International Conference:
Contentious politics in European urban settings and the right to the city
Location: Historic Archive of the University of Athens (Ιστορικό Αρχείο ΕΚΠΑ)
20th of September 2024
A one-day interdisciplinary conference titled ‘Contentious politics in European urban settings and the right to the city’ will be organized in the context of the EU-funded project GAPRIA [The Gentrification of Activism, Autonomous Collective Politics and the Right to the City in Exarchia, Athens] that will bring together scholars researching in the areas of urban resistance, urban social movements, urban margins, public space, gentrification and touristification.
Scholarly and activist attention is increasingly being paid to the urban scale as a site of oppression, dispossession, and exclusion along lines of hierarchised difference. Gentrification, in particular, as an urban phenomenon that often leads to violent displacement and eviction has shifted in the 21st century, as Neil Smith has argued (2002), from a sporadic, isolated, local policy in particular urban centres to a universalizing urban strategy that leads to global interurban competition. At the same time, cities are equally understood as sites of struggle, radical consciousness-raising and resistant subject formation, as well as sites where new claims are made on social, economic, cultural, and spatial rights.
The aim of the conference will be to bring together research on the politics of urban life which centres and sheds new light upon questions of justice and develop comparative work in the area. It will particularly aim to engage with current work that explores such policies that lead to the displacement and eviction not only of poorer sectors of the population from urban neighbourhoods as has been widely covered in the literature so far, but also of activist visions about city life, that are often produced in neighbourhoods of political and historical significance for social movements that claim equality, solidarity and social justice. Simultaneously, it will aim to explore, and contribute to, the under-researched area of resistance to such policies of displacement and eviction by activists and residents-activists in cities of Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. The conference will adopt an interdisciplinary approach and will aim to engage scholars across the disciplinary areas of Politics, Social Anthropology, Sociology, Human Geography and Urban studies.
The conference is organized in the context of Georgina Christou’s Marie-Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (Horizon Europe 2021-2027), acronym GAPRIA, in collaboration with Professor Athena Athanasiou, Panteion University. The GAPRIA project is coordinated by the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.
Conference programme
9:30- 10:00 Registration
10:00-10:20 Welcome and Introductions
Professor Athena Athanasiou and Dr. Georgina Christou
Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
10:30 -12:00: Gentrification, urban regeneration, resistance, and cooptation.
Chair/discussant: Giacomo Pozzi, Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology,
Department of Humanities, IULM University, Milan, Italy.
- Political interventions or urban decoration? Graffiti and street art in the contested landscapes of central Athens
Dr. Pafsanias Karathanasis
University of Crete
- Social Extractivism. Touristification through the lens of infrastructure. The case of Exarchia
Anna Gulia Della Puppa
PhD Candidate, Sapienza University of Rome
- Spatio-temporal politics in a Barcelona neighbourhood: Between resistance and co-optation.
Panayiotis Achniotis
PhD Candidate, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester
12:15-13:45 Formal/informal housing, urban marginality, and housing struggles.
Chair/discussant: Panagiota (Penny) Koutrolikou, Associate Professor,
School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens.
- Platform-driven housing financialisation and gentrification in Athens
Dr. Dimitris Pettas
Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Technical University of Berlin
- Living the Milanese dream. Housing vulnerability, squatting and penal populism in Milan
Dr. Giacomo Pozzi
Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology, Department of Humanities, IULM University, Milan, Italy
- From the squatted City Plaza: Challenging the borders of the everyday
Dr. Olga Lafazani
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin
14:00-15:00 Snacks and coffee break
15:00-16:30 Intersectionality, displacement and activism
Chair/discussant: Eirini Avramopoulou, Assistant Professor,
Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences.
- Activism in Small Places
Dr. Olga Demetriou
Professor in Political Anthropology, School of Government and International Affairs, University of Durham.
- Pilgrims of Home: Struggles against evictions during the Christian Jubilee of 2025 in Rome
Dr. Stefano Portelli
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Università Roma Tre Observatori d'Antropologia del Conflicte Urbà (OACU)
Universitat de Barcelona
- Exarcheia area as a shelter and a territory of displacement
Bessy Polykarpou
PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, Panteion University
16:45 – 17:00 Closing remarks
Conference abstracts
Achniotis, Panayiotis, PhD Candidate, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester
Spatio-temporal politics in a Barcelona neighbourhood: between resistance and co-optation.
