Life in the city of Athens and the densely built building block with the dominant role of the Polykatoikia, completely occupying every side, without any margin of empty, free, common space. What could contribute to decongesting it while maintaining all its programmatic and functional content, offering residents more than a standard balcony? This dissertation focuses on the importance of the courtyard and the garden and how these will be re-incorporated into habitation within the dense urban fabric. Derived from traditional architecture, as mainly functional spaces of contact and associations, are a reference element for the elaboration, attending the need for more greenery, the inadequacy of open spaces, long time problems of the city that the recent sanitary treaty has emphatically brought back. The absence of having such a common space of reference and interaction, destination or goal, raises questions as to whether it is one of the reasons that in conditions of urban densification, contact between neighbors was given over to randomness and discretion. Approaching the building block as a whole, this study envisions possible responses to issues of wider urban life and a new model of housing development. Through a multilateral process of research and proposal it seeks ways to transform the city square into a residential community, in the area of Votanikos questioning state will and laws that repeatedly have been revised, for a green conversion. In addition, it aspires to adequately utilize and give a substantial role to vulnerable areas of the typical building block while urging city life to enter, ensuring more free space and promoting the creation and preservation of a communal green pocket. At the level of the horizontal property, it rediscovers the private garden, bringing back the primal contact with nature and soil and the decongestion that this entails, ultimately contributing to a more qualitative urban living condition.