Agii Anargiri was one of many refugee settlements implemented in Cyprus immediately after the Turkish Invasion of 1974, which came to act as suburban satellites to existing conurbations. While the settlement’s population was initially more socially integrated, its present ageing has led to phenomena bordering social segregation or even isolation. A similar lack of assimilation is also endemic in Larnaca’s urban tissue. Currently Agii Anargiri is compelled to respond to what initially might have been a distant possibility: how to address with its secluded fabric the sprawl of Larnaca? Whereas the encompassing peripheral avenue originally constituted a buffer-zone that protected the settlement from a hostile and barren landscape, it has now become the boundary that severely disconnects the housing project from the rest of the city.
Since Agii Anargiri does not have the scalar attributes, nor can it attain the critical mass of spatial density, programmatic intensity, and urban appeal to become an urban district, it is forced to be operative as a (mostly-residential) quarter. Thus, the attempt in this Project is to organise the conditions under which a polycentric web of spatial events will emerge that would sharpen its qualities as an extraordinary quarter. The proposal consists of 7 non-hierarchical tactical themes that operate in tandem as a single strategy via systematic cross-fertilisation. Each theme is developed according to different objects, objectives and concepts, which traverse diverse scales and employ various means of intervention. The cumulative sum of these is an Urban Design Project that can be scripted as a series of possible scenarios with the immanence to evolve and mutate over time.