Performing neoliberalization through urban infrastructure: Twenty years of privatization policies around Thessaloniki’s port

Karaliotas, Lazaros

doi:10.1177/0308518x17699609

Cited by 15 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 45 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thessaloniki: the crisis footprint on a tourist destination in the making Despite Greece being a popular tourist destination, Thessaloniki was until recently off the tourist map. The city's economy has been in crisis since the 1990s (Karaliotas, 2017; Labrianidis, 2011) due to deindustrialisation, capital flight, and failed neoliberal reform attempts, in an era marked by corruption scandals in the local and regional administrations. The municipal government attempted to rebrand Thessaloniki during the last decade in order to attract tourists and investments (Katsinas, 2019) through the promotion of the city's historical and cultural heritage, the implementation of tourismand leisure-oriented urban regeneration projects in the city centre, and agreements with low-cost airlines.…”

Section: Semi and Tonettamentioning

confidence: 99%

Professionalisation of short-term rentals and emergent tourism gentrification in post-crisis Thessaloniki

Katsinas

2021

Environ Plan A

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper contributes to research on short-term rentals (STRs), their suppliers and their impact on housing and the local community, focusing on Thessaloniki, a recessionary city off the tourist map until recently. Through the conduction of in-depth interviews with hosts and other key informants, and the analysis of quantitative data on Airbnb listings, I argue that: (1) far from enabling a sharing economy, Airbnb facilitates (re)investment in housing by different types of hosts. But investors outcompete amateur hosts and contribute to the professionalisation of STRs and the concentration of revenues. (2) the extraction of higher rents through STRs leads to the displacement of tenants and to gentrification in cities previously considered as ungentrifiable, driven by increased tourism and the short-term character of these rentals. However, the type and scale of investors involved, and the impact of gentrification are conditioned by contextual differences and the position of cities in the international competition to attract tourists.

show abstract

Section: Semi and Tonettamentioning

confidence: 99%

Professionalisation of short-term rentals and emergent tourism gentrification in post-crisis Thessaloniki

Katsinas

2021

Environ Plan A

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…First, Thessaloniki has a rich and long history of citizen struggles over urban infrastructure, which has received significantly less research attention in comparison to Athens. To date, scholarship on such contestations has mainly focused on large scale development projects (Karaliotas, 2017), with domestic contestations around energy remaining relatively marginalized. Second, in spatial terms, the region of Thessaloniki is characterized by a continuous socio-spatial topography that includes peri-urban areas in addition to a large urban nucleus.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday politics of austerity: Infrastructure and vulnerability in times of crisis

Petrova

Prodromidou

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Growing numbers of households in Greece are unable to secure adequate levels of energy services in the home-a condition generally known as energy poverty. This situation can largely be attributed to the imposition of an austerity regime following the post-2008 debt crisis. We scrutinize the everyday experiences of, and resistance to, austerity among the 'new energy poor'-an emergent socio-demographic group whose vulnerability is contingent upon decreasing incomes, high prices, new taxation and inadequate socio-technical infrastructures. Having undertaken ethnographic research with 25 households living in and around the Northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, we draw on theoretical insights from the domains of informal household practices and environmentality frameworks to highlight the manner in which the austerity regime simultaneously renders households vulnerable and governable. The geographies of the new energy poor include a variety of spatial settings-in urban and peri-urban locations alike-that are constitutive of multiple material sites while being dependent upon them. This points to the existence of an infrastructurally-embedded everyday landscape of austerity that amalgamates the state policies, corporate interests, household practices and material pathways through which energy is produced and consumed.

show abstract

“…Reducing the act of governing into a techno-managerial exercise, this scripting re-affirms the peoples’ impotence to understand and intervene in the complexity of our world. Political disagreement and dissensus are, thus, constructed as irrational and irresponsible and a panoply of discursive and material practices is mobilized to foreclose and suppress the staging of democratic disagreement (Karaliotas, 2017b; Stavrakakis and Katsambekis, 2014).…”

Section: Politics Is Impure: Post-democratization and The Modalities Of Democratic Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geographies of politics and the police: Post-democratization, SYRIZA, and the politics of the “Greek debt crisis”

Karaliotas

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper explores the entangled dynamics of de-politicization and re-politicization in the midst of the "Greek debt crisis". Critically revisiting Jacques Rancière's political writings, it argues that, despite common criticisms to the contrary, his oeuvre foregrounds the impurity of democratic politics. Rancière, the paper contends, offers critical heuristic tools in understanding and engaging with how processes of post-democratization and democratic politics intersect, become entangled, and are mutually constituted. Simultaneously, however, it also challenges Rancière's almost exclusive emphasis on political subjectification to argue for a plural understanding of the modalities and spatialities of democratic politics. Reading the politics of the "Greek debt crisis" through this lens, the paper unpacks how post-democratization has unfolded through an uneven and contested geography articulated at multiple scales. In parallel, it also maps the diverse and impure modalities of democratic politics in crisis-ridden Greece: from the staging of disagreement through the 2011 squares movement to the articulation of everyday commoning and solidarity movements to SYRIZA's meteoric rise to power. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how post-democratization and democratic politics are being shaped in constant relationship and tension.

show abstract

Performing neoliberalization through urban infrastructure: Twenty years of privatization policies around Thessaloniki’s port

Cited by 15 publications

References 45 publications

Professionalisation of short-term rentals and emergent tourism gentrification in post-crisis Thessaloniki

Professionalisation of short-term rentals and emergent tourism gentrification in post-crisis Thessaloniki

Everyday politics of austerity: Infrastructure and vulnerability in times of crisis

Geographies of politics and the police: Post-democratization, SYRIZA, and the politics of the “Greek debt crisis”

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About