Getting Athens ready for the Olympics has been a race to modernise the city with multi-lane highways, stadiums and green pedestrian districts in time for the arrival of thousands of visitors in 2004. But mayor Dora Bakoyianni says the challenges and prospects before Athens go well beyond the Games, to improving the quality of life of its residents and bringing out the modern city's aesthetic appeal.

"The new Athens Municipal Council sees the 2004 Olympic Games not as an end, but as the beginning of a maturing and aesthetically upgraded Athens," Bakoyianni tells GreeceNow. Behind that new start, she adds, is "sensible state intervention," which has not been the norm, but has made a positive impact at different times since the 1830s.

Bakoyianni says that understanding Athens means bearing in mind that it has been marked by periods of rapid growth and "uncontrolled growth, particularly since 1950," often against a backdrop of poverty and strife. "Following the end of the civil war" in 1949, she explains, "the population of the city doubled in less than a decade."

Cost and effect

But "the key words" to understanding the capital's expansion "are 'political cost,'" says the new mayor, elected in a landslide victory last autumn. There has been, she explains, an "unwillingness of governments to take radical measures to face the situation, not only in the wider sense of city planning, but also on minor issues, such as obligatory parking lots in new buildings. For years a special fee was collected in return for not building a parking lot," meaning that Athenians have to spend a lot of time looking for a parking space.

Like most big cities, the Greek capital can disappoint even people not hunting for a space. Like tourists. "The first impression of Athens is usually horrible," writes one travel reviewer. "The smog is unbearable, traffic congestion enervatingand once you check into your hotel room on the 20th floor, the city looksjust plain ugly from above."

Looking past the smog, though, the same writer continues: "don't be worried by what you've just read: it only gets better from here." Charmed by the ancient sights and the museums, he says "Athens may not be a city where I would like to live, but it's definitely a city I'd like to visit again, and again, and again."

External problems

Bakoyianni says that, while the modern city seems like "a sea of condominium buildings," it too has much to offer aesthetically. For example, most of those condominiums "are generally of a quality much higher than elsewhere in Europe, but very degraded in their facades, by smog, advertising, air-conditioning fittings."

And, "apart from the world's greatest antiquities, plus various important Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman monuments, Athens possesses what are perhaps the finest 19th century neo-classical edifices in the world, the pinnacle of which is the famous 'trilogy - the Athens Academy, the University and the National Library on Panepistimiou Avenue."

Modern Athens, says the mayor, also contains "fine examples of eclecticism, art nouveau, art deco, both in the centre and in some of the more fashionable suburbs. Kifissia, for example, is a paradise of eclectic architecture, with its variously styled villas."

Unlike most residents, Bakoyianni is in a position to help make what is beautiful in Athens more evident. She says her plans for the city include:

*cleaning, painting and aesthetic upgrading of the facades of all periods, the removal of advertisements and roof antennas;

*architectural lighting of all ancient monuments and many 19th and 20th century buildings;

*a large pedestrian circuit uniting all archealological sites.

The mayor says she intends to make the city more liveable, too, by unifying and improving green areas, raising money for new parks, building a system of underground garages, extending bus services between outlying neighbourhoods and major metro and rail stations, providing services to the disabled, and setting up a new municipal police force.

Bakoyianni says Athens has applied for European Union programmes to help the city face "problems of social cohesion," include immigrants in city life and promote high tech business, with the aim of becoming "a major peripheral European centre."

All of which, she says, will take Athens, and Athenians, much further than 2004.