Kifissia’s character under threat

The character of the suburbs surrounding Athens is being compromised by the country's new building regulations, which allow basements to cover entire plots of land, at the expense of trees and, by extension, an area's aesthetics, according to the mayor of Kifissia, in the north of the capital, Vasilis Xipolitas.

Essentially the regulation allows the reconstruction of basements even beyond the outline of the building that is allowed to be erected on a plot of land, depending on the building coefficient per area.

In order to build these basements, trees that took decades to grow are cut down and replaced by lawns - the only thing that can grow in the 40 cm or so of soil left between the basement roof and the plot's surface.

Xipolitas emphasized to Kathimerini that the implementation of this article of the regulation in the leafy northern suburb, where...