Greece’s spatial problem is not that Athens is too successful, but that too few other cities have been allowed to become powerful enough to complement it.
For much of its modern history, Greece has developed around a powerful geographical contradiction. It is one of Europe’s most spatially fragmented states, divided by mountains, peninsulas, islands and long distances between peripheral regions, yet its political and economic system has become unusually concentrated around a single metropolitan centre. Athens is simultaneously the national capital, the principal corporate location, the dominant media centre, the core of financial services, the main concentration of central government and the country’s largest metropolitan labour market.
The demographic weight of this concentration is substantial. Greece’s 2021 census recorded a permanent population of 10.48 million, while Attica alone contained 3.81 million inhabitants, roughly 36 per cent of the national population. The OECD has similarly estimated that metropolitan Athens contains around one-third of the country’s population, with metropolitan Thessaloniki accounting for another 10 per cent. At the same time, Greece retains a comparatively large population in rural and remote regions, producing an unusual combination of metropolitan concentration at the top and spatial fragmentation below.
This imbalance is not new. Research into the Greek urban system has shown that post-war development reinforced concentration around Athens and, to a lesser extent, Thessaloniki. Although some smaller urban centres subsequently grew, much of this apparent decentralisation reflected the expansion of cities functionally connected to the two metropolitan poles rather than the emergence of an autonomous network of strong regional centres. Minas Angelidis consequently described the Greek spatial-economic structure as dominated by Athens and Thessaloniki, while identifying a persistent gap between the rhetoric of polycentric spatial planning and its implementation. (Petrakos, Mardakis and Caraveli, 2000; Angelidis, 2005).
The strategic question, therefore, is not whether Greece should weaken Athens. A country of Greece’s size needs a strong metropolitan centre capable of concentrating capital, talent, international connectivity and advanced services. The more useful question is whether the country can continue to rely upon Athens to perform such a disproportionate share of its national functions while large parts of the territorial system experience ageing, demographic decline and limited economic critical mass.
A genuinely polycentric Greece would offer an alternative.
From decentralisation to functional polycentrism
Polycentrism is often misunderstood as the administrative redistribution of government offices. Moving a ministry from Athens to another city may have symbolic value, but it does not automatically create a regional economic ecosystem. Polycentric development instead assumes the existence of several urban nodes with sufficient institutional, economic and infrastructural capacity to perform distinct functions while remaining strongly connected to each other.
The distinction matters. A polycentric Greece would not attempt to turn Patras, Larissa, Heraklion or Alexandroupoli into smaller versions of Athens. It would allow different cities to specialise according to geography, existing knowledge bases and economic advantage.
Athens–Piraeus would remain the principal national and international command centre, combining government, finance, global services, shipping and corporate headquarters. Thessaloniki has the scale and geography to operate increasingly as Greece’s principal Balkan metropolitan node, combining universities, logistics, technology, trade and regional corporate functions. Patras can reinforce its position as an Adriatic gateway and research centre; Heraklion can combine research, tourism, agrifood and Eastern Mediterranean connections; Larissa and Volos can form part of a larger agro-industrial and logistics system; Ioannina can develop around university-led innovation and its relationship with the western Balkans; and Alexandroupoli has already demonstrated how a relatively small city can acquire importance disproportionate to population through its position within energy, transport and security networks.
The logic is functional rather than redistributive. A city does not need to be large in order to be strategically important.
This approach also corresponds to the wider European understanding of polycentricity. OECD research suggests that the economic effects depend upon scale: individual metropolitan regions can benefit from agglomeration and therefore exhibit advantages from internal concentration, but at the national level more polycentric urban systems are associated with stronger economic performance. The implication is not that concentration itself is undesirable. Rather, countries can benefit from having several significant centres instead of allowing almost every high-level function to gravitate toward one city.
The cost of the monocentric model
The weaknesses of the existing model are becoming harder to separate from Greece’s demographic problem. Between the 2011 and 2021 censuses the national permanent population fell by 3.1 per cent. The decline among younger working-age groups was much sharper: the population aged 20–29 declined by 22 per cent and the 30–39 group by more than 23 per cent. At the same time, several mainland regions recorded significantly larger population losses than Attica.
Regional decline can become self-reinforcing. Young people leave because specialised employment is limited; companies hesitate to invest because skilled workers are scarce; professional and cultural services weaken because demand falls; and the reduced attractiveness of the city encourages another generation to leave. Under these conditions, regional development cannot be reduced to subsidies or infrastructure projects. A successful regional centre needs institutions, employment, transport, universities, housing, cultural life and private investment operating together.
The opposite pressure occurs in Athens. Concentration produces agglomeration benefits, but it also generates congestion, housing pressures, infrastructure demands and environmental costs. The OECD has specifically identified negative agglomeration effects in Athens and Thessaloniki and has argued for stronger metropolitan governance alongside a more explicit national urban policy. It also notes that Attica alone accounts for almost half of national GDP, while Attica and Central Macedonia together generate close to two-thirds.
A territorial policy that simply attempts to suppress Athens would therefore be economically self-defeating. The objective should instead be to create additional centres of accumulation capable of retaining people, attracting investment and generating specialised labour markets.
Michalis Charalambidis and the idea of a “Polycentric Greece”
An unusually explicit version of this argument appeared decades ago in the political thought of Michalis Charalambidis. Although better known for his interventions on the Pontic question, Charalambidis developed a wider critique of the spatial structure of the Greek state and repeatedly used the term “Polycentric Greece.”
In a 1997 interview, when asked about his political ambition, his answer was simply “Polycentric Greece.” By 2004 he was making the argument more directly, criticising what he called Greece’s ministerial centralism and a “monocentricity that destroys Attica and depopulates the countryside.” For Charalambidis, regionalism was not a mechanism for distributing subsidies to weaker areas but a different conception of government, development and the relationship between the state and territory.
