here in Vienna, I've had one apartment with terrace and 0 with balconies (of 6 total I've lived in),…
I did a similar move from flats in Buenos Aires with balconies, bidets, and modern lifts to flats without those things in London. I would choose the London ones every time.
In paper they might seem worse, but in practice my current flat is much better: London is much less noisy than Buenos Aires, nearby flats don't usually get robbed, and I'm reasonably sure that the fire alarm works. My large and beautiful Buenos Aires flat had an alarm that stayed silent during a major fire.