Athens’ urban development during the second post-war period was in large part made by small-scale building industry. Thanks to a specific apparatus of laws the State was able to advance local construction knowledge that permitted the proliferation of the polykatoikia’s archi­tec­­ture typology (multi-story build­­ing). This bottom-up practice of self-building instead of a top-down master­plan, on one hand, met the necessities of housing needs towards private owner­ship and without the need of a welfare pro­gram, on the other hand, produced strong overbuilding and over-exploi­tation of the city's urban space. 

The heavily built environment led to signifi­cant abandon­ment of central areas and the number of vacancies raised more with the arrival of the crisis. The weak welfare state suffocated by aus­terity measures in which the city is cur­rently drowning is also a bone of conten­tion that in the last decade generated various forms of manifes­tations and urban commoning practices. Investigating the application of those realities of sharing and participation in the constitu­tional form of the coop­erative is the object of the research, also seen as the possibility to rethink the city's urban spaces not anymore through the single unit of the building but on the scale of the block.

Through the legal instrument of the active building block which regulates the plots' regeneration, the propose of the project is to set up common spaces for a cooperative in an oikodomiko (building block) with the pro­gressive purchase, transformation and connection of vacant spaces present in the polykatoikias' ground floors. The process, envisioned to be developed in various stages, will give the possibility for a new flexible rent system, services open for use by all citizens in a founded public and semi-public space for the city.

In order to explore the project possible repetition, three recurrent typologies of building blocks have been identified, differing in shape and exploitation of the inner space. Three interventions have thus been advanced, varying mainly in the use of the akalyptos (interior un-built space) with a common program made by a lobby for the cooperative and open service spaces, public toilets and laundry for the neighborhood. Other services such as workshop space, communal kitchen, kindergarden, library, ateliers have been adapted for each case in relation with the surrounding context.