Commoning the city

Urban Studies, 2022

Over the years, cities have figured as exemplary places for neoliberal urban policies which tend to appropriate the right to the city through city-branding policies. However, as this article demonstrates , there are important claims of the right to the city raised by newly arrived refugees in the city of Athens. Although most refugees reside in overcrowded state-run camps on the outskirts of the city, there are many cases in which refugees enact the production of collective common spaces, occupying abandoned buildings in the urban core and claiming the right to the centre of the city. In this context and following the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city and the spatial analysis on commons and enclosures, we explore the actions of refugees, and the way they engage in commoning practices that not only strive against the official state policies, but also often contest city-branding policies. In particular, we focus on the area of Exarcheia in Athens, which is an emblematic case of the conflicted nexus between investors' and refugees' right to the city.

Haven : The Mediterranean Crisis and Human Security: New Horizons in Human Geography, 2020, ISBN 978-1-78811-547-6, págs. 248-275, 2020

ACME, 2018

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 urban policies and create a nexus of emerging common spaces. Following the recent spatial approaches on " commons " and " enclosures " (Dellenbaugh et al., 2015; Harvey, 2012; Stavrides, 2016) this paper focuses on the dialectic between the refugees' solidarity housing commons and the State-run refugee camps. Particularly, I examine the case of Greece, a country that is situated in the SouthEast End of the European Union close to Asia and Africa; hence it is in the epicenter of the current refugee crisis and I pinpoint in the case of Athens, the capital of Greece and the main refugee transit city.

Urban Planning, 2020

Since the European Union's agreement with Turkey on March 18, 2016, more than 70,000 refugees have been trapped in Greece. Most have been settled in state-run camps on the perimeters of Athens and Thessaloniki. However, these state-run camps do not meet international standards and are located at significant distances from urban centres, within industrial zones where residential use is not permitted. At the same time, a number of self-organized and collective refugee housing projects have been created within the urban fabric of Athens and Thessaloniki. In the context of these projects, refugees develop forms of solidarity, mutual help, and direct democracy in decision-making processes. There is a significant volume of bibliography which studies the NGOs' activities and state migration policies. However, little attention has been given to the various ways by which refugees create self-managed and participatory structures to meet their needs. This article aims to fill the gap in the research concerning the production of housing common spaces by the refugees themselves. Based on the current discussions on the Lefebvrian 'right to the city' and the spatialities of 'commons' and 'enclosures,' the article aims to compare and contrast refugee housing commons with state-run refugee camps. Using qualitative methods, including ethnographic analysis and participatory observation, the main findings show that refugees attempt not only to contest state migration policies but also negotiate their multiple identities. Consequently, refugees collectively attempt to reinvent a culture of togetherness, to create housing common spaces, and to claim the right to the city.

Geography Notebooks

City Plaza was an abandoned hotel in the center of Athens, squatted in April 2016, in the midst of what was named a “refugee crisis”. In the 39 months that it operated, it became a home to more than 2.500 refugees from more than 10 different countries. Still, what was achieved in City Plaza was beyond that: a community of solidarity and struggle was ‘manufactured’, and City Plaza gradually became a symbol of resistance to the dominant policies of control and repression of migration. This paper focuses on the analysis of the multiple practices and scales of space. The aim is to think around the manifold and interrelated spatial scales, structures, relations and practices that dialectically constructed and were constructed within and beyond City Plaza.

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.

Social Inclusion, 2019

During the recent refugee crisis, numerous solidarity initiatives emerged in Greece and especially in Mytilene, Athens and Thessaloniki. Mytilene is the capital of Lesvos Island and the main entry point in the East Aegean Sea, Athens is the main refugee transit city and Thessaloniki is the biggest city close to the northern borders. After the EU-Turkey Common Statement , the Balkan countries sealed their borders and thousands of refugees found themselves stranded in Greece. The State accommodation policy provides the majority of the refugee population with residency in inappropriate camps which are mainly located in isolated old military bases and abandoned factories. The article contrasts the State-run services to the solidarity acts of "care-tizenship" and commoning practices such as self-organised refugee housing projects, which claim the right to the city and to spatial justice. Specifically, the article is inspired by the Lefebvrian "right to the city," which embraces the right to housing, education, work, health and challenges the concept of citizen. Echoing Lefebvrian analysis, citizenship is not demarcated by membership in a nation-state, rather, it concerns all the residents of the city. The article discusses the academic literature on critical citizenship studies and especially the so-called "care-tizenship," meaning the grassroots commoning practices that are based on caring relationships and mutual help for social rights. Following partici-patory ethnographic research, the main findings highlight that the acts of care-tizenship have opened up new possibilities to challenge State migration policies while reinventing a culture of togetherness and negotiating locals' and refugees' multiple class, gender, and religious identities.

Spatial Practices: modes of action and engagement in the city. Edited by Melanie Dodd, 2020

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.