In a peripheral neighbourhood of Barcelona an ambitious plan of urban transformation is taking place by re-zoning an ex-industrial zone into a commercial-residential one. It includes the construction of more than 10,000 flats, new roads, parks, schools and medical centre. During a 12-month fieldwork in 2022, I observed the work of activists and community groups in defending perceived common interests in the transformation process and in asserting neighbourhood identity and belonging. I consider two sets of social practices: first, the spatial ones, that is political mobilisation oriented in making residents legible subjects with a say in the transformation of space; second, the temporal ones, that have to do with forms of urban belonging in the past and the future. Examples include community “memory work” to “conserve” the neighbourhood’s past urban and labour struggles, as well as attempts to signify what the neighbourhood will mean/be in the future. During more than a decade of protracted economic and social crisis in the country, the realm of the neighbourhood has re-emerged as a site of political participation, contestation and sociality. In this context, a kind of neighbourhood politics appears that is informed both by the spatial - the material and discursive production of the neighbourhood - and the temporal – the conjuring together of fragmented memories of the past and desires for a more just urbanism than occur in the gap between the plan and its actual manifestation (Smith 2017). I contend that this kind of crafted neighbourhood politics enters in an interesting dialogue with discussions on urban social movements, as it is not always posible to distinguish between resistance and co-optation and who are the actors who “legitimately” express these instances.
Della Puppa, Anna Giulia, PhD Candidate, Sapienza University of Rome
Social Extractivism. Touristification thought the lens of infrastructure. The case of Exarchia.
As Mezzadra and Neilson suggested in 2013, it is worth looking at the intersection of extractivism, finance and logistics to understand how contemporary capitalism works. By defining extractivism in terms of colonial expropriation of resources, the scholars propose extending this concept to the urban context and the dynamic of value extraction from spaces and the relationships therein (Mezzadra, Neilson 2013). This meaning allows us to consider extractivism as "a dispositif capable of extracting and privatising the value accumulated in a stock of common resources", in which "the particular resource is generally known as heritage, the meaning of which now extends to very diverse areas" (Salerno, 2020). Not unlike classical extractivism, this type of social extractivism requires precise infrastructures to operate, and in the digital age, it is mainly platforms that perform this function. Tourism is one of the engines of this extractivism. By creating its own space where physical and algorithmic goods are trafficked and enter the production-consumption circuit, tourism consolidates the city as part of the logistical dimension of contemporary capitalism. However, it should also be noted that it is often the infrastructure of care from below that drives social extractivism. The Exarchia neighbourhood is one of the places where the practice of commoning has allowed people to cope with difficult times and construct spaces and means of a new political lexicon, especially during the economic crisis and in continuity with a long political legacy. As Enright and Rossi note, "the commons is simultaneously a space of resistance to neoliberal accumulation through dispossession" and "a site of social subsumption and commodification within the knowledge-intensive economies of biopolitical capitalism" (2018). This paper aims to investigate the Exarchia's recent touristic burst, closely related to (the hypostatisation of) its commoning practices and spaces, as a frictional ground where multiple layers of infrastructure intersect.
Demetriou Olga, Professor in Political Anthropology,
School of Government and International Affairs, University of Durham
Activism in Small Places
This paper addresses the question of urban activism from a counter-perspective, asking what kinds of activisms unfold in locations that cannot so easily be classified as ‘urban’. From corners of the British bases in Cyprus, to islands in the Aegean and the central Mediterranean, and Spanish enclaves in north Africa, various forms of activism have unfolded in the course of the last two decades. These activisms have been spurred by the presence of refugee reception and detention facilities and the movement of migrants and refugees through them. They have been formed by their very location on the periphery and their multiple spectacular invisibilities. The paper is an attempt to think through the forms of activism that this lack of urbanity spurs.
Karathanasis Pafsanias, University of Crete
Political interventions or urban decoration?
