Segregation trends in Athens: the changing residential distribution of occupational categories during the 2000s

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses segregation patterns and trends in Athens during the 2000s. Does the city become more or less segregated and how do global forces and contextual factors affect the observed tendencies? The study focuses on the uneven spatial distribution of occupational categories and the way it developed between 2001 and 2011. The dominant trend is desegregation. However, there are specific types of residential space – new middle-class suburbs and declining central neighbourhoods – where segregation is increasing. Segregation seems to be the combined effect of global forces and contextual factors that do not always push in the same direction.

KEYWORDS:

• Athens
• segregation
• occupational categories
• housing
• family networks

JEL:

• R21
• R23
• Z

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Thomas Maloutas http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7564-6226

Stavros Nikiforos Spyrellis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2594-1029

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We chose this two-step process in order to prevent the classification from being affected by the presence of very small and very particular clusters which the classification algorithm cannot automatically discard and reallocate.

2. The spatial separation of these categories is the highest in Paris, for example (Oberti & Préteceille, 2016; Préteceille, 2017).

3. A previous analysis of segregation in Athens during the 1990s revealed the opposite possibility, that is, that there could be social without spatial polarization (Maloutas, 2007, pp. 745–750).

4. Vertically segregated areas are those where upper and intermediate middle-class groups are considerably over-represented in upper floor apartments (fourth floor or higher) and working-class and routine occupations are over-represented in lower floors (basements and ground floors).

5. This differs from the option adopted by Tammaru et al. (2016a), where only routine occupations represented the lower part of the occupational hierarchy.

6. Group positions in this case are determined by the way each of the two variables is distributed in the 3000 URANUs with respect to its own mean and standard deviation.

7. The house building system of antiparochi provided a massive amount of low-cost housing in the 1960s and 1970s (Antonopoulou, 1991). Almost 35,000 apartment buildings of five floors or higher were produced between 1950 and 1980 (Maloutas & Karadimitriou, 2001).

8. Self-promotion was enthusiastically approved and facilitated by the Americans who replaced the British in the tutelage of Greece after the civil war (Kalfa, 2018).