Remember the 2004 Olympics? Well, nearly two decades after the Closing Ceremonies,
the abandoned site of the Athens Games is about to be turned… into a casino.
This bold new masterplan is out to revitalise an area that’s
long sat abandoned and fallen into disrepair.
This USD $8.2BN megaproject will include houses, hotels, offices, a riviera, and Athen's
new tallest building… all in a bid to rewrite a more sustainable version of the capital’s story.
It'll be one of the largest construction projects
this ancient country has ever taken on – and that’s saying something.
But modern Athens has a history of spending too big on splashy projects. The Olympics
actually cost a very similar amount but helped spur the country into a massive debt crisis.
So can Athens really and quite literally pave over its tarnished Olympic legacy?
Can this project redeem the city or will it become another white elephant?
Athens is a city full of ruins. While some date back thousands of
years (show the Pantheon) while others date back to… well, 2004.
Many former
Olympic venues now stand abandoned. (source) What were once vibrant arenas, swimming pools, and
sporting complexes where billions around the world tuned-in to watch are now dilapidated wrecks.
Of course, it wasn’t always like this. Turn the clock back 19 years and you find a city
on the centre of the world stage, braced for an event like no other.
The Olympics had come home.
Athens overwhelmingly won the bid for the Games on the promise that many of its facilities were
already built and that the Greek government would cover any expenses over the $1.6BN planned budget.
That turned out to be easier said than done. But, at the time, Athens seemed like the
obvious choice. It had lost a previous bid to host the 1996
Games on what would have been the centenary of the modern Olympics.
There was a general sentiment that Greece was kind of owed the Olympics.
It’s probably fair to say that many were swept up in this romantic idea,
rather than what actually made best economic sense.
It’s no surprise that that somewhat modest $1.6BN soon ballooned.
Many of the budget woes stemmed from delayed construction works,
which then meant spending more in a rush to get major projects finished
on time – and that all undermined any serious long-term planning for many of the new venues.
There is no clear final number, thanks to what the head of the Greek Olympic
Committee calls “creative accountancy”, but estimates have ranged from $6BN to $29BN.
That doesn’t take into account the $7BN spent on infrastructure upgrades – like the new airport,
an extended and renovated subway, and light rail systems.
Now, Athens isn’t the most expensive Games, but it landed a long way from that original
pitch of a relatively low-budget event. Once the Olympics left town many of the
venues failed to be adapted. The Olympic Village was supposed to be repurposed into
the country’s biggest social housing development, but that never happened.
Other structures had no post-Olympic plan at all:
no environmental strategies or even basic business plans on their futures.
The country also couldn’t afford the estimated $64M
it would take to maintain the venues as they were.
In the end, the legacy of Athens Games… was debt. They helped set off an economic catastrophe.
Few quick news sound bites here about Greece’s economic crisis to help break up the VO.
While Greece has since more or less recovered economically, the legacy of this period remains.
It’s somewhat fitting then that the country’s next
construction megaproject will be built on the ruins of its last.
The Ellinikon, Athens’ massive new development, is giving new life to a former softball pitch,
hockey field, fencing venue, and decommissioned airport.
Built around a 600-acre new coastal green space bigger than London’s
Hyde Park, will be a district full of apartments, hotels, shops, and more.
The development wants to be seen as environmentally
conscious with long term planning at its forefront, unlike the Games. The
built environment is responsible for 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions,
and new developments have a responsibility to change the way we build for the better.
The park will have only native Greek plants while the airport’s 1960s-designed terminal will be
retained and converted. Tarmac from the runways will even be repurposed into benches and paving.
The sheer amount of green space to be added to Athens by this park will help
the city fight the urban heat island effect – that’s a phenomenon where a city’s concrete,
stone and asphalt absorb and retain heat,
often leading dense urban environments to become hotter than their rural counterparts.
Athens is already facing the effects of climate change, with higher temperatures
and more intense weather events, so more green spaces are desperately needed.
The former Olympic canoe and kayak areas will be converted
into a 3.7-acre lake which will collect and store stormwater to be re-used in the park.
Rising above all of this will be the first of six new high-rises; Marina Tower. At
200-metres it will be the tallest building in Greece and, according to Foster + Partners,
the architects behind the building, one of the greenest on the Mediterranean.
It’s being designed to hopefully achieve a LEED Gold rating,
meaning a 35% energy-saving as compared to a conventional building of similar size.
And, of course, there's the casino. 120 gaming
tables and 1,200 slot machines all sitting beneath a new luxury hotel.
The plan is for the whole endeavour to be powered entirely by renewable energy, with photovoltaic
panels on every rooftop. The aim is for no energy to be diverted from Greece’s national grid.
Your typical commercial building uses an average of 22.5 kilowatt-hours per
square foot a year. Having all of this come from renewable
energy is exactly how we should be thinking about our new structures.
While a lot of this sounds too good to be true,
the reality is Athens has been itching for this kind of revitalisation for a while.
The idea to turn the abandoned Olympic venues and airport into a park has been around since
the Olympics themselves. But finding a financial backer has been difficult – and
the 2008 financial crisis, the debt crisis and the pandemic all helped to further delay plans.
Now things seem to be happening quickly. The first phase of the park is set to be completed by the
end of 2025 and that’ll include 250 acres of parkland and the entire coastal front.
Many of the lessons from the Games seem to have been learnt. For the most part this is
a sustainable, environmentally-conscious project that the city actually needs. The parkland alone
will more than double the amount of green space in Athens, while the riviera and marina will likely
become a magnet for residents and visitors alike, hopefully providing an economic boost.
While it may have taken a casino and several tall residential buildings to fund it, the
designers of this new space have bold ambitions for it to become Athens’ version of New York’s
Central Park – a beloved public space that will, hopefully, outlast the ruins of the Olympics.
You can learn more about Athens’ revamp and the other topics on our channel over on The
World’s Best Construction Podcast – available now wherever you get your podcasts. And as always,
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