Transportation, mobility & land uses planning scenarios for Athens, Greece : shaping a sustainable city for the people, the environment, and the real estate market
Σενάρια σχεδιασμού συγκοινωνιών, κινητικότητας & χρήσεων γης στην Αθήνα : διαμορφώνοντας μια βιώσιμη πόλη για τους ανθρώπους, το περιβάλλον και την αγορά ακινήτων
View/
Keywords
Urban planning ; Spatial planning ; Compact city ; Transit-oriented development ; Active mobility ; Sustainable urban transportation ; Land use ; Brownfields ; Geospatial analysis ; Geodata science ; Real estate ; Public transportation ; SDGs ; Air pollution ; Road traffic congestion ; Big urban redevelopment projects ; Greek urban planning legislation ; Athens Master Plan 2021 ; Athens ; Greece ; SocietyAbstract
The third decade of the 21st century can be the turning point for action to mitigate climate change. Urban transportation by car contribute to climate deterioration at a concerning rate. Major intergovernmental or supranational actors, such as UN and the EU, have introduced guidelines, legislation and frameworks to promote sustainable urban mobility with electric rail means of transit (metro, light rail, tram) or active mobility (bicycle or walking). Countries around the world have to materialise this transition; otherwise, more the harsh environmental, social and economic reality itself and less the aforementioned organisations will constitute the change inevitable.
The Athens-Piraeus metropolitan complex, which is the capital of Greece, faces many issues regarding urban transportation with most significant the persistently high traffic congestion, the ageing passenger and light commercial vehicles fleet, the lack of a robust and extensive public transportation network, lack of pedestrian walkways and bicycle tracks, randomness in the workplaces-residences reciprocal geospatial relationships due to almost two hundred years of indefinite land uses and big redevelopment projects with caveats that could possibly affect negatively the urban transit landscape.
A geospatial analysis and a series of predictions with machine learning tools and libraries, such as K-means multivariate clustering (Esri ArcGIS Pro), gradient boosted decision trees (Esri ArcGIS Pro) and TensorFlow help comprehending the true needs of Athenians, the chances for long-term prosperous development and harmonious coexistence of both real estate investors’ and citizens’ interests and the means to make transportation in Athens sustainable. The visualisations used are mostly maps and Athens was split into 106 neighbourhoods for the purposes of this study, while additional data was pre-processed and utilised in various manners, forms and circumstances. Future metro and tram lines and stations for the predictions were either officially planned or mentioned in Annex XIV of N 4277/2014 or proposed by the author according to press releases, the abandoned 2009 plan and personal logical planning after observation and study of the data.
The results, after some further analysis, indicate that immediate action must be taken to enrich the Athens’ mass transit ecosystem and to offer at least 25% of total streets length to walkers and bicyclists. The long-term benefits outweigh the costs especially in more uniform development in Athens with more chances for everyone, a little clearer real estate market with new chances for both investors and Athenians being created at every stage of sustainable mobility systems development, a possibility to kickstart once again the problematic small to mid-size retail sector in some neighbourhoods of Athens, in reduction of air pollutants and heat emitted and in energy consumed and imported (referring exclusively to energy from combustion of fossil fuels). Finally, prudent administration with respect to local needs – more than ruthless econometrics – of the big three redevelopment projects (Agios Dionysios, Elaionas, Ellinikon) under way will leave its own significant impact on improvement of public mass transit in Athens, the capital area of Greece.
Postgraduate Studies Programme
Βιοοικονομία, Κυκλική Οικονομία και Βιώσιμη ΑνάπτυξηDepartment
Σχολή Οικονομικών, Επιχειρηματικών και Διεθνών Σπουδών. Τμήμα Οικονομικής ΕπιστήμηςNumber of pages
186Language
EnglishCollections
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as
Αναφορά Δημιουργού-Μη Εμπορική Χρήση-Όχι Παράγωγα Έργα 3.0 Ελλάδα
Αναφορά Δημιουργού-Μη Εμπορική Χρήση-Όχι Παράγωγα Έργα 3.0 Ελλάδα