2014 crisis-scape.net Athens
This publication is part of the City at a Time of Crisis project http://www.crisis-scape.net
Funded by the ESRC Designed by Jaya Klara Brekke Photography by Ross Domoney (pages 42, 102, 166 and 206) Antonis Vradis (pages 62, 91 – 101) Dimitris Dalakoglou (page 8) Printed in Athens by Synthesi http://synthesi-print.gr Edited by Jaya Klara Brekke, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis and Antonis Vradis Chapters 15 and 19 translated from Greek by Antonis Vradis
ISBN: 978-1-938660-15-3 CRISIS-SCAPES: ATHENS AND BEYOND 2014 CRISIS-SCAPE.NET
CONTENTS foreword 1. Introduction Crisis-scape …………………………………………. p.7 I. FLOWS, INFRASTRUCTURES, NETWORKS 2. Political and Cultural Implications of the Suburban Transformation of Athens Leonidas Economou …………………………… p.13 3. Messogia, the New ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Airport’ and ‘Attiki Odos’ or, the Double Marginalization of Messogia Dimitra Gefou-Madianou ……………………. p.18 4. Infrastructural Flows, Interruptions and Stasis in Athens of the Crisis Dimitris Dalakoglou and Yannis Kallianos …………………………………………… p.23 5. Athens as a Failed City for Consumption (In a World that Evaluates Everyone and Every Place by their Commodity Value) Andreas Chatzidakis …………………………… p.33 II. MAPPING SPACES OF RACIST VIOLENCE 6. “Very Unhappy to Say That to Some Point It’s True”: Fascist Intrusion Within Greek Police Dimitris Christopoulos …………………. p.47 7. Strange Encounters Crisis-scape …………………………………. p.51 8. Migration Knots: Crisis Within a Crisis Sarah Green …………………………………. p.55 III. BETWEEN INVISIBILITY AND PRECARITY 9. Laissez Faire, Security, and Liberalism: Revisiting December 2008 Akis Gavriilidis ………………………………p.67 10. Governing For the Market: Emergencies and Emergences in Power and Subjectivity Athena Athanasiou ………………………. p.72 11.From Invisibility into the Centre of the Athenian Media Spectacle Giorgos Tsimouris ……………………….. p.78 12. Is the crisis in Athens (also) Gendered? Facets of Access and (In)visibility in Everyday Public Spaces Dina Vaiou ………………………………….. p.82 13. Metronome Antonis Vradis ……………………………. p.90 IV. RIGHT TO THE CITY IN CRISIS 14. The Crisis and its Discourses: Quasi-Orientalist Offensives Against Southern Urban Spontaneity, Informality and Joie De Vivre Lila Leontidou …………………………… p.107 15. Crisis, Right to the City Movements and the Question of Spontaneity: Athens and Mexico City Christy Petropoulou …………………… p.115 16. Unravelling False Choice Urbanism Tom Slater …………………………………. p.128 17. Contesting Speculative Urbanisation and Strategising Discontents Hyun Bang Shin …………………………. p.139 18. Against Accountancy Governance: Notes Towards a New Urban Collective Consumption Andy Merrifield …………………………. p.150 V. DEVALUING LABOUR, DEPRECIATING LAND 19. Crisis and Land Dispossession Costis Hadjimichalis …………………… p.171 20. What is to be Done? Redefining, Re-Asserting and Reclaiming Land, Labour and the City Bob Catterall ……………………………… p.179 21. Labour Migration, Brokerage, and Governance in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries Filippo Osella …………………………….. p.190 22. Alienation and Urban Life David Harvey …………………………….. p.195 AFTERWORD 23. Emerging Common Spaces as a Challenge to the City of Crisis Stavros Stavrides …………………… p.209 FOREWORD by Crisis-scape ATHENS AND BEYOND 7 our years and four days. The exact amount of time, that is, that has lapsed since the day the greek state would sign its ‘memorandum of agreement’ with its lenders (the IMF, the EU and the ECB), on May 5, 2010—officially making its own way into the era of global austerity and crisis. An entering that would come with a bang, and very much stay so: from that moment on, the social tension playing out at the greek territory would feature—constantly, it seems—in discussions, analyses and reports the world over. But what is life like in a city that finds itself in the eye of the crisisstorm, how does the everyday reality here compare to Athens’ global media portrait? What kind of lessons might our city be able to learn from the outbreaks of capitalism’s crises elsewhere, and what lessons might the Athenian example be able to offer, in return? The volume that you hold in your hands acts as an accompaniment to a conference that tried to answer some of these questions. ‘Crisis-scapes: Athens and beyond’ took place in the city of Athens on May 9&10, 2014. Over the two days, the conference tried to explore an array of the facets of the crisis in the city, divided between five axes/panels, which are in turn mirrored in the structure of this book: 1. Flows, infrastructures and networks, 2. Mapping spaces of racist violence, 3. Between invisibility and precarity, 4. The right to the city in crisis and 5. Devaluing labour, depreciating land. Five broad axes comprising the vehicles we used to perambulate through the dark landscapes of the crisis. A crisis neither commencing nor ending here, today. Through these conceptual vehicles taking us through Athens, through her spaces and her times, we focused on the particularities of the greek crisis; a crisis first of all concerning the structures, meanings and processes weaving together what we could broadly label as the greek everyday reality. Yet we also believe these particularities ought to be understood within the global financial crisis framework: hence this centrifugal “beyond”. Athens may now be in a position to offer explanations about phenomena taking place much beyond the city’s strict geographical limits. What renders the city a field of experimentation are trials and productions of new means of governance. And they acquire a new meaning when seen as wider tendencies