Sustainable Development, Cultural Heritage and Spatial Planning in Syros, Greece Tangible and intangible cultural assets as means for sustainable urban planning and place making. The case of Ano Syros, Greece G. Pozoukidou1 and E. Linaki2 1 Assistant Professor, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 2 City Planner, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece * Corresponding authors: E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Architectural heritage refers to the form of cultural environment and its connection to “place-topos”, being the testimony of individual and collective existence, but also of human activity through the expression of its intellectual and artistic evolution. It includes traditional buildings and settlements, historical city centers and in general all the elements of the human environment having notable historical, urban, architectural, folkloric, social and aesthetic characteristics and value. Traditional settlements are of particular interest as part of the most recent (modern) built heritage of Greece. They are mostly small-scale villages with special architectural features, unique structural and functional characteristics and distinct urban fabric. They are institutionally protected by the Greek State but still there are serious drawbacks in protection policies due to complete absence of spatial criteria in the relevant protection guidelines. In this context this paper presents a pilot study of how to incorporate the multi-dimen- sional values of traditional settlements in a typical and mostly standardized general develop- ment plan. It incorporates physiognomic, morphological, demographic, cultural, urban and architectural elements that are particular to traditional settlements in such a way to create sustainable places. Furthermore it proposes building restrictions and rules in accordance to existing protection legislation. The pilot study is applied to the traditional settlement of Ano Syros that presents a rich history and a wide variety of tangible and intangible elements of cultural and architectural heritage. Keywords: urban planning; traditional settlements; Syros 1. INTRODUCTION Plato in his work “Politia (The Republic)” likens a man’s soul to a city. He attempts to analyze the human soul by exploring the city, assuming that by observing the city you get to know humans themselves, establishing in that way the unbreakable bond of a person to its place. Later on Doxiadis in his work “Ekistics” imported new ideas about city functionality that were connected to human needs, where the ekistic elements which compose human settlements are nature, man, society, shells and networks. These five elements which are embedded in the concept of “entopia (in place)”, meaning a place that is practicable and can exist, brings back the issue of the relationship and interdependence of a person to its place, P r o c e e d i n g s 333 of the International Conference on Changing Cities III: Spatial, Design, Landscape & Socio-economic Dimensions Syros, Delos, Mykonos Islands, Greece ● June 26-30, 2017 ISBN: 978-618-5271-12-1 Pre-organized Special Sessions where the humman who is an integral part of a settlement and indissoluble connected to it, is imprinted in his place-topos. Considering human settlements as entopias, this paper focuses on how tangible and intangible cultural heritage elements could shape our settlements. It attempts to create a functional city plan that encompasses particular morphological and cultural characteristics which highlights the physiognomy of a place. Under this notion traditional buildings and settlements and in general all elements of human environment having notable historical, urban, architectural, folkloric, social and aesthetic characteristics and significance are of great importance. 2. TRADITIONAL SETTLEMENTS AS “ENTOPIAS” Traditional settlements are mostly small scale inhabited villages with special architectural features, unique structural characteristics and distinct urban fabric that were shaped through a diachronic connection of the past, present and future. Each one of them has a particular physiognomy that is connected to its unique entity, as it is expressed though the tangible and intangible landscapes and the perceptual image created by the senses of vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste [1]. From an institutional point of view traditional settlements have been part of Greek cultural heritage since the 1975s Constitution enactment where an agenda for special state protection and designation of “monuments, traditional areas and any traditional elements” was set (Hellenic Constitution (art.24 §6). Despite the fact that traditional settlements were constitutionally protected there was not a solid definition of what constitutes a traditional settlement in any national legislative document. It was the adoption, by the Greek legislation, of the Granada Convention that set for the first time a definition for traditional settlements as “a homogeneous set of urban or rural constructions that have special architectural, structural, social or historical features which are unique, valuable and need to be protected”. Later, in 2002 with the most recent Archeological Law (Law 3028/2002) traditional settlements were included in the greater notion of cultural heritage as places of “collective human action” or as “historical sites” that their protection is mandated by their “folklore, ethnological, social, architectural, industrial, historical and scientific significance” [2]. Furthermore Granada convention made an important distinction in regard to the expression "architectural heritage" that shall be considered to comprise three permanent properties: monuments, groups of building and sites. Sites, which are of particular interest for this research, are considered to be “the combined works of man and nature, being areas which are partially built upon and sufficiently distinctive and homogeneous to be topographically definable and are of conspicuous historical, archaeological, artistic, scientific, social or technical interest”. So for the first time protection of architectural heritage overcomes the boundaries of buildings and incorporates intangible elements that with the shells (buildings) comprise the concept of site-topos and by extension the concept of entopia. 2.1 Protection of Traditional settlements in the Greek legislation system An overview of the Greek legislation system for the protection of traditional settlements indicates that there is a strong will for the protection of cultural heritage as part of the greater sense of sustainability. Therefore, the State is obliged to adopt sustainable planning policies (Hellenic Constitution, Art.24) that will ensure perpetualness preservation of any cultural and 334 P r o c e e d i n g s of the International Conference on Changing Cities III: Spatial, Design, Landscape & Socio-economic Dimensions Syros, Delos, Mykonos Islands, Greece ● June 26-30, 2017 ISBN: 978-618-5271-12-1 Sustainable Development, Cultural Heritage and Spatial Planning in Syros, Greece natural possessions, such as to be preserved for future generations. In this sense, cultural heritage protection should be part of the greater spatial planning policy that in Greek legislative realm is expressed by several spatial planning laws and regulations [3]. The first substantial effort for the protection of traditional settlements was made in 1978 when the Traditional Settlements Protection Act (TSPA) was enacted and a total of 421 settlements were designated as traditional. The Act referred to the national territory and included settlements from both the mainland and insular parts of Greece. The main purpose of the act was to establish a set of general building regulations and morphological rules that would apply to all designated settlements until more detailed and specialized architectural and urban studies were conducted for each one of them [4]. TSPA is considered to be a milestone in the protection of traditional settlements, and it has become the guideline for a lot of subsequent legislative acts. From 1978 until 2013 an additional of 503 settlements were designated as traditional where in most of these cases the Council of State required that building regulations and morphological rules, set by the relative legislative acts, complies with those set by the 1978s TSPA (CoS Decision D200/2008) [4]. Therefore the specific act had significant impact in the formation of protection guidelines for hundreds of traditional settlements. Nevertheless TSPA had several drawbacks from its conception to its application starting from the fact that it was introduced for the sole purpose of characterizing certain settlements as traditional and for that it cannot be considered as a sufficient legislation framework to cover a diverse array of settlements. Moreover, it concerned a large number of traditional settlements covering the entire country (mainland and islands), therefore it proposed very general directions, failing to get into details according to the particular and different characteristics of each settlement. Besides, it was the TSPA itself, which, recognizing its inability to include provisions tailored to the needs of each settlement, transferred the specialization and defining the protection arrangements of each settlement to a later stage. Finally and maybe most importantly TSPA considered traditional settlements as a group of notably shells without overcoming the boundaries of buildings to include the intangible elements that shape