Abstract

Abstract:

As far as urban studies, urban planning, and spatial politics are concerned, the military dictatorship of 1967–1974 remains one of the least examined and discussed periods in recent Greek history. In particular, the existing literature offers limited insights into the period, which is usually described as a "parenthesis" or a time of "frozen activity" for planning and technocratic work. Nevertheless, new research, drawing on archival materials and personal narratives by members of the planners' community at the time, reveals a much more complex reality. In this paper, I argue against parenthetical considerations of the junta and discuss spatial modernization under the military regime as a contradictory process characterized by both continuities and ruptures with regard to the early 1960s and the Metapolitefsi period that followed. Ultimately, the years in plaster, as they have been called, appear as a time of rapid transformation as well as a dense and contradictory moment in Greek postwar modernity, when the multiple dynamics of change intersect with political authoritarianism.

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