Graffiti and street art in the contested landscapesof central Athens
Graffiti and what has been called Street Art, are forms of urban intervention which can play a vital role in forming and re-forming the landscapes of the cities. By painting, writing and tagging the public surfaces of the city, those involved in this form of urban intervention are not only changing the ways in which the people see the different urban areas of a city, but they actually alter the ways in which people interact and understand the cityscapes in their everyday lives. This is why graffiti or street art cannot be approached separately from their urban environments and, in this way, they are a visual as much as they are a spatial phenomenon that directly affects the city aesthetics. During the last fifteen years, or so, Athens has gone through different sociopolitical changes and crises that have affected the city landscape in various ways. The ‘economic crisis’, the ‘refugee crisis’, the ‘public health crisis/pandemic’, and lastly the tourstification and gentrification of the city center have caused structural changes in the city and fueled urban contestations that are expressed on and through the walls and the other surfaces of the urban landscape. In this presentation, we will focus on the “overpainted” landscapes of Athens, to discuss the ways in which they relate to aspects of the sociopolitical changes, and the ways in which they contribute to the social construction of public space. Using Marry Douglas’ classic anthropological notion of “matter out of place” we will approach the different kinds of interventions found on the streets of central Athens through their capacity for contestation and resistance, or their ability to facilitate the necessary urban aesthetics of gentrification and touristification.
Lafazani Olga, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Humboldt University, Berlin
From the squatted City Plaza: Challenging the borders of the everyday
City Plaza was a seven-story hotel in central Athens, occupied on April 22, 2016, amid the so-called "refugee crisis." It provided decent housing for hundreds of migrants who were homeless or living in dire conditions in camps. Still, City Plaza was not merely a housing initiative but also a political project, aiming to create a community of struggle and resistance against prevailing border and migration policies. The organization of daily life at City Plaza was grounded in principles of self-organization and inclusive participation. However, when approximately 400 people from ten different nationalities, with diverse experiences in terms of class, gender, religion, and socio-political backgrounds, coexist, things become complicated. This paper discusses the ways we managed to cope with these challenges and the ways we failed. It examines the varying understandings of collective action and participation and the interplay of different forms of power in everyday life. Contrary to romanticized views of social movements, City Plaza was not, and could not be, an "island of freedom and equality" within the broader context of exploitation, repression, racism, and antagonism among the oppressed. Nevertheless, it was a space where significant collective social and political experiences emerged, and where self-organization and cooperation were manufactured - for a short time or for a while longer.
Pettas, Dimitris, Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Technical University of Berlin
Platform-driven housing financialisation and gentrification in Athens
This presentation explores the effects of short-term rental (STR) platforms like Airbnb on urban development and housing market in Athens. It focuses on how STRs contribute to housing unaffordability and broader changes in the housing landscape, influenced by the economic crisis, tourist influx in central districts, and the participation of international investors. In this frame, STR networks are seen as infrastructural assemblages that blend physical, human, and symbolic elements, operating at the intersection of digital and urban environments. Drawing from extensive research, including 32 interviews and data analysis from 2014–2021, the findings reveal how STR markets drive housing commodification and financialization, trigger and accelerate processes of gentrification and touristification, separating housing from traditional social uses and linking it to global financial trends.
Bessy Polykarpou, PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology, Panteion University
Exarcheia area as a shelter and a territory of displacement
Traditionally the neighborhood of Exarcheia has been a nest for radical collectives across the spectrum of emancipatory politics – several feminist and queer also among them. Although the androcentric paradigm of political engagement which was deriving from the left and anarchist political spaces perceived Exarcheia as a crossroads of revolutionary ideas, this framework was at times suffocating, while others empowering or deliberating for feminist and queer collectives and subjectivities. In this presentation, I will describe this dual relationship between queer and feminist collectives and subjectivities and the broader area of Exarcheia, which has been unfolding over the last fifty years. Since the fall of the dictatorship in Greece, back in 1974, and the beginning of the so-called “period of democratization” in the country, gays, lesbians, and trans people began to meet at Exarcheia. AKOE [Gay Liberation Movement of Greece, Απελευθερωτικό Κίνημα Ομοφυλοφίλων Ελλάδας] was founded during the autumn 1976, holding meetings initially in friends' houses, while a little later it found a home at 6A Zalongou Street. The offices in Zalongou became a meeting place for political encounters and empowerment. Later in the ‘90s, the first attempts for pride parades by Paola Revenioti on Strefi Hill [Λόφος Στρέφη], (recently at the risk of privatization) marked an era when queer lives were manifoldly silenced. In addition, the Feminist Center at 12 Eresou Street since the early ‘00s had been a cluster of solidarity for several groups that organized their gatherings there for over a decade, such as LOA [Lesbian Group of Athens, Λεσβιακή Ομάδα Αθήνας]. Apart from the homophobic attacks that occasionally take place in Exarcheia (see for instance the cases of Nikos Sofianos and Ilias Gkionis), the wider area was marked by the cruel murders of Alexis Grigoropoulos in 2008 and Zak Kostopoulos/Zackie Oh! in 2018, as well as by the successful attempts of gentrification that led to the displacement of many residents and the reshaping of public life and relationalities.