His most unusual attempt to materialise this theory was the proposal for Romania, a new city on the Thracian coast. First advanced in the context of the Second World Pontic Congress in 1988, the project was partly associated with the settlement and integration of Pontic Greeks arriving from the former Soviet Union. Yet Charalambidis subsequently presented the proposal in much broader spatial terms.
In 2002, he described Romania as a geoeconomic and urban-planning project rather than simply a new settlement. His preferred model was a broader polycentric metropolitan area joining Alexandroupoli, Romania, Sapes, Kirki and Traianoupoli, connected by rail and developed in relation to the landscape, history and existing settlements. He explicitly contrasted this with uncontrolled peripheral urbanisation of the kind experienced around Athens.
Whatever one thinks of the feasibility of building an entirely new city, the conceptual importance of the proposal is striking. Charalambidis was not proposing another isolated provincial settlement. He was imagining a networked urban corridor in Thrace capable of combining population, transport, culture and economic development.
The proposal also moved beyond intellectual discussion. Parliamentary proceedings from December 1998 record MP Christos Kipouros stating that 204 members of Parliament had co-signed Charalambidis’s idea for Romania, while discussing its potential development as a technology-oriented urban centre. The city was never built, but the scale of parliamentary support demonstrates that the idea briefly entered mainstream institutional debate.
Seen from the perspective of contemporary spatial policy, Romania is perhaps more useful as a thought experiment than as a literal blueprint. The question it posed remains relevant: should development continue by expanding the gravitational field of Athens, or can Greece intentionally create new nodes of economic and demographic gravity?
Polycentrism as resilience
There is also a strategic dimension that earlier regional-development debates often underestimated. Extreme concentration creates systemic concentration risk. When government, finance, corporate decision-making, communications infrastructure and a large share of the population are concentrated in the same metropolitan region, disruption there can acquire national consequences.
Polycentricity creates a degree of redundancy. Research capacity distributed among several university cities, logistics organised through multiple ports, energy infrastructure connected to different regions and administrative functions supported by several strong urban centres can increase the ability of the country to absorb economic, environmental or infrastructural shocks.
For Greece, this is especially relevant because geography already demands networks. The country cannot eliminate the distances created by mountains, islands and border regions. It can instead turn them into a system of complementary nodes linked by transport, digital infrastructure and specialised economic functions.
Such a model would also avoid the traditional mistake of equating regional policy with uniformity. Not every region needs the same institutions, industries or investment incentives. OECD recommendations for Greece increasingly emphasise precisely this place-based approach, in which development policy responds to the particular economic and social characteristics of each territory rather than applying the same model everywhere.
A network rather than a second Athens
The strongest argument against polycentrism is that Greece may simply be too small to sustain numerous sophisticated metropolitan economies. Excessive dispersion can dilute investment, duplicate institutions and prevent specialised clusters from achieving critical mass. This objection is valid.
But it argues against indiscriminate decentralisation, not against polycentricity.
The alternative should not be ten competing versions of Athens. It should be a hierarchy of complementary centres. Athens would remain dominant; Thessaloniki could function as a genuine second national metropolitan pole; and several smaller cities could acquire specialised roles of national significance.
The strategic choice is therefore not Athens versus the regions. It is between an urban system in which almost every high-level function ultimately points toward one dominant centre and another in which the capital is embedded within a broader national network.
Charalambidis’s language was polemical, and his proposal for Romania was never implemented. Yet the underlying diagnosis has aged remarkably well. The problem of monocentric Greece is simultaneously visible in the congestion of Attica and the demographic fragility of the periphery.
A polycentric Greece would not require making Athens smaller.
It would require making the rest of the Greek urban network more consequential.
For a country whose geography is inherently fragmented, the network may ultimately be a more natural model than the centre.
References
Angelidis, Minas. “Polycentricity in Policies: The Greek Case.” Built Environment 31, no. 2 (2005): 112–121.
Brezzi, Monica, and Paolo Veneri. “Assessing Polycentric Urban Systems in the OECD: Country, Regional and Metropolitan Perspectives.” OECD Regional Development Working Papers, No. 2014/01. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2014.
Charalambidis, Michalis. Nea Anaptyxiaki Paideia: I Anaktisi tou Ellinikou Tropou [New Development Education: Recovering the Greek Way]. Athens: Strabon, 2017. The volume contains dedicated sections on “Polycentric Greece,” the city of Romania and Alexandroupoli as a polycentric city.
Charalambidis, Michalis. Interview with Paratiritis tis Thrakis, 18 June 2004. His discussion explicitly connects regionalism with opposition to Greek monocentricity.
Charalambidis, Michalis. Remarks on Romania and regional urban development, reported in Paratiritis tis Thrakis, 19 February 2002.
Hellenic Parliament. Proceedings of the Plenary, 18 December 1998, 9th Parliamentary Period, 3rd Session, Meeting 50. The proceedings record parliamentary discussion of Romania and the support of 204 MPs for Charalambidis’s proposal.
Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT). 2021 Population and Housing Census: Resident Population. Athens, 2023.
OECD. Regional Policy for Greece Post-2020. OECD Territorial Reviews. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2020.
Petrakos, George, Prodromos Mardakis, and Helen Caraveli. “Recent Developments in the Greek System of Urban Centres.” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 27, no. 2 (2000): 237–251.
ESPON. The Role, Specific Situation and Potentials of Urban Areas as Nodes in a Polycentric Development. ESPON Project 1.1.1. The study identifies Athens and Thessaloniki alongside potential Greek urban networks including Larissa–Volos–Trikala and the eastern Macedonian–Thracian urban corridor.