ABSTRACT
This paper aims to suggest a conceptual apparatus for assessing the urban fabric, with a view to initiating its transformation towards sustainability. The fabric of the city of Thessaloniki is used as an example. The ‘building cells’ of Thessaloniki’s fabric are multi-storey apartment blocks that combine with one another to form different ‘urban configurations’. Four of these ‘urban configurations’ are assessed as representative both of the fabric of the city today and of the different phases of Thessaloniki’s urbanisation process. As the urban fabric is understood as a social and economic artifact, apart from a strictly physical one, parameters employed in this assessment strive to illuminate the relation between the environmental characteristics of the four configurations and the processes – social, economic and regulatory – that have brought them about.
