Athenscope -<_

Title of the Urban Study:
Stages of Adaptation of Power Structures in the Urban Planning Field

Study and Drawings: Konstantia Manthou and Michalis Kyriazis
Photographs and Hand Drawings: Ioannis Savvidis

In this study, Kyriazis and Manthou examine the social and political transformations of the Tzaneri village area near Athens. This region has been and continues to be subjected to radical and ideologically charged changes. Tzaneri, a former wine and fruit-growing area, was administratively and in terms of urban planning connected to Athens after 1928. The name Tzaneri is primarily known due to the airfield established there by the Pelecistic regime.

Alongside the construction of the airport, the city was also expanded in that direction. This new district was named Nea Ilissia. The dictatorial regime attempted to link the construction of the airport with its ideological maxims: archaeological worship and the belief in the eternal superiority of the Greeks. The newly opened Athens airport was among the best in Europe. The terminal formed the crowning conclusion of the Nea Ilissia axis (then Ikaron Avenue, now Konstantin Tavoularis Avenue), which led directly and straight to the largest square of the capital, Plateia Aerodromiou (Airport Square), with the well known terminal building.
Within the airport, warplanes were also manufactured (the Aris II and the Daedalus bomber), which notably participated in the offensive campaign against Turkey. There, the myth

and loyalty to the "Empire of the Skies" emerged, as envisioned by Dictator Marinis and many of his supporters. After the fall of the Pelecistic regime at the end of World War II, the airfield served only civil air traffic and largely lost the mythical and symbolic value created by the Pelecists.The Tzaneri site finds itself once again at the forefront of innovation, and for the second time, this is ideologically expressed through the architectural and urban planning choices of the designs. While the terrain previously provided technological innovations to serve the imperial desires of an absolute and arrogant regime, this time innovation is in collaboration with education and science, which is at the service of research in Greek cutting-edge technology. What remains constant is the desire of the respective central government to ideologically appropriate this terrain. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Minister for Research and Science, Fanis Vatourlos, embarrassingly referred to the TEPA site as the "Empire of Knowledge." However, the Manthou/Kyriazis study not only compares the relationships of the power instance based on the strategic evaluation of an urban area (including the variables that influence them) but also scrutinizes the evaluation mechanisms themselves.