Portelli Stefano, Postdoctoral Research Fellow,
Università Roma Tre Observatori d'Antropologia del Conflicte Urbà (OACU) Universitat de Barcelona.
Pilgrims of Home: Struggles against evictions during the Christian Jubilee of 2025 in Rome
The Vatican announced that the motto of the Jubilee year 2025 will be "Pilgrims of hope". The city that will host the event is preparing to host 37 million of tourists, with enormous transformations that mostly impact on the crucial right of its inhabitants to have a house to live in. Religious celebrations, rituals, the erection of sites of worship, have always been consubstantial to the birth and evolution of cities. Even the recent "new enclosures" that turned essential features of everyday life into tools for financial accumulation, may employ religious elements to legitimize or enforce their action. In Rome, the wave of evictions that began with the end of the Covid-19 moratoria is quickly growing, as residential housing becomes inaccessible, and as crucial public spaces and resources, well beyond the city center, are suffering financialization and privatization. Thousands of people are already forced into becoming "pilgrims of home" after being evicted from the houses they lived in, forced into homelessness or to live cramped in emergency shelters. Thousands more are threatened with the same fate and are only supported by anti-eviction militants and solidarity networks. Despite the declarations of both the Holy See and Rome's City Council, the Jubilee of 2025 will be another "big event" that will enforce misery and dispossession onto the city's most vulnerable population, in a way similar to what happened with the Jubilee of 2000, but with the turn of the screw of a climate catastrophe, a genocide unfolding, structural impoverishment, and the warmongering propaganda of state actors. Religion and ritual, though, may also be the bases for alternatives, resistance, and resignification of social struggles: in this sense, some may remember that the original sense of the Christian Jubilee was the periodic cancellation not only of sins, but of debts and servitude, as a form of being "renewed in hope". It is unlikely, though, that this liturgic message of hope will resound among the powerful that are dispossessing and putting the lives of millions under siege.
Pozzi, Giacomo, Department of Humanities, IULM University
Living the Milanese dream. Housing vulnerability, squatting and penal populism in Milan (Italy)
Milan stands out as Italy’s capital of inequality. In fact, on the one hand, Milan is the wealthiest capital city in Italy by average income. On the other, within the same urban context, one finds the neighborhood with the highest average income in Italy, Brera-Castello (100,489 euros per year), and Quarto Oggiaro, which, with 18,926 euros of income, is surpassed five times by the former. Urban vulnerability is particularly visible in the housing dimension. Consider, that, in 2022, in the city of Milan, 2,311 requests for eviction enforcement were filed, 2,142 enforcement measures were issued, and 612 evictions were carried out. At the same time, in 2023 about 17,000 households were waiting for the allocation of Public Housing accommodation. Despite these frailties, alternative forms of living are not only unsupported but often stigmatized and criminalized. Consider for example the case of squatting. A complex system of control and oppression is exercised to govern squatting. Especially, squatters are subject to law enforcement. Understanding the logic and mechanisms underpinning these processes means questioning the state of the production of urban social and political difference, the politics of conflict and the spread of inequality in the protection of the right to the city. To this end, I examine labor practices, moral economies, and everyday narratives of those who work with the institutional mandate of tackling squatting in public housing. I propose to grasp these processes considering two specific political and legal configurations that traverse the arena under investigation: the entrenched presence, in the Italian context, of what has been defined as penal populism; additionally, the increasingly pronounced prominence of an infra-legal dimension of law. Squatting—and the way in which it is publicly managed and punished—represents a privileged lens for examining the specific forms of normative and political governance in contemporary cities.