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Governmental policies to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) have directly and decisively intervened with literally every facet of people's life transforming the geographies of everyday lives across the Global South and North. In this paper, we explore the shifting relationship of urban dwellers to public space during the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim to unravel the uneven ways lockdown measures and restrictions on movement have impacted the residents of Athens, the capital of Greece. By focusing on the way the relationship of different social groups to public space has been affected by governmental measures, we show how the reconfiguration of the production of urban public space has disproportionately affected people along lines of class, ethnicity and gender. We argue that governmental measures have so far deepened systemic inequality, segregation and social, spatial and environmental injustice in the city and have imposed unprecedented restrictions in people's democratic rights, consolidating a shift towards a more authoritarian version of neoliberal urbanism. By opposing and challenging the possibility of only dystopian futures that has dominated public discourse and collective imagination within this ongoing global public health crisis, we address a call to radical scholars and activists to start envisaging possibilities for a plural use of space and a new undisciplined, radical politics of coexistence in shared, safe spaces along the lines of a geography of togetherness, care and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside the depressing image of closed shops as visible indicators of the crisis, migrant businesses can be found in many parts of Athens and often play a vital role in local neighbourhood markets. This paper explores the socio-spatial dimensions of Athens’ emerging migrant economies. Drawing from a recent research project combining survey and ethnographic methods on three Athenian neighbourhoods, the paper examines migrant entrepreneurship at the local level and highlights the relevance of place, politics and everyday life. We argue that the spread of immigrant entrepreneurial activity in Athens not only forms an existing part of the urban landscape, but has also become an organic part of the everyday experience of life in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Resistant performances in Athens have gathered momentum over the last year, transforming the fixed landscape of a city into a platform for negotiation and dialogue. The singular compelling imagery of ‘occupying’ as a form of resistance is its multiplicity of voices—the collective mobilisation of the ‘multitude’. Yet, the force and urgency of a collective resistance lies in the individual untold stories of its proponents. Rather than glorify the movement as a faceless entity, this paper embraces the daily stories, struggles and wounds of occupation, by using photographs. Resistant performances are connected with existing social conditions: austerity measures, mass immigration and ‘crisis’. Such narratives of globalisation and empire building are transforming central areas and traditional notions of Athenian identity, giving birth to a new street-level language that has twisted, innovated and filled in the gaps of a culture's hegemonic discourse. The paper analyses both protests and specific examples of street art as visual markers of the shifting, complex discourses of power struggles, marginality and counter-cultures that establish a new reality that must be seen and heard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The extension of the European Community has led to the application of policies and strategies (and their underlying concepts and assumptions) generated in one set of national and historical contexts to quite other situations. This paper examines the idea of 'sustainability'--and especially social sustainability--arguing that it is an imperative which has been first de-socialized and then re-socialized. It is de-socialized in that the pursuit of equality is replaced as the central force by the need to make peace with nature. It is re-socialized through an argument that social inclusion is a necessary condition for making this peace with nature. The paper goes on to demonstrate the timeliness of the sustainability concept for the social democratic parties of Europe, seeking a new basis for legitimation in the post-fordist period. It ends with a detailed analysis of the failure of this idea to take root effectively in Greece--notably in Athens--where many features of culture, history and social relations have created a context in which it cannot mobilize effective change without 'serious analysis and the development of a wider social awareness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers published within the issue, including one on international mining in Skouries, Greece, another on the Maya solar form of land relation in Yucatán, Mexico and a paper on activist farmers in the no go areas of Gaza.

An infrastructural gap (IG) emerged after the outbreak of the crisis in 2008 and it refers to the difficulty of the state and the private sector in sustaining the level of infrastructural networks in the Western world. Yet, infrastructures comprise the realm where the state or the market materialize a great proportion of the social contract. Citizens therefore often experience IG as a challenge of the entire political paradigm. Nevertheless, as research in the country that is at the center of the current euro-crisis—Greece—records, we have novel and innovative forms of civil activity focused on the IG. Such activity, applying principles of self-organization and peer-to-peer relationships, along with practices of social solidarity and ideals of commons, attempts to address IG in innovative ways. However, such practices call for theoretical and empirical innovations as well, in order to overcome the social sciences’ traditional understandings of infrastructures. This paper—based on the inaugural professorial lecture I gave in acceptance of the Chair in Social Anthropology at the Vrije University Amsterdam—seeks to initiate a framework for understanding this shift in the paradigm of infrastructures’ governance and function, along with the newly emerging infrastructural turn in socio-cultural anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the Greek crisis deepens and ‘recovery’ is constantly postponed to an unknown future, a dominant discourse seems to consolidate which focuses almost exclusively on macro-economic arguments and concerns. Other aspects of the crisis, among which are its gendered facets and unequal effects on women and men, rarely permeate the allegedly ‘central’ understandings. With the possible exception of unemployment which fares high among left-wing analysts, gender is thought to pertain to a ‘special’, that is, less important, matter which may detract from the ‘main problem’. The paper draws together a series of stories of ordinary women who have experienced deep changes in their everyday lives as a result of austerity policies (unemployment, precarity, salary and pension cuts, shrinking social rights, mounting everyday violence). It argues that emphasis on this scale ‘closest in’, linked in multiple ways to many other scales (local, national, European, international), reveals areas of knowledge that would otherwise remain in the dark; and that connecting concrete bodies with global processes enriches our understandings with more complex and more flexible variables and informs the ‘big pictures’ (in this case about the Greek crisis)—and not only the reverse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores potential links between the project of emancipating autonomy and urban commoning by tracing the development of experiences connected to the creation of common spaces in crisis-ridden Athens. It is maintained that for commoning to remain an