The December youth uprising in Greece took on a new form, one that has generated in its turn other uprisings and new kinds of social and radical urban movements. Led by a broad spectrum of people of different ages and socio-economic backgrounds, it became the call for the 'right to the city', conceived as the right to free space and free expression, especially for the young who live in cities that have been designed to accommodate neoliberal capitalist expansion. This essay discusses the manifestations of globalization that the uprising attacked. It shows that the targets of the uprising were the symbols of neoliberal consumption and consumerism, especially in the rich city centres. It then discusses the novelty of this uprising in terms of its organization, networking, composition and resources, and the means it used to further its goals. It further describes how it differs from, and has transcended, previous social movements and has influenced, and will continue to influence, subsequent ones. It concludes that the new urban movements go beyond simple rejection and confrontation in order to enter into the collective creation and radical changes of space and of everyday life in the city. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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 participatory 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.
Abstract:This study refers to urban social movements, creative social resistances, and the collectives that are emerging today in "self-constructed popular neighborhoods" ("barrios de auto-construcción popular" in Latin-American, Spanish bibliography; "quartiers d'auto-construction populaire" in French bibliography and "self-help housing" in Anglophone bibliography), with a special focus on the new characteristics of these movements and the poetics of their daily practices. Firstly, a cartographic approach is explained through the concept of eco-landscapes; a qualitative analysis follows based on interviews and a review of the secondary literature. In particular, this research focuses on cases of movements and collectives in villas in South Greater Buenos Aires, barrios of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico City, and barrios of El Alto in the Metropolitan Area of La Paz. It shows that the poetics of creative resistances question the symbolic power of territorial stigmatization.
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