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This paper focuses on the peri-urban space of east Attica and aims to theorise the politics of recovery planning following the wildfire of 23 July 2018, showing the crucial interrelations between vulnerability, space and land development processes in an era of climate crisis. Certain processes of land development increase vulnerability, creating a greater risk of disasters. Through critical discourse and content analysis, we trace the genealogy of peri-urban land development trends in Greece, and explore connections with contemporary theoretical debates, focussing on the burnt area of east Attica as a paradigmatic case study. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding dimensions beyond, beside, outside or even within recovery policies and planning, such as land ownership, private property, formal and informal practices and institutional adaptations during climate crisis. Considering particular land development processes as an inherent and integral part of spatial vulnerability regimes, we argue that, insofar as they maintain and reproduce the factors that produce and reproduce it, post-disaster recovery policies and planning may actually normalise spatial vulnerability, thus leading to future disasters.

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Informality is a significant aspect of the recent processes of land development, which has attracted the interest of academics and policy‐makers, in the context of the crucial role that land has acquired for the global economy and the prevalent trends of capitalist activity. A wide variety of reforms and policies for dealing with informality have been adopted in many countries worldwide, often under the guidance of supranational organisations, though with contradictory impacts.The objective of this article is the critical appraisal of informality in land development processes in Albania, a former socialist country in “transition”, by exploring links with land reforms and socioeconomic dynamics, as well as the interaction of various actors from the global to the local level. We argue that, through multiple synergies and conflicts, informal practices serve a wide variety of interests, while informality in itself, as well as the policies for controlling it, may also lead to the intensification of socio‐spatial inequalities and exclusionsOur approach is based on the analysis of the land development processes in the coastal settlement of Jal as a case study. The article focuses on an incident of demolitions of informal constructions in Jal in 2007, which was associated with a World Bank's development project, as well as on the land development dynamics prior to and after this incident. We employed a mixed‐method approach, based on qualitative tools, which combined fieldwork in Jal, semi‐structured interviews in Jal, Tirana and Athens, evaluation of land reforms and review of official reports and articles in the local and national press.

This article investigates the complex ties between planning, socio-political conflicts, and emerging Cold War geopolitics during the post-war reconstruction period in Greece, by focusing on the years between 1944 and 1947. In these crucial transitional years, transnational flows of expertise, interwar legacies, and political, scientific, and ideological contestations gave rise to novel planning ideas and antagonistic visions for the country's reconstruction and its future development path. The article sheds light on how the architect-planner Constantinos Doxiadis formulated Ekistics as a spatial vision, a mode of central planning, and a technical guide, examining how Ekistics affected the shaping of reconstruction policies, particularly in the countryside. This analysis further exposes the way the Greek countryside became the locus of competing visions of spatial development, as well as contradictory state responses: from long-term housing policies and self-help practices all the way to ideological repression and population resettlement strategies, British interventionism, and Civil War conflicts that paved the ground to Greece's subsequent US-led recovery programs under the Truman Doctrine (1947) and the Marshal Plan (1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952). By focusing on the paradigmatic case of Greece, this article advances an understanding of European reconstruction as an uneven, contested, and transitional process and highlights the implications of architecture and planning discourses and practices amid ideological, territorial, and geopolitical contestations.