ABSTRACT

In Exarcheia, Athens, in a rather densely populated part of the city, an extended graffiti painting on a building façade depicts a jungle scene of tropical plantation, made during the last years of economic crisis. It reveals the extended demand of the Athenian urban population for ‘green urbanism,’ which would insert natural plantation in the interior of the Hellenic capital. ‘Emeralds’ as the elements of the ‘emerald necklace,’ in the metaphor used by the great American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, in order to describe a number of parks, correlated through ‘green’ parkways in the urban territory of Boston, United States. Political ideals were projected on the urban landscape at a scale much greater than individuals’ natural and psychic ‘dimensions,’ at a scale imposing the feeling of sublime in correlation to principles, ethical principles of collective and probably universal validity.