According to Foucault, heterotopias are real and organized spaces, places of otherness, which are simultaneously physical and mental. These places are part of the urban tissue, “a sort of realized utopia, in which all real spatial patterns, and all the other spatial patterns that exist inside society, are simultaneously represented, questioned and reversed”. Spaces that are not just “other places”, but “an-other” way to think spatial.

Thinking spatial with “an-other” from the standard way, we interpret already existing spaces and we try to transform them into places with purpose and aesthetic/experiential potential, through an alternative use. We attempt to see the cinema projection inside the urban space as an “urban performance”, which re-composes the symbolic meanings of space. What will happen if, in spaces of the everyday life, that are symbolically loaded because of their past, we create a reversal that will result in the creation of an heterotopic space? That is the main question trying to be answered with this project thesis.

The development of open air cinema in Athens has always been connected with the formation and the development of the new city. The extension of Athens from the centre to the periphery caused a parallel dispersion of the open air projections. The squares of the neighborhoods, as central spots where social interactions happened, became the new places for open air projections. Turning towards a new example nowadays, an “urban experiment” is proposed, with the emergence of the open air cinemas of the city again, but this time redefining the meaning of projections in space. Three hypothetical scenarios are selected and analyzed. Three spaces, with different program of uses each one, but with a common past, the one of having been open air cinemas before, are selected to become new heterotopias.