Volos Waterfront _ Transformation of the coastal landscape
J. G. Ballard described the Mediterranean coast as 'a linear city... some 3,000 miles long and 300 metres wide'. In 'The Largest Theme Park in the World' this city is claimed at once both by its international temporal inhabitants, the tourists, and its local permanent residents. However, as the temporary sense of European euphoria is succeeded by a return to national isolationism and austerity, both the tourists and the locals return to their ordinary lives, leaving behind the desolated territory of an abandoned amusement park.
While the Ballard narrative, dating back to 1989, holds an uncanny foresight into the contemporary situation of many Mediterranean beach stretches, it is also a great simplification. The site in question is comprised by diverse parts. Extended areas freed by de-industrialization, old factories and warehouses some of which today house the School of Architecture that marks the beginning of the site at the Western outskirts of the city of Volos and extensive unused port facilities, are chained to a series of scarcely used recreation areas including an equestrian centre of manicured landscape and stretches of beach interrupted by a small natural preserve adjoining the Xerias temporal river mouth. The site also includes traces of commerce and industry: among them a working wholesale fish-market and a surviving traditional boatyard. The semi-circular coastal string culminates at the Pefkakia, a beautiful and derelict small peninsula that opposes the gridded urban complex of Volos as its natural counterpart, point of view to the city and point of reference from it.
The coastal park project brings forth the classic questions of urban dispersal and its relation to natural preservation and the global pressure of tourism opposed to isolated localities, however within a completely new framework. The monetary crisis marks the transition to a new era of Ballardian desolation, or what Rem Koolhaas calls a future of radical stasis. The workshop is to explore into this new spatio-economic territory and work out viable and realistic, yet insightful and visionary prospects for the area.
