How an old Athens airport is being transformed into a 650-acre coastal park

Sasaki is one of the winners of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards. Explore the full list of projects we’re honoring for making the world more equitable, accessible, and sustainable.



One of the world’s most remarkable urban transformations is now underway in Athens, Greece. Over the next decade, the city’s decommissioned airport will be turned into the 650-acre Ellinikon Metropolitan Park, designed by the landscape architecture firm Sasaki and interspersed with 21st century neighborhoods. It’s the winner of Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Award in the Urban Design category.



[Image: Sasaki]



Shuttered in 2001, the airport has been a physical representation of Greece’s ups and downs. The country built stadiums at the airport for the 2004 Olympics, then fell into decline in the long debt crisis that followed. Later, airport terminal buildings and Olympic venues both became emergency shelters for a flood of migrants.



[Image: Sasaki]



Soon, Ellinikon will become the largest coastal public park in Europe, featuring more than 30 miles of walking paths and 10 miles of cycle routes, 4 large playgrounds, an 18,000-person capacity amphitheater, and a massive beach, all accessible by transit.



[Illustration: Jonathan Peterson ]



It took years of negotiations to make the park’s privately led development plan a reality. A coalition of private developers got the rights to build on about half the site for free in exchange for constructing and operating the park and its related infrastructure: the rare public-private partnership in which most of the investment is private, with long-term public benefits. That development model enabled Sasaki to pursue an aggressively resilient design. The park will absorb more carbon emissions than it creates and feature a native landscape adapted to Athens’s extreme weather. Once 80% asphalt, the site will soon be 80% green space. The park’s first phase, about half its total area, should be finished in 2025. “We see this as a park for 1,000 years,” says Sasaki lead designer Michael Grove.