2021-2024 | Public Space & Community Empowerment
Postdoctoral Marie-Curie Fellow, School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens | project website

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Places of Togetherness is a research-through-design project that investigates the relationship between urban space and social cohesion in Nikea, a historically diverse working-class borough of Attica, Greece. The project focuses on a network of small public spaces (courtyards and alleys) originally built as part of the masterplan for the Asia Minor refugees settlement in 1923, and that once fostered vibrant everyday sociability and a sense of community. These in-between spaces functioned as places with layered meanings and uses, operating between public and private realms. Over the last few decades, however, they have declined due to socio-spatial transformations, migration, and neglect, reflecting a broader fragmentation of Nikea’s social fabric. Places of Togetherness responded directly to this challenge by re-evaluating these spaces as potential thresholds – dynamic, inclusive interfaces where private and public life intersect, and where encounters across cultural differences can be enabled rather than foreclosed. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork (2021–2023) including participant observation, spatial mapping, and dozens of resident interviews, the project combined architectural analysis with social research to understand how design can promote access, inclusion, and sociability in an evolving urban community.

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Places of Togetherness began as a postdoc research, investigating the relationship between public space and social cohesion. Having grown up in Nikea, and after living a decade abroad, I returned as a resident and a researcher to investigate the role that threshold spaces (between public and private) play in everyday life, the social life and relationships they can afford, and how opportunities of embodied commoning, care, and collective action can reactivate them. To answer these questions, the research had two main phases: The first one was ethnographic that investigated and documented the existing social life of the courtyards through observations, interviews and mapping. The second was participatory, involving a series of activities taking place in the shared spaces, aiming at bringing residents together to reactive them. 

 

Through the first part of the research and the interviews, I met various people in the area, and we formed a small informal interdisciplinary group of researchers and artists, and we worked collectively to organize a series of participatory activities in the courtyards for the second phase of the project, focusing on caring for the space and caring for others. The group was formed by: Aristodimos Komninos (Urban Designer & Product Manager), Kyriaki Papathanasopoulou (Doctor in History), Markos Papoutsakis (Visual Artist & Educator), Ioanna Tsoucala (Cinematographer), Dimitris Bampilis (Director).