Negotiations of Socio-Spatial Coexistence through Everyday Encounters in Central Athens, Greece

Abstract

Over the past decades, Athens has emerged as both a destination and gateway city for diverse migrant populations. Athenian urban development interrelated with migrants’ settlement dynamics has resulted in a super-diverse and mixed urban environment. This article focuses on the western part of Omonia, in central Athens, Greece, and investigates sociospatial trajectories of migrants’ habitation, entrepreneurship, and appropriation of (semi-)public spaces. It draws on scholarship about everyday encounters where negotiations of difference and interethnic coexistence take place at the very local level. It explores encounters between migrants, as well as between migrants and locals, that are created due to their everyday survival and social needs. The article argues that these ‘place-specific’ and ‘needs-specific’ encounters emerge as ‘micropublics’ that are open to negotiation, manage to disrupt pre-existing social boundaries, and epitomise processes of belonging in the city. The article draws from ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative semi-structured interviews carried out from 2013 to 2014 and from 2018 to 2019.

Reconstruction of Gender Roles

“…International migration can remodel power relations and gendered expectations (Papatzani & Knappers 2020). In Somali women's context, transnational terrains offer them a viable space for transgressing gender roles and societal expectations.…”

Encountering Everyday Racist Practices: Sociospatial Negotiations of Immigrant Settlement in Athens, Greece

“…In the case of Omonia, ethnic shops do not merely meet immigrants' needs for services and commerce, they also function as spaces of leisure for diverse ethnic groups. In recent years, spaces of encounter emerged at street level, between the public street and the stores' interior spaces (Papatzani and Knappers, 2020). Immigrants who gathered in these in-between spaces, through their bodily appropriation of place, thus produced informal micro-publics (Amin, 2002) to reinforce everyday social proximity and coexistence.…”

“…Over years, such micro-publics, formed by immigrants themselves, have emerged and been reproduced as places that allow them to resist in the face of fear and the threat of encountering racist violence. Thus, 'place-specific' and 'needs-specific' encounters in Omonia (Papatzani and Knappers, 2020) have retained their significance and maintained their continuity in space and time for immigrants' everyday lives in the city:…”

“…The disruption of encounters, during police operations or as a result of racist violence, did not endure permanently. Instead, spaces of encounter were constantly reproduced by immigrants themselves, in accordance with their everyday survival and social needs (Papatzani and Knappers, 2020). Everyday sociospatial practices are allowing immigrants to create new routes of acceptance.…”

“…Omonia, in the heart of the historical commercial centre of Athens, continues to attract diverse ethnic groups until today. Since immigrants began settling here, in the 1990s and the mid-2000s, it has been a place where immigrants find housing, work and opportunities for leisure (Papatzani and Knappers, 2020). Immigrants gradually established a variety of both commercial and service-related businesses here, including retail outlets, mini-markets, restaurants, money transfer agencies and travel bureaus.…”