To combat water scarcity, the park will be irrigated with treated wastewater supplied by a plant nearby, and a 3.7-acre lake – repurposed from the former Olympic canoe and kayak area – will collect and store stormwater.Īre cities 'spongy' enough to handle floods? New climate resilience report points to nature for solutions “We’re essentially inverting a site that was 80% hardscape … to 80% softscape,” said Grove, and replacing concrete or stone with trees and shrubs helps to absorb rainfall and create shade, which has a cooling effect.
Green space can help to counter these effects. “Athens is very densely built, and all of the different surfaces are totally inappropriate for rising heat,” she said, adding that they don’t absorb water so can lead to flooding during increasingly common cloudbursts. Temperatures are exacerbated by the urban heat island effect, as the city’s concrete, stone and asphalt absorb and retain heat, explained Eleni Myrivilli, chief heat officer for the City of Athens and senior advisor on climate resilience at Atlantic Council’s Arsht-Rock Resilience Center. Today, rust-colored weeds, parched by the sun, poke out from old stands, in a sad turnaround from its glory days.Įarly next year, developers will break ground on the Ellinikon Metropolitan Park, a 600-acre restorative landscape that will inject new life in the area and hopes to serve Athenians as a park, a playground, and a cultural center, while also strengthening the climate resiliency of the city. After being decommissioned in 2001, the structure was left abandoned, besides a brief period during the 2004 Summer Olympic Games, when it hosted a softball pitch, a hockey field and a fencing venue. The site of Ellinikon International Airport, once a bustling gateway to Greece, has lain empty for almost two decades. But this may soon change, as the city’s former international airport and its surrounding waterfront is set to be transformed into a giant coastal park bigger than London’s Hyde Park. Renowned for its iconic, ancient architecture perched atop dusty hilltops, the Greek capital of Athens is not usually associated with green, open space.
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