Kifissia’s character under threat
The character of the suburbs surrounding Athens is being compromised by the country’s new building regulations, which allow basements to cover entire plots of land, at the expense of trees and, by extension, an area’s aesthetics, according to the mayor of Kifissia, in the north of the capital, Vasilis Xipolitas.
Essentially the regulation allows the reconstruction of basements even beyond the outline of the building that is allowed to be erected on a plot of land, depending on the building coefficient per area.
In order to build these basements, trees that took decades to grow are cut down and replaced by lawns – the only thing that can grow in the 40 cm or so of soil left between the basement roof and the plot’s surface.
Xipolitas emphasized to Kathimerini that the implementation of this article of the regulation in the leafy northern suburb, where construction is not particularly dense and there are large plots of land, is changing the area, which is gradually losing its identity and of course its beauty.
In fact, as he points out, many basements are declared as parking spaces, but when the ground is sloping, in practice, there is another floor, one side of which is not underground.
Cedars, eucalyptus, poplars and pines are the trees that exist on many of the plots in Kifissia, a large part of which remains undeveloped.
On a plot of 1,000 square meters, 400 square meters can be built (a coverage factor of 0.40 is typical for the area) and the rest of the plot must be left uncovered.
However, according to the new regulation (Article 17), the extension of the underground spaces of the building to 80% of the uncovered space is allowed. So the underground buildings in this can cover 880 square meters.
If a plot is less than 600 square meters, then the underground spaces to be built can extend to the entire area outside the perimeter of the building being erected. Obviously excavations to construct the basements necessitate the cutting down of large trees on the plot.
