Greek National Architectural Ideas Competition for the Unification of Thessaloniki’s Archaeological Sites and Monuments.

Through an interdisciplinary approach, the proposal conceptualises the historic centre as a historic urban landscape: a living urban system where cultural heritage, climate, mobility, and everyday life are intrinsically interconnected.

The strategy is structured through a network of routes—threads, seams, and ring—reconnecting the Upper Town with the waterfront, strengthening continuity between neighbourhoods and monuments, and integrating the historic centre within the wider metropolitan city.

Monuments are approached not as isolated objects, but as fields, nodes, oases, traces, and testimonies that preserve and reactivate collective memory. The project focuses on the creation of the the squares “in-between”: the public realm that connects monuments to one another and to everyday urban life through the transformation of squares and key public spaces.

The aim is to establish an open and continuous urban system, where heritage, memory, and contemporary life coexist. Unification is understood not as a formal gesture, but through the everyday practices of the city—moving, dwelling, working, playing, pausing, observing, and gathering.

A renewed public realm and mobility network, integrating pedestrian, cycling, and maritime routes, completes the strategy, offering a long-term vision for Thessaloniki’s public space as a collective, interconnected, and environmentally responsive urban system.