There was something oddly appropriate about the European Commission holding a conference entitled Metropolis 2000 in Athens, of all places. It is, of course, the cradle of European civilisation and now perhaps the most maddening example of how chaos can take hold of a modern city.
Chaos derives from the Greek kaos and Athens is virtually crippled by it. The Acropolis, that mesmerising monument to the city's one-time grandeur, just about manages to retain its serenity amid a swirling mass of traffic on streets lined by cheap modern buildings. Christos Papoutsis, the EU Energy Commissioner who convened the conference in his home town, described Athens as "a megalopolis, full of life and full of problems, a rich cultural heritage and serious environmental pollution". What it's now trying to do - and he would like to be its mayor - is to put things right.
Anastasios Mantelis, the Greek transport minister, conceded that at present the metropolis of Athens (population: 3.5 million) "is not giving citizens any satisfaction". Traffic is responsible for emitting tens of thousands of tonnes of pollution while congestion is costing 500 billion drachmas (£1.2 billion) a year.
It was due to very real fears that some of the greatest architectural glories of ancient Greece were being irreparably damaged by the pollution of modern society that the European Commission agreed to provide 80 per cent funding for a major extension of the Athens metro, which is due to open at the end of this year. The extended metro, together with the construction of a major ring road and a new international airport, is expected to reduce traffic volumes in the city by 250,000 vehicles a day and cut atmospheric pollution by 35 per cent. A tramway is even being considered for the seriously congested historical centre.
Outside the great slab of the Hilton Hotel, built in 1961 to exploit an unrivalled view towards the Acropolis, the "refuge" for pedestrians in the middle of Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, with four lanes of traffic on one side and four more on the other, is half-a-metre. The public realm doesn't count for much here.
The 14-storey Hilton was the first high-rise building in Athens, and was strongly criticised at the time by Vincent Scully, then architecture critic of the New York Times, as an attempt to compete with the Parthenon. But the hotel is at least a mile to the east and its partially-curved plan was deliberately intended as a grandstand.
After the Colonels seized power in 1967, building height restrictions were abandoned and there was a great free-for-all in slapping up high buildings all over the city. However, following the restoration of democracy in 1974, an ordinance was passed limiting the height of new buildings to a maximum of 32 metres (105 feet).
Despite its favourable Mediterranean climate, with sunshine most of the year, Greece has made surprisingly little use of solar technology in its buildings and has barely tapped its wind resources either. But the energy directorate of the European Commission is now working with the Greeks to promote alternative energy use.
Throughout the EU, buildings account for about 40 per cent of total energy consumption, seventenths of it in the residential sector. If the EU is to reach its Kyoto target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 8 per cent, the European Commission believes that energy efficiency in the building sector will have to be addressed.
Even using existing technology, the commission's energy directorate estimates it would be possible to achieve a 16 per cent cut in energy consumption in the residential sector and 25 per cent in the "tertiary" sector (commercial, recreational, etc). This would correspond to a reduction of 340 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
The move to more sustainable architecture will be underpinned by the publication next month of A Green Vitruvius, a design handbook prepared by a team including Eoin O Cofaigh, president of the RIAI, and the Energy Research Group at UCD. They describe it as a "green pattern book", following in the steps of Marcus Vitruvius. Alexandros Tombazis, a leading Greek architect, is winning a lot of kudos for his AVAX construction group headquarters, near Lycabettus hill, in the centre of Athens. A narrow, east-facing building, it uses moveable external shading devices to reduce solar gain, allowing the building to operate without active cooling for most of the year. The design is set to achieve a 52 per cent reduction in energy consumption, compared to a conventional new building, with a consequential drop in carbon dioxide emissions. It is one of the showpiece projects in "Energy Comfort 2000", funded by the European Commission's highly successful Thermie programme.
Despite its impressive savings, the AVAX building is still very much avant garde in the context of Athens where most developers - as in Dublin, too - just want to build cheaply. But the challenge of hosting the Olympic Games in 2004 is prompting a more sustainable approach and galvanising the city into action.
For many years, archaeologists and others with an interest in Ancient Greece had been campaigning in favour of a plan to unify the main archaeological sites in Athens. Now, largely because of the Olympics, it is about to happen and the benefits of a new pedestrian network will extend to the narrow spiral streets of the old city.
The Mayor of Athens, Dimitris Avramopoulos, noted that the roots of urban civilisation lay in the polis created by the people of Athens. But this was now threatened by unresolved social problems, with a quarter of the people marginalised. "We are simply building castles in the sand if these problems are not confronted," he warned.
This has also been a theme of Dublin's city manager, John Fitzgerald. Last year, he urged the Government to provide an additional £120 million towards a crash programme to refurbish the corporation's housing stock, particularly inner city flat complexes, using windfall revenues generated by the "Celtic Tiger".
In some ways, the problems faced by Athens and Dublin are quite similar - especially on the traffic front. The value of EU conferences, such as Metropolis 2000, is that they help to spread the word about "best practice" elsewhere in Europe, enabling cities to learn from each other and see how innovative approaches actually work.
For example, Utrecht, in the Netherlands, is planning a new high-density suburban district, where the housing will be located within easy walking distance to bus and rail stops. One of its councillors, Annemieke Rijckenberg, told the Athens conference that a motorway was even being relocated to gain an extra five sq km of building land.
One of the most important exercises in promoting sustainable development will be next year's Expo in Hanover. Its mayor, Herbert Schmalstieg, said the Expo would extend far beyond a single site to encompass such projects as the creation of a new city district of 6,000 housing units, designed according to the latest principles.
Hugh Lloyd, chief executive of the Merseyside Transport Authority, stressed the importance of a continuing exchange of know-how between cities as the best way of introducing new ideas into the real world. "If we hadn't seen electric buses in Florence, we wouldn't now have them in Birkenhead", he declared.
Seeing is believing . . .
