Public land policy and urban planning in Greece: Diachronic continuities and abrupt reversals in a context of crisis

Abstract

Land ownership determines fundamental interests, prescribing a framework of alliances and oppositions around its development and use. The public sector constitutes one of the main categories of large landowners, although this type of ownership takes more than one form, due to the wide variety of public sector bodies holding property. Public land management became one of the focuses of austerity policies in many European countries after the burst of economic crisis in 2008–2009, externally imposed in those countries that went through bailout programmes. In Greece, the history of land policy shows that a fundamental objective of state policy was the distribution and liquidation of public land, a policy that contributed to the formation of an extensive system of small land ownership. From 2010 onwards, a plethora of formal legislation sought to accelerate development procedures for the remaining large-scale public property, as a background resource to attract large-scale, so-called “strategic”, investments. This paper explores the critical characteristics and outcomes of the reforms to transform public land policy, identifying the interactions with urban planning, before and during the economic crisis. Taking a longer temporal view, the paper highlights the entrenched relationships existing between public land policy, urban planning and property development processes and their significance in the diachronic continuities often concealed in major policy reversals and reforms. It argues that ultimately there is a lack of a coherent and sustainable public property valorisation policy, being deprived of any institutional innovation for new forms of urban development, as well as of social acceptance.