STUDENTHOUSING FROM LEFTOVER MATERIALS ON LEFTOVER LAND IN ATHENS

The intention is to design, develop, and operate affordable student housing as a start-up. I don‘t want to compromising on spatial quality, and still offer budget friendly accomodation for young Greeks. The business strategy is built on bootstrapping, flexibility, and re-use. Small investments to maintain control over comoany and value, no land purchases, prefabricated units, temporary structures. Building a company is hard enough. So I avoid to reinvent the wheel, and focus to find suitable proven concept.

The intention is to develop, design, prefabricate and operate affordable housing, all by ourselves, to allow synergies between the disciplines. While the prototype is developed in denmark, a future production should be located in Greece locally. However, to allow such an interdisciplinary workflow, we start small and move step by step.

Bootstrapping - Fundraising sounds cool and the idea of big projects is attractive — but we want to maintain control of our values and strategy. So we work with small investments, only if we need to, and take one step after another. By doing that we avoid the real estate-typical loans and debts and their risks.

Flexability - With a small budget we have to ensure we make the best out of our resources. Therefore we build temporary, compact units that allow us to change market if needed. We also avoid buying land as a cost driver and reject it as a later asset. Instead we are looking for alternative places that could come with lower prices because they are not suitable for classic developments.

>50% Re-use - Being flexible with our units comes with the opportunity, but also the challenge, to integrate circular economy to locations where it is not yet established. Our goal is to re-use and recycle more material than we introduce as new.

After wider research during the third semester, the decision was made to test 20-foot shipping containers as the structural core for 14 sqm student housing units.

Re-using containers is not about to re-invent the wheel, but to apply a proven concept, as the right fit to the Greek market. The country operates the largest economic fleet in the world, with Piraeus harbour in Athens being one of Europe‘s most important entry points. Containers are local, available, and affordable.

Their compact size of 6m x 2.5m fits Athens‘ narrow streets, allowing side-loading from a truck without extra cranes. By keeping the units temporary and movable, the container also fits the strategy of avoiding land purchases, that require high up-front investments.

Prefabricating most of the unit keeps construction costs down and quality high. Only the outer shell gets finished on-site, built from locally collected demolition debris.

The re-use of shipping containers meets the project‘s ambition to integrate as much leftover and re-used material as possible.
 

After several iterations, the decision was made to build a 1:1 prototype, to really understand what is being developed, and what it means to live in it. What works on 14 sqm? What needs to change?

Building it myself meant learning from people across every relevant field: carpenters, electricians, specialists in material re-use. That hands-on knowledge is hard to replace, and makes it easier to convince future funders that the project is grounded in reality, not just theory.