The technical and the social: Balancing criteria for housing improvement in Egaleo

In October 2025, the Municipality of Egaleo launched a call for proposals, open for all Polykatoikia (multi-storey condominium buildings) in Egaleo whose residents were willing to undertake renovations for better housing quality or energy efficiency. Unlike many other energy upgrade or renovation programmes, the Rock The Block project, funded by the European Urban Initiative, does not focus exclusively on technical parameters but also social connections and cooperation, aiming for an added value for local society and building on the power of community. A few weeks after the call closed, I had an online call with members of the Rock the Block consortium. I asked representatives of the organisations most active in the open call and its evaluation, to share with me their experiences and thoughts of the process. 

Combining technical and social criteria as factors in evaluation is a complex endeavour and establishing these criteria was not without any dilemmas. “This is a project that combines an understanding of care networks and physical infrastructure,” explained to me Stefania Gyftopoulou, Rock the Block’s project coordinator, during our call. “The challenge is how to combine all this together in an intervention and how to estimate its impact. Would it be more impactful to focus on buildings that need a lot of investment or to distribute smaller interventions between buildings?” 

In order to discuss the criteria with residents, a series of public events were organised by the Egaleo Municipality and its consortium partners, in a variety of locations. “The main role of these public meetings was taking general feedback about the criteria, but essentially making the project known to the people, spreading the word about it,” recalled Stella Daouti, co-founder of the architecture studio AREA, in the online call. While these encounters gave the consortium valuable feedback about the sentiments of residents about the different conditions and requirements of the call, the public events did not change the criteria fundamentally. 

By the time the open call was launched, the selection criteria had been finalised to include a variety of aspects in the evaluation process. Besides a set of preliminary conditions (majority agreement, participation in workshops and accommodating different kinds of interventions), the proposals were examined according to three main criteria. The first criterion (B1) is related to building’s general conditions, including typology, age, size, accessibility, outdoor spaces and empty properties, technical features such as insulation, heating and ventilation, as well as population density. The second criterion (B2) refers to the social aspects of the Polykatoikia, covering the number of residents involved, their participation in neighbourhood initiatives, their openness, skills and culture of cooperation, as well as household compositions, financial capacities, social challenges and the presence of vulnerable groups. The third criterion (B3) corresponds to the potential impact of the renovations, consisting of the possibility of integrating different kinds of interventions, the potential of using vacant apartments for housing and unused land for public spaces and the prospect of transferring the deployed solutions in other cities and at a larger scale. 

This last criterion was designed to assure a diversity of building types, locations and interventions in the programme. “We had many discussions about the right set of Polykatoikias that would make the biggest impact,” explained Stella. “This means picking not identical types of Polykatoikias but to test the programme’s tools in different building sizes and geographical areas as well.” The 40 applications received for the call allowed for this diversification: besides smaller and larger buildings, spread across the whole city, proposals also represented a good balance between homeowners and tenants, with homeowners engaging to freeze or lower rents in exchange for renovations. 

Those applicants that met the pre-requisite conditions of the call were visited and interviewed by members of the Rock the Block partnership, and based on these discussions, they received scores for each criteria. While the University of Thessaloniki led the technical assessment of the buildings, the feminist urban planning agency Urbana and the circular economy organisation InCommon met residents of the Polykatoikias to understand community dynamics, willingness to participate and vulnerabilities. “It took a couple of visits for us to test how the process would go,” recalls Stella. “We did not know in advance if applicants would feel comfortable to have us in their buildings but they were very open and proud of showing us around, inviting us into their homes and talking about the history of their building, which in many cases, is also the history of their family.” 

Assessing the buildings’ technical conditions followed a questionnaire with questions related to the building shell, the insulation level, the windows, the heating system and many other technical elements that the visiting experts completed based on their observations. “In the evaluation, we took into account how easy it would be to implement an intervention as efficiency upgrades can be more complicated in existing buildings than in new ones,” explained Aikaterini Tsikaloudaki from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In this assessment, the University’s experts also kept in mind the budget and the feasibility of the planned interventions within the programme’s capacities. “Because if for example, a building was extremely old, in extremely bad condition, this building would have a high grade, but it would require a lot of money to be fixed.” 

Exploring the social conditions of the applicants took the form of guided discussions conducted by InCommon and Urbana with as many members of the Polykatoikias as possible. The visits to the applicant buildings went beyond interviews: they allowed Rock the Block partners to have a unique insight  into the communities that constitute the Polykatoikias. “Having all the people together in one of the apartments in the shared space of the Polykatoikia did show a lot about the dynamics between residents and their relationships with each other,” remembers Valia Zourna of InCommon. “It was very interesting to see that many neighbours have never been to each other’s apartments. Maybe their parents used to visit one another but this generation didn’t develop these relationships. They just needed an opportunity to be all together and we created this opportunity. I remember one person saying that it’s time to care more about each other to see how we can solve some of the problems we share, event without technical interventions.” 

The visits not only gave the Municipality and Rock the Block partners a better understanding of local housing conditions and challenges but also helped uncover existing attempts to improve Egaleo’s neighbourhoods and quality of life, or, in some cases, the potential of such initiatives. “It’s very useful to have a better idea about residents’ desires and needs regarding their common spaces. We came to learn about care networks they already created,” underlined Ioulia Leventopoulou from Urbana.   

Based on the technical and social criteria, a shortlist of applicants was created and presented to the whole consortium. The shortlisted buildings were then assessed for their scalability: “We want to ensure that there is a diverse sample both in terms of technical aspects and social compositions,” explained Stefania. “We want to make sure that we have case studies that are different from each other – this diversity can help the scalability of the solutions produced.” There are many factors that can increase an intervention’s possible impact and potential for multiplying and upscaling: in the case of some buildings, for example, apartments that are currently empty could join the municipality’s social housing programme. In others, empty lots adjacent to applicant buildings could be turned into public spaces for local communities.

The evaluation was completed in January 2025, with the consortium reaching a consensus in all cases. However, the publication of the results in February did not close the process. Applicants were given five days to express any objections to the results and several building representatives used their right to object. Ten objections arrived from different condominium buildings, questioning the selection criteria, the accuracy of the evaluation, or the definition of “Polykatoikia” itself.  While these objections did not derail the process, they caused significant delays. As long as the process was not closed, the Rock the Block consortium could not launch the planned workshops with the winning buildings, scheduled to take place between April and June. 

The objections left many consortium members perplexed. “We had a lot of discussions about these objections,” admitted Stella. “They mean that the programme is successful because people really want to be part of it. On the other hand, by reading the objections, we realised that many applicants have not fully understood what this programme was about.”  

After responding to the objections and finalising the selection, partners could finally set up a series of workshops with the selected buildings. This opens a new phase in the project: working with residents to define actions and interventions, building communities and helping them design their action plans.