The creation of new spaces of heterotopia by the migrants' and refugees' solidarity movement in Athens (original) (raw)

For ‘common struggles of migrants and locals’. Migrant activism and squatting in Athens

Citizenship Studies, 2019

This article analysis the socio-political form of the migrant squats, and the socio-spatial interactions they foster and generate. Drawing on empirical research, it focuses on the Athenian context where, since September 2015, political groups belonging to the anti-authoritarian and Left-libertarian movement, occupied some empty buildings to host migrants in transit through the country. From a political perspective, the squats are interpreted here as strategies of struggle to gain access to the space of the city and they also constitute instances of migrant activism and resistance to the European border regime. Moreover, migrant occupations represent practices and sites for contesting citizenship, intended as a category of political status; as such, they exceed the limits of this category and move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, originating practices of citizenship 'from below', while at the same time they produce subjectivities that choose to 'opt out' of citizenship as a legal status. This article is situated within the contextualisation of space and autonomy. Migrant squats are looked at from the angle of the 'gaze of autonomy', since they are aimed both at contesting citizenship as an exclusionary feature, and at revindicating the activists' (both migrants and non) presence in the space of city.

What's so radical about refugee squats? An exploration of urban community-based responses to mass displacement in Athens.

Challenging the Political Across Borders: Migrants’ and Solidarity Struggles, 2019

The so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ has drawn attention to hitherto peripheral actors who produce new spaces, socialities, and readings of humanitarianism. Amongst the actors found in this milieu are faith-based initiatives; diaspora networks; volunteer efforts; and refugee-led self-help initiatives. Recently arrived refugees and migrants find themselves at the loci of intersecting social relations that append themselves to an existing infrastructure of hidden forms of welfare outside state-led social support. To better understand these emergent spaces and socialities, I mobilise the example of autonomous refugee housing collectives, or squats, located largely in and around the Exarcheia district of Athens. This case study reveals the potential and limits of migrant solidarity organising - highlighting the competing, conflicting, and at times contradictory discourses and practices of actors involved. The chapter concludes by questioning whether the transience of refugee populations in Athens adds a further layer of complexity to the possibility of enacting egalitarian modes of solidarity. In so doing, I consider how normative readings of hospitality imbue solidarity initiatives with migrants and refugees. The argument presented here is that refugee squats in Athens are embedded in an almost ineliminable hegemonic humanitarian logic and are thus caught between hospitality and abject space.

Urban Social Movements and Refugees in Greece. A New Relation? Emerging Common Spaces in Mytilene and Idomeni

International Conference: From CONTESTED_CITIES to Global Urban Justice , 2016

The ongoing refugee streams that derive from the recent conflict in the Middle East are a central issue to the growing socio-political debate about the different facets of contemporary crisis. While borders, in the era of globalization, constitute porous passages for capital goods and labor market, at the same time they function as new enclosures for migrant and refugee populations. Nevertheless, these human flows contest border regimes and exclusionary policies and create a nexus of emerging common spaces. Our basic argument is that despite the vivid and increasingly popular discussion on commons and urban social movements, there have been few attempts to think it together with the ongoing migrants and refugees’ crisis. During the current migrants’ crisis, the newcomers do not just claim the urban space but they occupy and tend to transform it to common space. Moreover, the moving populations try to challenge cityscapes and border regimes, as well as they seek to negotiate and go beyond cultural, class, gender, religious and political identities. At the same time the newcomers produce hybrid spaces and collectively reinvent a culture of coexistence, sharing and commoning. Consequently, the newcomers produce unique and porous common spaces, spaces in movement and threshold spaces. In parallel, neoliberal exclusionary policies tend to appropriate the migrants’ common spaces, with several methods like closing borders, forced evictions, detention centers-camps and hot spots. Based on the above context, this paper attempts to elaborate a critical methodological framework that examines the emerging migrants’ common space focusing on the case of Greece, a country that is in the epicentre of the current refugee crisis. We pinpoint in the cases of Greek borderscapes in Mytilene and Idomeni; the former is the main entrance point in the East and the later is the exit point in the North. Based on this context, we explore how the newcomers challenge the existing socio-spatial power relations and produce unique, unpredictable and misfitting common spaces.

