Athens is turning its abandoned airport into a smart city
The Sunday Times article states:
“On a now disused airstrip, two aircraft bask in the midday sun.
Adjacent waiting rooms that were once bustling with life now stand empty and abandoned. Bushes grow between the cracks of the battered airstrip.
For almost two decades, the former international airport of Athens remained closed and fenced off, preventing access for locals and tourists to a large area of the city’s coast.
However, in just a few years this area can become a model for sustainable city planning.
Miles from the Acropolis, one of the oldest structures in the western world, a Greek property development company is set to transform the former airport into a “smart city” of the future.
The vast tract of land three times the size of Monaco will become The Ellinikon, a development project that the Greek government and project management team hope will show how far the country has come since the financial crisis.
“The largest coastal park in Europe”
At the center of The Ellinikon will be the largest coastal park in Europe, spanning 2,000 acres and occupying a third of the total plot. The area, which was twice the size of London’s Hyde Park, would form the heart of a new “15-minute city” southwest of Athens. Everything a resident can do, from shops and offices to schools and hospitals, will be no more than 15 minutes from the center of the park, reducing the need for cars. Around 50 kilometers of walking and cycling paths will be built in the area along with a new tram line connecting to two nearby metro stations.
“We’re turning a place that’s 70% cement into a place that’s going to be 70% green”
“We are turning a place that is 70% cement into a place that will be 70% green,” says Odysseas Athanasiou, CEO of Lamda Development, the company responsible for redeveloping the six million square meter area.
The “smart city” of the future
Thousands of high-tech sensors and displays will be installed in various locations to improve the lives of residents and visitors, creating a “smart” city. There will be detectors placed inside public waste bins that will alert collection teams when they need to be emptied. Lighting on roads and paths will be adjusted according to needs and conditions, while the streams running through the park towards the sea will be autonomously monitored to reduce the risk of flooding. Concrete benches reclaimed from runways that have built-in solar phone chargers. The plants are irrigated with wastewater that has been collected and treated in an underground facility before being piped back into the park.
Plans to use drones to clean up the coastline
There are plans to use drones to monitor and clean up the coastline. “We are lucky because we can create this smart city from scratch,” says Mr. Athanasiou. “In our case, we can put fiber optic cables and sensors everywhere without going into paving.”
The Ellinikon is located in the middle of the so-called ‘Athenian Riviera’, the coastline that stretches along the western side of the city where the sea is clear and calm enough to allow swimming. However, a series of government disputes, issues related to the country’s economy and opposition from some residents have hindered the redevelopment of the airport site since it closed in 2001.
Part of the land was used to host stadiums for the 2004 Olympic Games. However, these lands did not decline after the Games ended. The broken runways that became synonymous with Greece’s reputation as the EU’s financial “burnt paper”.
Lamda won the tender to redevelop the site in 2014, but was not allowed to start construction work until last year. The poly park is not 40% complete until 2025 alongside a new 1600m sandy beach open to the public, as well as a promenade with shops, stores and a marina for 350 boats – a sign of the glitz and the latest that hoping to attract space operators, some berths can accommodate kites up to 35 meters long.
Despite its size, the park will be just one part of this vast new site. Lamda is also building 9,000 residences, two five-star hotels, a casino, six skyscrapers (the first buildings in Greece to reach a height of 200 meters), as well as two schools, a university, a hospital, a business district and the largest shopping center of the country.
The Riviera Tower
The main attraction will be the Riviera Tower, a 200-apartment residential complex overlooking the park and the coast, which will be covered in greenery. Its design was done by the British architectural office Foster + Partners.
At a height of up to 200 meters, trees and plants adorn the exterior of the Riviera Tower, helping to reduce the need to use air conditioning during the summer months. The tower consists of two buildings connected by a series of vertical gardens, terraces and pools. Antoinette Nassopoulos-Erickson, senior partner at Foster + Partners, says: “We designed the tower with a green backbone of rich vegetation in each garden not only to meet sustainable design principles but also to deliver one of the first . will incorporate green interiors on 40 floors’.
He adds that equipment will be installed that will reduce energy use by around 35%.
Frames on the balconies of the apartments that collect rainwater that will be used to irrigate the building’s plants.
86 endemic tree species in Greece found in the Hellinikon Park
The size of Hellinikon’s construction project has prompted developers to think about how to make it more sustainable. The soil under the runways of the former airport is being cleaned of toxic chemicals so that it can be reused in the park and other parts of the site. Similarly, concrete from existing buildings and roads is used by young people to build walls and fountains, as well as benches, new paths, etc.
The park will have 31,287 trees representing 86 endemic species in Greece, as well as many plants designed to cope with hot and dry climates. A former Olympic canoeing and kayaking facility is being converted into a 15-acre lake that will help store excess stormwater.
It is extremely rare to find such a large area in a European capital and even rarer to have a third of that area given over to green spaces. However, although plans for this giant park have been in the works for years, its construction has coincided with the shift in land use in the US and Europe.
Real estate developers are increasingly choosing to convert significant portions of their land into green space, realizing that the long-term benefits of this decision outweigh the quick returns of building an apartment complex. In London, for example, Canada Water’s 215-acre redevelopment by British Land in the southwest of the city includes 49 acres of parks and open space.
Research has shown that the benefits of having more green spaces range from lower rates of depression in adults to a reduced risk of childhood obesity. At the same time, parks help improve air quality, maintain milder temperatures and reduce noise.
“The increased desire for a new meaningful connection with nature”
Savvas Savvaidis, President and CEO of the Greek division of Sotheby’s International Realty, argues that the development of Hellinikon coincides with the search by buyers for more natural environment space in urban areas.
“During the global pandemic, we have noticed an increased desire to disconnect from the intense everyday life and develop a new meaningful connection with nature,” he tells us. “Thus there was an increased interest in properties located within an environment rich in vegetation or in the countryside.”
Currently, the site is buzzing with construction activity, with cranes and bulldozers just beginning to transform this abandoned lot. However, in an effort to show the public and prospective buyers what the future holds, Lamda has created a massive visitor center in a converted aircraft hangar on the edge of the development. Inside, Indians get on an exercise bike in front of a screen that allows them to cycle through the park in a virtual reality environment or tour the marina virtually in the venue’s yacht simulator.
Visitors can see a showroom apartment of the Riviera Tower equipped with smart home gadgets. For example, residents who have a refrigerator that will display its contents when they touch it so they avoid opening the door and wasting energy, while a screen built into the kitchen counter will allow users to control its lighting and heat. . them, as well as to receive updates on events in the Hellinikon area.
170 of Riviera Tower’s 200 apartments have been sold
Mr. Athanasiou stated that 170 of the 200 apartments in the Riviera Tower have been sold, 86% to Greek buyers including himself. Prices range from €9,000 (£8,000) to €30,000 per square meter for a penthouse.
The property under development worth 8.5 billion euros will be built and financed by Lamda, which in 2014 leased the area from the Greek State for 99 years in exchange for 915 million euros. Lamda’s majority stake is owned by the family-owned Latsis Group, which has interests in shipping, banking, real estate and oil.
80,000 jobs by 2025
The large park, casino and new seafront could attract an extra million tourists a year to Athens and the location will add 2.% to the size of the Greek economy and create 80,000 jobs by 2025.
“This is a huge area next to the sea that was empty and this is something that is not found in any other capital in the 21st century”, argues Mr. Athanasiou. “We have clean sea, abundant green spaces, fantastic weather, good infrastructure with metro and tram lines and everything else a smart city can offer. It’s a combination that, in my opinion, you can’t find anywhere else in the world.”
Source: iefimerida.gr