Closed shops, rows of empty basements & low-price apartments, degrading infrastructure, impoverished population and poor urban public space is the image of the center of Athens right now as a result of years of abandonment and a deepening crisis. What is to come is either a big gentrification wave or further degradation.
Given a broken State, beyond failed plans, the only alternative proposal seems to come from the people. The idea is about a community- neighborhood land bank that acquires cheap, empty properties and manages them collectively as a common resource with priority to the needs of residents, protecting them from real estate speculation. A new social contract is sought that would incentivize the synergies of citizens to produce urban space, to exchange land, labor & time while sharing common values and space.
As people practice urbanism, through co-housing & collective management of land, the city becomes a city again- a society’s collective plural work.
A social cooperative, with residents as members, is the basis of a dispersed co-housing system, which collects distinct properties across the neighborhood and uses them either as low –rent housing for its members either to host common facilities and activities, as social care for elderly people, preschool education, or playgrounds that are missing in these central areas of the city. Beyond housing, unemployment needs to be addressed with the relocalization of production and creation of new jobs.
