Coexisting or mingling: The visual aspect of the problem in the urban context

The residents of a working‐class settlement in the north of Greece were the subjects of a three‐stage study to determine the degree of satisfaction these people found in their surroundings. The ultimative objective was to take a highly disparate group of individuals and unify them both as a community and with the surrounding Greek population by designing an environment that blends the individuals' colour tastes. The main aspects of the investigation were (a) the residents' use of public spaces, (b) their evaluation of them from functional, psychological, visual, and aesthetic points of view, and (c) their colour preferences (colour palette and combinatory principle) for building exteriors. The second and third stages of the research focussed on, respectively, semantic differentiation and an analysis of a sample building facade by colour elements. The main difficulties in this research resulted from the very disparateness of the population (refugees of various origin), the indifference of the authorities, and the bissection of the area by a highway. In the coloration proposals resulting from the research, the accomplishment of the main objective on the level of the visual and psychological reaction of the users to an organic coloration of their building facades was attempted. Social, semantic, synthetic, and technical factors were taken into account.