The proposal concerns the postwar urban sprawl of Heraklion through transactions in the period 1945-1960 involving property inside and outside the walls of Heraklion. The expansion of the urban city limits is investigated as a result of the tendency of citizens to invest in real estate in areas outside the walls, mainly from the 1950s onwards, with a deeper desire to settle in a more comfortable space and with subsequent final movement of citizens to new areas, thereby increasing the postwar urban area of Heraklion.

The paper refers to the period from 1945, the first year after the liberation of the city of Heraklion from German occupation, until the early 1960s, accompanied by a comparative study of the temporal phases from 1945 to 1950 and from 1951 to 1960. From this it emerges that gradually, within the first period, the perception of the urban installation sites changed, resulting in the creation of new residential areas in the second phase, beyond the Venetian walls of the city, which had delimited urban Heraklion until the Second World War.

The tendency for citizens to settle in new areas beyond the walls defined and legitimized both master plans of 1936 and 1958. The first included in the city plan some of the areas outside the walls which had already started to be inhabited by the interwar period, while the 1958 master plan included still more areas outside the walls, where citizens already living in Heraklion had begun to invest from the early 1950s onwards.