Crisis-Scapes Athens and Beyond
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CRISIS-SCAPES ATHENS AND BEYOND 2014 crisis-scape.net Athens This publication is part of the City at a Time of Crisis project www.crisis-scape.net Funded by the ESRC Designed by Jaya Klara Brekke Photography by Ross Domoney (pages 42, 102, 166 and 206) Antonis Vradis (pages 62, 91 - 101) Dimitris Dalakoglou (page 8) Andreas Chatzidakis (page 32) Printed in Athens by Synthesi http://synthesi-print.gr Edited by Jaya Klara Brekke, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis and Antonis Vradis. Chapters 15 and 22 translated from Greek by Antonis Vradis ISBN: 978-1-938660-15-3 CRISIS-SCAPES: ATHENS AND BEYOND 2014 CRISIS-SCAPE.NET CONTENTS foreword 1. Introduction Crisis-scape ............................................ p.7 I. FLOWS, INFRASTRUCTURES, NETWORKS 2. Political and Cultural Implications of the Suburban Transformation of Athens Leonidas Economou ............................. p.13 3. Messogia, the New ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Airport’ and ‘Attiki Odos’ or, the Double Marginalization of Messogia Dimitra Gefou-Madianou .................... p.18 4. Infrastructural Flows, Interruptions and Stasis in Athens of the Crisis Dimitris Dalakoglou and Yannis Kallianos .............................................. p.23 5. Athens as a Failed City for Consumption (In a World that Evaluates Everyone and Every Place by their Commodity Value) Andreas Chatzidakis ............................ p.33 II. MAPPING SPACES OF RACIST 15. Crisis, Right to the City VIOLENCE Movements and the Question of Spontaneity: Athens and Mexico City 6. “Very Unhappy to Say That to Christy Petropoulou ........................ p.115 Some Point It’s True”: 16. Unravelling False Choice Fascist Intrusion Within Greek Police Urbanism Dimitris Christopoulos ...................... p.47 Tom Slater ........................................ p.128 7. Strange Encounters 17. Contesting Speculative Crisis-scape ........................................ p.51 Urbanisation and Strategising 8. Migration Knots: Crisis Within a Discontents Crisis Hyun Bang Shin ............................... p.139 Sarah Green ........................................ p.55 18. Against Accountancy Governance: Notes Towards a New Urban CONTENTS III. BETWEEN INVISIBILITY AND Collective Consumption PRECARITY Andy Merrifield ............................... p.150 9. Laissez Faire, Security, and V. DEVALUING LABOUR, DEPRECIATING Liberalism:Revisiting December 2008 Akis Gavriilidis ....................................p.67 LAND 10. Governing For the Market: 19. Crisis and Land Dispossession Emergencies and Emergences in Costis Hadjimichalis ........................ p.171 Power and Subjectivity 20. What is to be Done? Athena Athanasiou ............................ p.72 Redefining, Re-Asserting and 11.From Invisibility into the Centre Reclaiming Land, Labour and the City of the Athenian Media Spectacle Bob Caterall ...................................... p.179 Giorgos Tsimouris ............................. p.78 21. Labour Migration, Brokerage, and 12. Is the crisis in Athens (also) Governance in the Gulf Cooperation Gendered? Facets of Access and (in) Council countries Visibility in Everyday Public Spaces Filippo Osella ................................... p.190 Dina Vaiou ......................................... p.82 22. Alienation and Urban Life 13. Metronome David Harvey ................................... p.195 Antonis Vradis .................................. p.90 AFTERWORD IV. RIGHT TO THE CITY IN CRISIS 23. Emerging Common Spaces as a 14. The Crisis and its Discourses: Challenge to the City of Crisis Quasi-Orientalist Offensives Against Stavros Stavrides ........................ p.209 Southern Urban Spontaneity, Informality and Joie De Vivre Lila Leontidou ................................. p.107 FOREWORD by Crisis-scape our years and four days. The exact amount of time, that is, that has lapsed since the day the greek state would sign its ‘memorandum of agreement’ F with its lenders (the IMF, the EU and the ECB), on May 5, 2010—officially making its own way into the era of global austerity and crisis. An entering that would come with a bang, and very much stay so: from that moment on, the social tension playing out at the greek territory would feature—constantly, it seems—in discussions, analyses and reports the world over. But what is life like in a city that finds itself in the eye of the crisis- storm, how does the everyday reality here compare to Athens’ global media portrait? What kind of lessons might our city be able to learn from the outbreaks of capitalism’s crises elsewhere, and what lessons might the Athenian example be able to offer, in return? The volume that you hold in your hands acts as an accompaniment to a conference