ABSTRACT
This paper explores the role of land policy in determining the modern forms of landownership in Thessaloniki, particularly its role in consolidating widespread small landownership closely bound to the state. I also highlight the interdependence between land policy and the modern forms and processes of the city’s residential development. The work is based on a historical analysis of state land policy, with emphasis on the role of land distribution programmes implemented for the rehabilitation of urban and rural refugees from the interwar period and beyond, which left an important legacy in land policy. Using raw data from official records, the paper investigates the implementation of this policy throughout the area of the post-war Greater Thessaloniki (GT), and studies its effects on the structure of landed property, on land supply for residential development, and on often complex, ambiguous, and distinctive patterns of ownership. By capturing critical data of the Programmes of Urban and Rural Refugee Rehabilitation, it highlights aspects of these programmes that have been neglected or underestimated in the literature of urban planning and Thessaloniki’s urban development. It illustrates the role of bodies such as the Ministry of Social Welfare, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Directorate of Exchangeable Property, both in the distribution of urban or transitional land as well as in land-use planning. The main argument of this paper is that the distribution, particularly of rural land, and its administration, played a very important role in extending access to urban land and in shaping the particular characteristics of the process of residential development. The policy of land distribution and the way it was undertaken in areas under urban conversion had a great impact not only in the structure of ownership of urban land but also in the way the land market was controlled in the urban periphery.
