Defaced land: Reading the marks of a social obsession

Street networks commonly serve some form of human habitation. That’s why the image of a dense pattern of driveways leading to vacant plots in a natural landscape seems absurd. Usually the outcome of a suspended residential development, this image has the uncanny quality of a misplaced fragment. In many coastal areas of Greece the hillsides are marked with such enigmatic patterns. Large tracts of land ranging from 50 to 500 hectares are lined with road systems of absent or rudimentary settlements. They are the unfinished projects of the numerous construction cooperatives (Oikodomikoi Synetairismoi) operating in the country, that aim to develop large rural properties. The Greek model of a construction cooperative is a privately financed planning method, initially established to answer housing needs through low-cost suburban developments. Eventually though, they committed themselves to satisfying an obsessive demand for second homes in the countryside. The zeal in occupying and disfiguring land, embedded so emphatically in these extensive scars, does not represent just the climax the domestic real estate market reached. It is also an expression of deeper disorders somehow linked to the calamities and disruptions that occurred in 20th century Greece