Urban and Rural Development Challenges
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Abstract
Abstract
Unauthorised construction has been a persistent feature of spatial development in Greece, yet its geographical variation cannot be adequately captured by counts of recorded cases or total unauthorised building area alone. This study examines the officially recorded and legally regularised component of the phenomenon using administrative data from the Technical Chamber of Greece, comprising approximately 1.2 million declarations and more than 4.1 million violation records. A four-indicator frame-work is applied to distinguish complementary dimensions of unauthorised construction: relative severity, average scale, spatial intensity, and degree of integration into the building stock. Three indicators are calculated for 1,036 municipal units nationwide. The Unauthorised Share Ratio is examined separately for Athens and Thessaloniki using more detailed building-level data. The analysis combines descriptive and non-parametric statistics with Global Moran’s I and local correlation analysis. National correlations between severity, average scale, and spatial intensity are weak, indicating that these dimensions capture distinct characteristics of recorded unauthorised construction. All three indicators exhibit significant positive spatial autocorrelation, strongest for violation density (I = 0.546), while local correlations reveal marked geographical variation in both the strength and direction of their relationships. The analysis of Athens and Thessaloniki further identifies substantial intra-urban variation in the share of unauthorised area within the building stock. These findings demonstrate that recorded unauthorised construction does not fol-low a single spatial pattern and that its spatial structure is obscured when analysis relies solely on conventional aggregate measures. The proposed framework provides a transferable approach for examining the spatial differentiation of unauthorised development in other planning contexts where comparable administrative data are available.
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@article{Eftychiadou2026Declared,
title = {Declared Unauthorised Construction in Greece: An Indicator-Based Spatial Analysis},
author = {Ourania Eftychiadou and Aristotelis Vartholomaios and Evangelos Asprogerakas},
journal = {European Journal of Geography},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.48088/ejg.o.eft.17.1.358.378},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48088/ejg.o.eft.17.1.358.378}
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