Adaptive Reuse of Adobe Refugee Dwellings in Attica, Greece, as a Social Housing, Bioclimatic Upgrading and Heritage Preservation

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a transferable analytical framework for assessing earthen housing stocks and bioclimatic upgrades, useful for circular construction and heritage preservation researchers.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights into low-impact retrofitting techniques for adobe buildings, applicable to social housing projects in Mediterranean climates.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights how adaptive reuse can serve dual goals of housing provision and climate adaptation, potentially informing urban renewal policies for heritage areas.

The climate crisis, housing precarity, and the loss of everyday architectural heritage are converging challenges in Mediterranean cities. This article investigates the adaptive reuse of early twentieth-century adobe refugee dwellings in Nea Ionia and Kaisariani, neighborhoods of Attica, Greece, as an integrated social, environmental, and cultural strategy. Historical documentation, urban-morphological analysis, field observations, building survey data, material assessment, and design-based microclimatic analysis were combined to evaluate compatible restoration and bioclimatic upgrades as alternatives to demolition and conventional energy retrofit practices, with the main aim of preserving an important part of Greek history and architecture. The study develops a replicable qualitative assessment framework that identifies how existing adobe envelopes, compact layouts, courtyards, thresholds, vegetated pergolas, and low-water evaporative cooling may support low-carbon housing reuse. The results clarify the current preservation conditions and reuse potential of the selected case-study fragments, showing that adobe dwellings can preserve embodied material value, retain thermal mass and hygroscopic regulation, and support social housing when repaired with compatible, low-impact techniques. The article argues that the reuse of adobe refugee dwellings can function as a distributed urban strategy for housing provision, heritage continuity, and microclimatic adaptation. Its main contribution is a transferable analytical framework for assessing overlooked earthen housing stocks in dense Mediterranean contexts. The study argues that adaptive reuse can serve simultaneously as a means of social housing, a mechanism for optimizing the microclimate, and a means of preserving the tangible and intangible heritage of Greek adobe buildings that have been standing for over 100 years. This position extends circular construction debates by prioritizing non-demolition and direct reuse while preserving an important period of history.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16122358first seen 2026-06-29 07:38:06