After the most recent austerity politics, Greece faces the elimination of the middle class and the rise of the ‘new poor’. However, people are tentatively shaping collective forms enhanced by a networked society. What seems most relevant at the time is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa (Lefebre, 1991).

This proposal suggests the unification of storage spaces in the -1 level of the polykatoikia (Greek apartment building). The unified underground spaces will form an exchange / sharing network across town and at the same time will introduce a vibrant common space in the polykatoikia typology.

Either on rent or on a permanent stay, people need storage spaces usually for things that are not in current use but they bear a possibility of use and a sentimental value. Storage spaces form an archive of objects from various stages of each owner’s life, consumed and compressed to fit the modern way of dense living. These storage rooms constitute the immediate ‘material past’ of individuals and groups to which they rarely refer to, thus it is frozen for an uncertain length of time. An uneventful place but also an archive of fragments from the contemporary culture. 

What if we organize these spaces into a continuous social archive, which absorbs material life and redistributes it according to need and use value?