active force against social and urban enclosures, commoning has to remain ‘infectious’ and to expand by overspilling the boundaries of any defined community. Threshold spatiality shapes common spaces which support expanding commoning. Moreover, institutions of expanding commoning remain correspondingly open and osmotic by ensuring that collective actions become comparable, translatable to each other and controlled by mechanisms which obstruct any form of accumulation of power. City space, thus, is not only transformed and reclaimed through practices of expanding commoning but also actively contributes to the shaping of commoning institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exploitation of land, but also of natural elements linked to it―such as water, forests, landscape, the subsurface and biodiversity―nowadays comprise investment targets for local and international speculative capital at some unprecedented extent, intensity and geographical spread. From 2009 on, Greece became a target country due to the current crisis which has decisively contributed to the de-valorisation/depreciation of the exchange-value of land, decreasing monetary values by 15–30%―depending on the area―when compared to 2005 prices. The special legal status imposed by the Troika as of 2010, forms a lucrative environment for speculators–investors, dramatically altering the legal, constitutional order and imposing something of a semi-protectorate status upon the country. This short paper explains how the crisis in Greece made public land via privatisations a major target for dispossession by global and local capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the analytical potentials of the concept of spontaneity in our effort to understand critically the socio-spatial dynamics of Athens, but especially the contemporary collective protest actions in the city. Such critical understanding emerges as a significant task given the current urgency to grasp the capitalist crisis and the collective reactions to it. However, taking into account the re-configuration of extreme-Right violence in the streets of Athens, the article attempts to revisit the Marxist dichotomy between spontaneity and non-spontaneity. Via an anthropological critique of this distinction, the paper suggests an additional point of focus beyond spontaneity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The €110 billion bailout offered to the Greek government in May 2010 by the so-called troika (comprising of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union) was not only the largest of its kind in Western history to date, it also marked the entrance of Greek society into a period of extreme turmoil, with profound changes in the standard of living and the everyday reality of large segments of the population. The country's extensive public sector saw wage reductions, pension decreases and tax rises. In the private sector mass lay-offs and redundancies became widespread, as did wage reductions and renegotiations of labour contracts. Against this turbulent backdrop an extraordinary event would soon take place in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki. In early 2011, the beginning of the largest mass hunger strike on European soil saw 300 undocumented migrants, mostly of Maghrebi origin, demand the legalisation of all undocumented migrants in the country. Regina Mantanika and Hara Kouki, Athens-based researchers and activists, trace the chronology of the strike in the city by looking at the series of different spaces—both public and private—that took turns in hosting it: the Law Faculty of the University of Athens, in which the migrants were quickly made unwelcome; the private mansion in which they found shelter and finally, the public hospitals to which many of them were transferred and in which they ended their strike. Mantanika and Kouki offer us the preliminary findings of their research on these spaces' dynamics, the way in which they interacted with the strike and how the strike itself transformed some of these spaces in return. I can hardly think of a more appropriate topic and paper with which to launch my term as editor of the Alternatives section of City, a section set to engage and discuss ‘with groups and individuals who are developing alternative urban visions and practices’. Here we have an extraordinary such example: the practice of a small number of people who nevertheless forced us to rethink the distinctions between private and public, between local and foreign, between a struggle for life and for death. In a historical conjuncture where alternatives are desperately sought but seldom found, where the public retreats in the face of the private, tracing the spatiality of this newly encountered social struggle is a much needed and rewarding exercise. Antonis Vradis, Alternatives Editor [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on reports on Right to the City Alliances in Spain, Germany, France, Hungary, the USA, Portugal and Greece, this paper puts together questions on organizational issues that have been raised and suggests some hypothetical answers. The issues dealt with include target constituency, problem focus, organizational base, internal organization, strategies and tactics, historical setting, role of the state, motivations and guiding theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Athens Polytechnic, an emblematic site that has been the epicentre of historical ruptures during which it has been extensively graffitied. It is based on a corpus consisting of graffiti writings on this particular building during three key crises moments in Greece's modern history. It critically examines an architectural drawing of graffiti writings on the edifice and reflects on the methods followed to produce this drawing of writings. The article develops in four parts each of which gradually unfolds the relationship between crisis and representation. Crises and representations are seen as opportunities for criticality and, by extension, sites of critique. By studying key moments of crises of representation in the public domain, as these are expressed in graffiti writing, the Polytechnic becomes the site of writing that registers the various responses to the overwhelming forces of crises. As a representation of these crises, the site of drawing is turned into a montage table—an 'atlas' in Warburg's terms—where these crises are resituated, or rather recomposed, thus forging relations and producing new nexuses of meaning. Ultimately, the article aims to show how representations and/of crises have the capacity to operate as sites of knowledge production whilst introducing an architectural design research method to study urban phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay puts to doubt the supposed ephemerality of social movements in Mediterranean cities, focusing on Greece and discussing Spain as well. During the aftermath of anti-austerity mobilizations international networking expands, the change in values affects society, and diverse economies emerge. A new generation of digitally literate and highly educated millennials, instead of lingering in unemployment and precarity or succumbing to the brain drain, are involved in alternative and creative ventures and the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), facilitated by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). On the basis of a map of solidarity structures in Attica and a two-dimensional typology of initiatives in Greece we argue that, though these ventures are vulnerable, they transform urban public spaces. Hybrid hubs of solidarity and creativity add up to affect urban landscapes towards a grassroots version of the 'smart city'. In the 2010s, despite the crisis, and with a short-lived positive role of the state when the Left was in power, geographies of hope have been emerging in Mediterranean Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the privatisation issue in Greece, land transformation and racism.

