Of course, each part of Athens also has unique qualities. The city is comprised of
small urban villages’ defined by administrative∕political but also narrative, social, and
economic borders. For example, Psyrri (Ψυppf∣) was once an up-and-coming arts quarter
in Athens which has now deteriorated into an entertainment district packed with bars and
clubs, and Mets (Mετς) is an area comprised of old homes that were constructed using
stone from nearby archaeological ruins. Each of these locations has its own street life,
unique history known by local residents, and individual feel. Overall, one experiences
Athens as a “fragmented conurbation”; there is certainly very little sense of “traditional
cohesion” (see Faubion 1993:39). Getting to know each neighborhood, each urban
village in the Attica plain, would take a significant amount of time. Consider that the
Attica region is divided into four prefectures including Athens, Piraeus, East Attica and
West Attica. The prefecture of Athens consists of 45 municipalities and 3 communities,
including the capital of the country the municipality of “Athens”. Each of these
municipalities and communities has its own elected mayor. The municipality of Athens
consists of 55 small neighborhoods (including Psyrri and Mets) and seven districts, again,
with their own elected representatives. According to the Greek Interior Ministry, the
municipality of Athens has a land area of 39 km2 while the urban network that makes up
the greater Athens prefecture measures 361 km2. The totality of the Attica plain is 3,808
km2.
I carried out my field research in a handful of the urban villages concentrated
around the Athenian core and within Athens itself, and along a number of routes that
1 It has been said that these urban villages somehow approximate the social quality of Greece’s rural life.
While this may have been true when some of these areas were originally established (particularly on the
city’s borders, where people sought to produce a kind of quaint, yet aristocratic rural lifestyle), the affective
quality, let alone the social and cultural significance of urban villages in Athens today is much more
complex and varied, as the following chapters will argue.