Stroll through the city with eyes wide open. Look for the hidden. Look for the neglected. Here, I look at the city of Geneva, home to the worlds largest corporations and one of the biggest expat communities in Europe, or so the guide book will tell you. But seeking a more vivid and undistorted picture of less popular living modes within Geneva, you must look farther.

Casablanca, Alger and Tunis are just a few examples, where attempts to offer affordable housing to a local worker class, was more often intertwined with an idea of demarcation and segregation between the colonialists and the colonized. The reactions to these societal and architectural impositions were slow and subtle forms of colonial opposition, often translated into building transformations and appropriations.

For as long as the neighborhoods in the new desert towns around Cairo have been built, residents have continually adapted the ‘‘free space’’ between the building blocks to their own needs. Accustomed to a dwell and work environment users were missing a vital component of their original urban habitat in the new neighborhoods

By altering the current typology of the housing block via a simple restructuring and repurposing of existing architectural and structural elements, the project aims to transform the use of private space in the new desert city "Badr City" into public space and to establish communal urban spaces that ultimately improve entire districts.

Through a photographic documentation and phenomenological description of the building stock in mass housing settlements built in the 1960s and 1970s the project aims to provide a qualitative perception of these buildings and further develop a new methodology for building analysis and finally, to create a genetic code of our built environment.