After the Arrival City

Since 2016, the focus of ARCSR’s (Architecture for Rapid Change and Scarce Resources) work in Athens has been on migration and refugees, place-based architecture, and homemaking, to enhance the capacity of ‘arrival’ residents and their support networks to imagine and transform the context in which they live. After the Arrival City addresses the close of the European refugee housing support programme (ESTIA), bringing about great uncertainty for an estimated 13,000 people in Athens, who have sought to make the city their home in recent years. The project seeks to understand how a city without an existing model for rented social housing can adapt to find new ways to support and accommodate people in displacement. Taking a place-based architectural approach, the project aims to support the development of robust and equitable research partnerships with local and international institutions working in Athens on questions of migration and urban development, housing and social infrastructure. Through the experience of shared city-making from the bottom up, this research project seeks to involve students as collaborators undertaking investigative practice in historic and newly established migrant neighbourhood settings.