Equals in Solidarity: Orfanotrofio's Housing Squat as a Site for Political Subjectification Across Differences Amid the "Greek Crisis"

Antipode, 2020

This article engages with the political struggles staged by illegalised migrants and activists in solidarity amid the long summer of migration and the "Greek crisis". Grounding its analysis on Orfanotrofio's housing squat in Thessaloniki, it narrates how such struggles are articulated to politicise migration and stage the equality of newcomers-migrants and refugees-and locals. Drawing on Jacques Ranci ere's political writings and contemporary geographical work on solidarity, the article argues that such struggles not only disrupt the exclusionary ordering of our cities but also construct political spaces and infrastructures of dissensus wherein equals in solidarity discuss common political problems and devise common political strategies. Through the notion of equals in solidarity, the article investigates how the performative enactment of equality can form the basis for solidarities across differences and analyses how some of the tensions that emerge around collective political subjectification are negotiated. Building on this, it explores some of the challenges and limitations that these struggles face in their efforts to transform the existing order of the city.

The Newcomers’ Right to the Common Space: The Case of Athens During the Refugee Crisis

ACME, 2018

Urban spaces and anti-neoliberal social movements: the case of Exarchia neighbourhood in Athens

In Europe there is a ‘piazza’, which is not the one of spread and financial markets but the ‘piazza’ still able to shape the urban space in the name of ‘the right to the city’. Paradoxically that ‘piazza’ is based in Greece, downgraded to PIGS by European financial institutions, specifically in Athens, a social kaleidoscope on the age of the global economic crisis. Starting from the industrial era, the development of the Greek capital proved to be ‘a story of failure’, a day scenario exacerbated for the least four years cause the economic crisis. At the same time, following the fast decline of the quality of life, Athens has been the witness of huge squares movement, that have taken place whether in a central approach (in particular localized in Syntagma, where Greek Parliament is based) or widespread through local assemblies territorialized in every neighborhood. Surely Platia Exarchia, that takes its name from the local district, is the most radical among these ‘piazzas’, holding a strong tradition as an anarchist area that continues to play a leading role for urban movements against austerity. Exarchia represents a unique place in the metropolitan European context due to the low level of acceptance to a strict urban neoliberal enforcement. A mix of different political identities and several underground styles marks the district as a political, social and cultural environment, where ‘cry and lament’ of Lefebvrian memory can be still recognized as the ‘sound of the identities’ in Castells’s meaning. The aim of this paper is to give a first ethnographic reading of Exarchia, starting from its contextualization in the Athenian metropolitan space up to the identities and practices narrative that through it.

Reimagining a Transnational Right to the City: No Border Actions and Commoning Practices in Thessaloniki

Social Inclusion, 2019

Although there is extensive literature on State migration policies and NGO activities, there are few studies on the common struggles between refugees and local activists. This article aims to fill this research gap by focusing on the impact of the transnational No Border camp that took place in Thessaloniki in 2016. The border region of northern Greece, with its capital Thessaloniki, is at the heart of the so-called refugee crisis and it is marked by a large number of solidarity initiatives. After the sealing of the “Balkan corridor”, the Greek State relocated thousands of refugees into isolated and inappropriate camps on the outskirts of Thessaloniki. Numerous local and international initiatives, with the participation of refugees from the camps, self-organized a transnational No Border camp in the city center that challenged State policies. By claiming the right to the city, activists from all over Europe, together with refugees, built direct-democratic assemblies and organized a multitude of direct actions, demonstrations, and squats that marked the city’s social body with spatial disobedience and transnational commoning practices. Here, activism emerges as an important field of research and this article aims to contribute to activists’ literature on migration studies after 2015. The article is based on militant research and inspired by the Lefebvrian right to the city, the autonomy of migration, and common space approaches. The right to the city refers to the rights to freedom, socialization, and habitation, but also to the right to reinvent and change the city. It was recently enhanced by approaches on common spaces and the way these highlight the production of spaces based on solidarity, mutual help, common care, and direct democracy. The main findings of this study point to how the struggle of migrants when crossing physical and social borders inspires local solidarity movements for global networking and opens up new possibilities to reimagine and reinvent transnational common spaces.

The creation of new spaces of heterotopia by the migrants' and refugees' solidarity movement in Athens (original) (raw)

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