CoHab Athens is a small, volunteer-driven research and action group in Athens that studies and tests alternatives to private, profit‑driven housing. It emerged in 2016, in the midst of Greece’s housing crisis, when architects, urban researchers and activists formed a collective to examine how rising rents, tourism pressure and energy poverty were reshaping everyday life in the city’s apartment blocks.
From the outset, the group focused on Athens’ dominant building type, the polykatoikia, and the 1929 “horizontal ownership” law that enabled stacked, individually owned apartments and helped turn housing into a commodity rather than a social good. CoHab’s work dissects that system and asks how collective ownership or cooperative models could be anchored in the same fabric instead of starting from scratch.
Much of its activity takes the form of applied research. Since November 2017, CoHab has run ongoing participatory design workshops that bring residents together to map local housing needs and sketch scenarios for a first cooperative housing project in central Athens. It has collaborated with neighborhood committees, notably in Exarchia, to unpack everyday conflicts in condominium management and explore collective responses to foreclosures and speculative pressure.
Beyond workshops, CoHab Athens develops legal and financial prototypes on paper, studies how existing Greek cooperative and social economy law could host a housing cooperative, and participates in European knowledge networks and conferences. The group does not yet operate housing units; instead, it sits in the grey zone between research and practice, trying to turn scattered knowledge and international examples into one concrete, collectively owned building in Athens.