In this essay I outline the ways in which κρίση ( krísi – crisis) and μετανάστευση ( metanástefsi – migration) have been interrelated during the last decade in Greece. By being grounded in concrete times and places, I argue that these interrelations, far from being stable and fixed, take their form and meaning within wider social, economic and political contexts.

This paper can be read as a film sequence, as each scene is based on the narration of a different everyday encounter in the city. The aim of the paper is to start a discussion on the multiple ways borders proliferate in the urban: not only through laws, institutions or policing practices, but also through deeds, words, and feelings. Rather than analyse migration and borders by focusing only on the borderzones, this paper captures the multiple relations that connect the camp to the city square, the deportation regime to the train carriage, the newspaper headlines to the housing tenements in an attempt to work towards framing a broader theory of borders in geographical terms. Focusing on everyday encounters generates more complicated and nuanced understandings of subjectivity and power, while it brings to the fore the multiple borders that are simultaneously embodied and transcended, performed and challenged, established and subverted.

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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.