The walled city of Nicosia in Cyprus has experienced a decline in its urban life and building stock due to the effects of the island's division since 1974. A vast number of unused and abandoned buildings has provided opportunities for the reappropriation of spaces by transnational communities. In certain neighborhoods, particularly those near the United Nations-controlled Buffer Zone, “new” inhabitants have transformed entire buildings and ground floor spaces, seeking affordable housing and engaging in collective activities. These encompass human rights advocacy, religious worship, and commerce. Some of these spaces became bridges between public and domestic spaces, linking long-time residents with newcomers. This project retraces the old city through the lens of everyday practices, examining work rhythms, "social time," collective interiors, and street life. Through critical ethnographic explorations (site documentation, interviews, topological maps and drawings) and a collaborative visual essay titled "Living Diaries" the project constructs a dense and multidimensional narrative of shared urban life, challenging fixed imaginaries of the migrant experience.

Alice Buoli is an assistant professor in urban design and planning at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU), Politecnico di Milano, Milan. Her academic and professional expertise combines Euro-Mediterranean and African urbanism, borderlands studies, creative practice research, and editorial and curatorial activities. Prior, she was a Marie Curie experienced researcher for ADAPT-r (Architecture, Design, and Art Practice Training-research) at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, Estonia; the assistant curator for the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017; and a post-doctoral researcher at Politecnico di Milano working on sustainable territorial development projects in Mozambique and Italy. She is the principal investigator of the project Italian Borderscapes After 2020 (2023–25), funded by the European Union through its NextGenerationEU program and the Italian Ministry of University and Research. She has taught in numerous European universities, including coordinating the Urban Design for Borderlands studio at Politecnico di Milano. She cocurated the edited book Territorial Fragilities in Cyprus. Planning and Preservation Strategies (Springer, 2023) and she is the author of the monograph Urban Design and Planning Across the Strait of Gibraltar (Routledge, 2026).

Popi Iacovou is an assistant professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus. Her research explores the intersections between architecture, performance and the moving image, focusing on visual methodologies and situated filmic practices for the study of sociopolitical architectural and urban phenomena. She has published internationally and her work have been shown in venues such as the Melbourne Design Week; Copenhagen Architecture Festival; 16th Venice Architecture Biennale; Hong Kong and Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture; Architecture + Design Film Festival (A+DFF), Winnipeg; and the International Thessaloniki Film Festival. She has curated exhibitions for the London Festival of Architecture, The Gopher Hole (London), the Kolektiv Cité Radieuse gallery (Marseille), the State Gallery of Contemporary Art - SPEL (Cyprus) and the Artos Cultural and Research House (Cyprus). She received a PhD in design from The Bartlett, University College London, and an MPhil in architecture and the moving image from the University of Cambridge. She previously taught at Central Saint Martins and the University of Cambridge.

Socrates Stratis is an architect, urbanist, activist for the urban commons, and professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus. His research focuses on the political agencies of architecture and urban design. He studies the strategic value of urban design, as well as the social dimensions of architecture plus, the ways they both transform into critical urban practices. He oscillates between diffractive practice and practice-based research, thanks to entanglements between teaching, practicing, curating, and writing. He enriches his research by operating in a highly contested territory, such as the Cypriot one, and through his scientific position in EUROPAN Europe. He is one of the main founders of the critical urban practice agency AA & U, Cyprus. The Guide to Common Urban Imaginaries in Contested Spaces (Jovis, 2016) is one of his main editorial works. He also published Urban Design on the Move: Five Stories about Implementing a Winning Europan Project (Jovis, 2024). His curatorial and activist work involves Cyprus's participation in the 15th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, as well as the Hands-on Famagusta project.