A City Is Dying

Smog-smothered Athens

Stinking buses, their passengers gaunt, pale and weary, jam the crowded streets. Drivers shout at one another and honk their horns as they turn the city's few escape routes into ribbons of steel. Smog smarts the eyes and chokes the senses. The scene is Athens at rush hour. The city of Plato and Pericles is in a sorry state of affairs, built without a plan, lacking even adequate sewerage and sanitation facilities, hemmed in by mountains and the sea, its 135 sq. mi. crammed with 3.7 million people. Even Athens' ruins are in ruin: sulfur dioxide eats away at the marble of the Parthenon, the Erechtheum and other treasures on the Acropolis. As Greek Premier Constantine Karamanlis has said, "The only solution for Athens would be to demolish half of it and start all over again."

So great has been the population flow toward the city that entire hinterland villages stand vacant or nearly so. About 120,000 people from outlying provinces move to Athens every year, with the result that 40% of Greece's citizenry are now packed into the capital. The migrants come for the few available jobs, which are usually no better than the ones they fled. At the current rate of migration, Athens by the year 2000 will have a population of 6.5 million, more than half the nation.

Aside from overcrowding and poor public transport, the biggest problems confronting Athenians are noise and pollution. A government study concluded that Athens was the noisiest city in the world. Smog is close to killing levels: 180-300 mg of sulfur dioxide per cubic meter of air, or up to four times the level that the World Health Organization considers safe. Nearly half the pollution comes from cars. Despite high prices for vehicles and fuel (the government two weeks ago raised the price of gasoline to $2.95 per gal.), nearly 100,000 automobiles are sold in Greece each year; 3,000 driver's licenses are issued in Athens monthly.

After decades of neglect, Athens is at last getting some attention. In March a committee of representatives from all major public service ministries met to discuss a plan to unclog the city, make it livable and clean up its environment. A save-Athens ministry, which will soon begin functioning, will propose heavy taxes to discourage in-migration, and a minimum of $5 billion in public spending for Athens alone. The ministry will also have an extensive investment program for rural areas to encourage residents to stay put. A master plan that will move many government offices to the city's fringes is already in the works. Meanwhile, more Greeks keep moving into Athens. With few parks and precious few oxygen-producing plants, the city and its citizens are literally suffocating.

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