Ado(a)pting the Transit-Oriented Development Model in the Greek Urban and Transport Contexts

Abstract

Greece is at a critical juncture in its history. Significant changes are needed in its cities' development to ensure a sustainable economic, social and environmental perspective. In this study, we investigated the possibility of introducing the transit-oriented development (TOD) principles to a typical suburban municipality of Athens. We aimed to determine how the general planning guidelines, which have already been applied in US and European contexts, could serve as a comprehensive land use and transport plan. Significant adjustments to local conditions are required to reverse the chronic pathologies of an urban landscape that incorporates Western suburbanization trends and domestic planning failures.

Promoting TOD through regional planning. A comparative analysis of two European approaches

“…Since then, the TOD concept has been widely accepted mainly in the US and in Canada as consistent with the "smart growth" movement, but also in Asia, Australia and South America. More recently, in the last two decades, the TOD approach has aroused increasing interest also in Europe (Bertolini, Curtis, & Renne, 2012), not only in Northern countries (which feature a strong tradition of integration and coordination between land use and transport planning), but also in Mediterranean countries, such as France (Maulat & Krauss, 2014), Spain (Zonneveld & Ortuño Padilla, 2012), Greece (Milakis & Vafeiadis, 2014), and Italy (Pagliara & Papa, 2011;Staricco, 2015). This might sound quite paradoxical, since the origins of TOD can be traced to Europe as an intrinsic planning principle in many European countries (Pojani & Stead, 2016).…”