that tried to answer some of these questions. ‘Crisis-scapes: Athens and beyond’ took place in the city of Athens on May 9&10, 2014. Over the two days, the conference tried to explore an array of the facets of the crisis in the city, divided between five axes/panels, which are in turn mirrored in the structure of this book: 1. Flows, infrastructures and networks, 2. Mapping spaces of racist violence, 3. Between invisibility and precarity, 4. The right to the city in crisis and 5. Devaluing labour, depreciating land. Five broad axes comprising the vehicles we used to perambulate through the dark landscapes of the crisis. A crisis neither commencing nor ending here, today. Through these conceptual vehicles taking us through Athens, through her spaces and her times, we focused on the particularities of the greek crisis; a crisis first of all concerning the structures, meanings and processes weaving together what we could broadly label as the greek everyday reality. Yet we also believe these particularities ought to be understood within the global financial crisis framework: hence this centrifugal “beyond”. Athens may now be in a position to offer explanations about phenomena taking place much beyond the city’s strict geographical limits. What renders the city a field of experimentation are trials and productions of new means of governance. And they acquire a new meaning when seen as wider tendencies in crisis management. Yet these Athenian testing grounds must at the same time be studied as traces and as future projections of structural readjustments taking place in seemingly disparate locations, but often-times ever so close in their causes and consequences alike. The interventions put together in the present volume try to take another composite look at Athens and its crisis. They try to comprehend the city through crossings and transitions in space and in time. ATHENS AND BEYOND 7 8 CRISIS-SCAPES I. FLOWS INFRASTRUCTURES NETWORKS Leonidas Economou (Panteion University, Athens) Dimitra Gefou-Madianou (Panteion University, Athens) Yannis Kallianos and Dimitris Dalakoglou (Manchester University, Sussex university and crisis-scape) Andreas Chatzidakis (Royal Holloway, London) Flows, Infrastructures and Networks Section Opening by Dimitris Dalakoglou eople, information, labour, vehicles, commodities, waste, water or energy are just some of the elements that move around us making up the dynamic P urban condition. However, it is not only mobile subjects and objects that constitute dimensions of the urban everydayness—what are equally important are the material infrastructures of flows: the built environment, highways, streets, pipelines, tunnels, airports, ports or landfills and various other grids synthesize city’s spatial formations and are crucial parts of the multiple urban experiences. Since the end of the WWII, Athens has been growing into a city where nearly half of the country’s population live; an urban complex that flows and grows out of its previous boundaries every few decades. But if the quantitative growth of the city has been impressive in these past six decades, the qualitative dimensions of that same expansion are equally formidable. It is not only that consumption increased, as Andreas Chatzidakis shows us, or that vehicles multiplied; it is not merely the emergence of the new suburbs that Leonidas Economou tells us about, or the new mega-infrastructures that were built— such as those studied by Giannis Kallianos (and Dimitris Dalakoglou) or Dimitra Gefou-Madianou. As all section authors agree, these processes facilitate the shaping of specific socio-material formations and subjects. They imply uneven experiences of the urban and materialise—quite literally— urban marginality and inequality. During the post—2010 crisis, the local project of neoliberalism is revealed anew as a failure, for the great majority. This failure in terms of infrastructural flows is often translated as slowing down while in terms of urban materialities as break downs. The construction and even the maintenance of public works and infrastructures has been paused; the flow of commodities (and thus waste) has decreased and the number and flow of vehicles, arrivals, departures etc. are reduced. Yet as all section chapters explain, these failures and interruptions that prevail today are merely the real face of neoliberal urban growth that was being applied systemically to some proximate Others until the recent past. The ones who were on the wrong side of the grid or the flow. Nevertheless, now this model expands affecting almost everyone—leading to new social formations and paradigms of staying, building, consuming, resisting and Being in the city during the crisis. ATHENS AND BEYOND 11 2 Political and Cultural Implications of the Suburban Transformation of Athens by Leonidas Economou will use