Mexico and Greece comprise typical cases of the so-called semi-periphery where neoliberal policies have been applied but also where social movements tried to resist the implementation of the policies in question. In the past, many Right to the City movements start to emerge, focused particularly on the right to the habitat. Recently, the most important RttC movements concerned the claims to public space and common goods, while at the same time opposing privatisations and big projects. Some authors called these movements spontaneous. Yet the relationship of politico-economic changes with the spontaneous is considerably complicated and related towhat, by whomandwhywould be included in the discursive category of the ‘spontaneity’. This approach I will explore below. Nothing is entirely spontaneous in the world’s so-called spontaneous neighbourhoods and in the so-called spontaneous uprisings. The people participating in acts characterised as ‘spontaneous’ without rules enforced by any superior authorities, simply refuse to define their bodies as machines. The question is if the so-called spontaneous resistances became, or may become, under certain conditions, dangerous cracks. The right to the city is not the right to the impersonal urban space but the right to thepolis. In these new movements, the right to thepolisis exercised in the everyday life by many different actors and through different ways of action. The motto is: Changing values within spaces of encounters and experimentation. Let us all be rebel poets in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferating numbers of a new population of urban poor in the Western world—who I call here nouveau poor—is a phenomenon equally (if not more) significant as the emergence of the Indignados and Occupy movements, and calls for urgent attention from the part of critical urban studies. This phenomenon forces us to re-evaluate the analytical categories within which we study urban poverty (gender, age, ethnicity, marginality, etc.) and prompts us to focus on commonality, rather than difference, when it comes to collectively reclaiming the ‘right to the city’. Focusing on the political, social and affective consequences of the presence of nouveau poor on the streets of Athens, I argue that the shock waves that Greece's nouveau poor send down Europe's spine are partly due to the fact that Athens' new ranks of beggars are not migrants, junkies, alcoholics or homeless; they do not fall in any of the familiar categories of the urban ‘other’ or ‘subaltern’. As they belonged, until very recently, to the mainstream aspiring middle classes, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to ‘other’ them, ignore them or dismiss them politically, or socially. The presence of Europe's very own ranks of middle class-come-poor begs for a reconceptualisation of the link between urban theory and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To attend to the dark side of the Olympics, as it is has begun to emerge over the last decade and now in London, is not necessarily to ignore its bright side or its promise. It is not to ignore the skills and commitment of the athletes or the emotional engagement of the spectators. Nor is it to ignore the utopian promise of an event in which, at best, the nature of achievement and competition is a celebration of positive human potential rather than an exploitation of that potential. Nor is it to blame the Olympics itself for that exploitation. But it is to attend to the evidence for a rapidly emerging trend, dramatised and accelerated by the Olympics, a complex socio-economic, psychosocial yet deeply material, and political trend, a counter-spirit and set of arrangements that need both to be identified, interpreted, and to be addressed, resisted and overcome. Some of the evidence for that trend and its dramatisation and acceleration by the Olympics is identified and interpreted in this issue of City. It comes from London and Athens. Some of the research is presented in two special features, one with a specific focus on the Olympics that extends from London now and back eight years to Athens, the other on architecture and the politics of ‘the new’, with particular reference to London and an excursion to Renaissance Italy. It continues in a reading of the global class dialectics of the nouveau poor looking inwards and outwards from the ‘local’, ‘national’ debt crisis of Greece, and in reexamination of the class structure of London, a new analysis that challenges established views of gentrification and professionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the editor's views on how the emerging urbanized global system is a cognitive- cultural capitalist system. He reflects on the economic crisis and social uprising in Greece as well as the Arab Spring movement. He says that urbanization is being transformed by economy, politics, culture and technique.