A Tale of Hidden Cities

Abstract

Abstract. Hidden cities within a city? A large trending literature concerning urban and suburban poverty concentration patterns has been developed during the last decade. However, there are few cases where adequate data exist at a low spatial level, allowing the exploration of such socio-spatial phenomena. This paper seeks to investigate the structure and evolution of poverty within urban and suburban space, under a multidimensional framework, during a period of extended economic transformation. This paper uses the metropolitan area of Athens as its main case study, for which data at a municipal level exist, allowing the calculation of the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) for the years 2006 and 2011. An extended cluster analysis, based on the calculated MPI values, results in the specification of three poverty clusters within Athens. The decomposition of the MPI index into its main dimensions highlights any existing differences between the structural and behavioural characteristics of each of them. The results indicate that there is a clear spatial concentration of poverty in the west suburban areas of Athens. The urban core of the city is characterised by middle-income municipalities, whilst the north-east and the south-east suburban areas experience low-poverty indicators. Finally, the results suggest that during the period under investigation more deprived areas were affected the most.

Multiple Deprivation and Urban Development in Athens, Greece: Spatial Trends and the Role of Access to Housing

“…This transition is confirmed by the pattern of deprivation in 2011. This specific finding concurs with a recent analysis on the changing social profile of the city's neighborhoods [45], while the overall results are in broad alignment with the findings of other contemporary alternative explorations of deprivation in Athens [14,20,21].…”

“…The analysis in this paper confirms the findings of previous research about the concentration of poverty [20] and the role of housing systems in the social geography of the city [12,38]. What is more, the paper shows how Athens' spatial patterns of deprivation appear to be tied to its urban development trajectory via the way that the city residents access housing.…”

“…However, in a context of austerity and slow economic growth, policies to address those emerging issues have not necessarily been as successful as one would have hoped. Research on the geography of deprivation in the city is only recently beginning to attract attention as a topic of interest [20,21]. In parallel to this trend, there is a much longer tradition of exploring segregation in Athens [12,22,23], as well as its links to housing and welfare provision in the broader context of southern Europe [9,10,12].…”

Integrating Urban Form, Function, and Energy Fluxes in a Heat Exposure Indicator in View of Intra-Urban Heat Island Assessment and Climate Change Adaptation

“…In the 1990s, the majority of the arriving immigrants settled around the city center, where they mixed with the remaining lower and middle-class residents [48]. Considering the above, it follows that the east-west social segregation of Athens [148,149] is less pronounced in terms of unequally distributed extra warmth; however, an income-based stratification of the thermal environmental quality is generally present in the agglomeration. The synergy of the UHI and the global climate change ( Figure 14) will further exacerbate the existing overheating hazards in Athens.…”

Spatial segregation and migration in the city of Athens: Investigating the evolution of urban socio‐spatial immigrant structures

“…To this end, Athens offers a unique opportunity to investigate the effect of migration on the socio‐spatial outcomes in a southern European semiperipheral city, which has been significantly affected by the processes of globalisation and economic restructuring, over recent decades (Beaverstock, Smith, & Taylor, ). Both the suburbanisation and professionalisation processes have fostered the social polarisation and spatial segregation phenomena, resulting in an East–West division of Athens (Maloutas, ; Panori, ; Panori & Psycharis, ; Pantazis & Psycharis, ). Recent work by Maloutas () has provided a comprehensive presentation of the evolution of socio‐economic segregation in Athens from the 1960s until the 2000s.…”