The article offers a fresh, empirically grounded look at the spatialities of crisistriggered employment forms--a largely overlooked issue in contemporary critical geography literature. Specifically, it discusses the interconnection between investment flows from manufacturing to the built environment (capital switching) and underemployment in urban metropolitan regions to substantiate its impact on emerging spatial fixities. The article, which is based on an empirical analysis informed by a radical political economy, investigates changing fixed capital formations in Greece over an extended period prior to and during the recession, from 1995 to 2012. It traces the evolution of part-time waged work in the capital metropolitan region of Attica (Athens) vis-à-vis the rest of the country's regional labour markets, focusing on the polarized 2005-2012 period and the demise of the construction industry. The article highlights that 'disrupted' capital switching that occurred in Greece, closely associated with recalibrated sectoral priorities and institutional interventions, resulted in the uneven sprawling of underemployment. Our findings offer insight into how the dismantling of spatial fixes within core metropolitan regions of the southern European Union (and beyond) are connected to labour surplus and successive slumps in manufacturing and construction. The article closes by calling for new theorizations of contemporary urban regional unevenness and its spatiotemporal fixities, which account for the role of changes in labour turnover time.

The paper explores the regional dimensions of under-employment by analysing the uneven dispersion of part-time jobs in Greece. It understands under-employment as an integral dimension of contemporary flexible labour trends, triggered by devaluation and expanding amid crisis, although in diverse geographical and sectoral terms. It follows a methodology that comparatively analyses statistical data, relevant secondary sources and previous case studies, before moving to a theoretical contextualization of the findings. Based on this framework, NUTS-II level total employment and part-time work data are analysed through location quotients, and a new embellishment of shift-share analysis is implemented for 2005–2008 and 2009–2012 across nine sectors. The findings reveal four distinct, although porous, patterns of under-employment that are distinguished according to different regional productive specializations and the impact of structural or regional effects. The reasons why some regional economies, such as the tourist ones, were more resistant to employment losses, and at the same time the most keen on expanding part-time work, are scrutinized. Concluding, three deeper causal mechanisms, namely productive-technological, organizational and institutional, that determine the under-employment patterns revealed, are discussed and contrasted to relevant literature findings.

COVID-19 is a global pandemic but has a particular geography to it, differentially affecting people and places. Here we explore its impact upon labour markets in the Mediterranean European Union (EU) countries. Our analysis is part of a collective work-in-progress monitoring the pandemic’s effects upon workers since early March 2020. First we note that there is a geographical political economy to pandemics. We then scrutinise the current pandemic’s spatiality and impact upon Mediterranean EU workers. Following this, we discuss how workers are responding to the pandemic and how this is remaking the geography of employment. As such, our paper represents a contribution to the ongoing development of the Labour Geography literature. Overall, we stress that workers face a variety of choices in responding to the pandemic, choices which are, of course, shaped by the geographical contexts within which workers find themselves. In deciding whether and how to act, they are playing proactive roles in shaping COVID-19’s impact upon the geography of employment and emerging labour landscapes.

This work constitutes a theoretically-informed empirical analysis of the spatial characteristics of the short-term rentals' market and explores their linkage with shifts in the wider housing market within the context of a south-eastern EU metropolis. The same research objective has been pursued for a variety of international paradigms; however, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been a thorough and systematic study for Athens and its neighborhoods. With a theoretical framework that draws insight from the political-economic views of Critical Geography, this work departs from an assessment of Airbnb listings, and proceeds inquiring the expansion of the phenomenon with respect to the rates of long-term rent levels in the neighborhoods of Central Athens, utilizing relevant data. The geographical framework covers the City of Athens as a whole, an area undergoing profound transformations in recent years, stemming from diverse factors that render the city one of the most dynamic destinations of urban tourism and speculative land investment. The analysis reveals a prominent expansion of the short-term rental phenomenon across the urban fabric, especially taking ground in hitherto underexploited areas. This expansion is multifactorial, asynchronous and exhibits signs of positive relation with the long-term rentals shifts; Airbnb not only affects already gentrifying neighborhoods, but contributes to a housing market disruption in non-dynamic residential areas.

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under-researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio-spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call "weak" and "strong" links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of "gentrification-supporting" and "gentrification-fostered" labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post-industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city.R esum e: L'interaction entre l'intensification de la pr ecarit e du march e du travail et la gentrification constitue un sujet encore peu etudi e dans les domaines de la g eographie du travail et de la g eographie urbaine. Pour rem edier a cette lacune, nous soutenons que la gentrification et la flexibilisation du travail sont deux manifestations socio-spatiales des efforts du capital pour faire face aux crises d'accumulation. En distinguant ce que nous appelons des liens «faibles» et «forts» entre les deux, et en s'appuyant sur les concepts de flexibilit e du travail «soutenant la gentrification» et «favoris e par la gentrification», nous d efinissons un cadre pour relier la gentrification a la pr ecarit e. Cela nous permet de faire des liens entre la restructuration de l'environnement bâti et la r eorganisation du travail dans la ville post-industrielle; cela nous permet egalement de montrer comment les travailleurs, par leur agentivit e, peuvent combler les ecarts de loyers dans la ville contemporaine.