Unfinished Athens

“Unfinished and abandoned buildings lie in wait through out Greece, as refugees and homeless line the streets in front of them. Why can’t one balance out the other?”

— Yiannis Baboulias, Greek journalist and writer

2007 marked the beginning of a worldwide financial crisis. Beginning in the US, the effects soon travelled to Europe. Greece felt the effects of the economic downturn more than most, with a drop in wages, rise in unemployment and the highest sovereign debt default in history. Because of the sudden nature in which the recession affected Greece when the banking system collapsed, many building project that were onsite at this time, as Greece had been building rapidly during this period, ran out of funds. This left behind concrete shells that can be seen throughout Greece today. An unfinished landscape, lying in wait. As the years pass by, these structures have remained untouched.

The 'Unfinished Athens' projects looks into the possibility of inhabiting these concrete structures, utilizing the scars of economic collapse to house refugees, as well as the homeless, throughout Greece. With an estimated 300,000 empty, unfinished and abandoned structures in Athens alone, all of varying scales, housing refugees in these structures could be seen as an opportunity to reinvigorate both the communal and the economic situations at a micro scale within struggling communities. With ease of access to services, facilities, transport, and more possibilities in terms of integration for refugees, the possible benefits of housing refugees within communities, rather than on the peripheries, are clear.

With a flexible design approach, this system could be used initially for hyper temporal situations, with a long term goal of providing a finished building with both temporary and permanent accommodations, taking advantage of current practices of free rent of certain structures, and providing certain upgrades to the structure.