in crisis management. Yet these Athenian testing grounds must at the same time be studied as traces and as future projections of structural readjustments taking place in seemingly disparate locations, but often-times ever so close in their causes and consequences alike. The interventions put together in the present volume try to take another composite look at Athens and its crisis. They try to comprehend the city through crossings and transitions in space and in time. F Leonidas Economou (Panteion University, Athens) Dimitra Gefou-Madianou (Panteion University, Athens) Yannis Kallianos and Dimitris Dalakoglou (Manchester University, Sussex university and crisis-scape) Andreas Chatzidakis (Royal Holloway, London) I. FLOWS INFRASTRUCTURES NETWORKS ATHENS AND BEYOND 11 by Dimitris Dalakoglou Flows, Infrastructures and Networks Section Opening eople, information, labour, vehicles, commodities, waste, water or energy are just some of the elements that move around us making up the dynamic urban condition. However, it is not only mobile subjects and objects that constitute dimensions of the urban everydayness—what are equally important are the material infrastructures of flows: the built environment, highways, streets, pipelines, tunnels, airports, ports or landfills and various other grids synthesize city’s spatial formations and are crucial parts of the multiple urban experiences. Since the end of the WWII, Athens has been growing into a city where nearly half of the country’s population lives; an urban complex that flows and grows out of its previous boundaries every few decades. But if the quantitative growth of the city has been impressive in these past six decades, the qualitative dimensions of that same expansion are equally formidable. It is not only that consumption increased, as Andreas Chatzidakis shows us, or that vehicles multiplied; it is not merely the emergence of the new suburbs that Leonidas Economou tells us about, or the new mega-infrastructures that were built— such as those studied by Giannis Kallianos (and Dimitris Dalakoglou) or Dimitra Gefou-Madianou. As all section authors agree, these processes facilitate the shaping of specific socio-material formations and subjects. They imply uneven experiences of the urban and materialise—quite literally— urban marginality and inequality. During the post-2010 crisis, the local project of neoliberalism is revealed anew as a failure, for the great majority. This failure in terms of infrastructural flows is often translated as slowing down and, in terms of urban materialities, as break-downs. The construction and even the maintenance of public works and infrastructures has been paused; the flow of commodities (and thus waste) has decreased and the number and flow of vehicles, arrivals, departures etc. are reduced. Yet as all section chapters explain, these failures and interruptions that prevail today are merely the real face of neoliberal urban growth that was being applied systemically to some proximate Others until the recent past. The ones who were on the wrong side of the grid or the flow. This model now expands affecting almost everyone—leading to new social formations and paradigms of staying, building, consuming, resisting and Being in the city during the crisis. P ATHENS AND BEYOND 13 by Leonidas Economou Political and Cultural Implications of the Suburban Transformation of Athens 2 I will use the term suburb to refer to the urban areas, which approximate the notion of the bourgeois suburb, as it is usually defined in the literature of the social sciences. The metropolitan development of recent decades has destabilized, to some extent, the notion of the suburb without erasing, however, its spatial and social specificity. A number of suburban areas, in the above sense, can be discerned in the Athenian conurbation. Their spatial form has some distinct indigenous traits (Economou, 2012) and they are perhaps more socially mixed than is often the case in other countries, but they are nevertheless spatially, socially and symbolically differentiated from other areas of the city (Maloutas, 2000, 2013). During the first decades after the second World War (1950-1970), Athens attracted a large part of the population and the economic and cultural dynamism of the country (the population grew from 1,4 million in 1951 to 2,5 million in 1971). The larger part of the new population was directed to the central city (the municipality of Athens), where it was housed in the newly built apartment buildings (polikatoikies), and to the working-class districts (especially in the western part of the city), which were built through processes of self-housing and informal settlement. The great majority of the higher socio-economic strata lived in the central city and many had second homes in suburban or countryside resorts. The suburban areas, which were formed during the interwar period along the Kifisias and the Paraliaki avenues (and became later known as the Northern and the Southern suburbs) grew quickly, but their population remained quite small as a percentage of the total. Despite its great expansion during these years, Athens remained a highly centralized 14 CRISIS-SCAPES Suburban transformations of Athens city. The central city gathered most supralocal functions and activities, and dominated the whole conurbation. The suburbs depended on the central city and were very different from it. They were almost exclusively residential, with detached houses surrounded by gardens, and they had a semi-rural character, as they were separated by large open spaces from the city and contained many unbuilt and green spaces. The Athenian growth slowed down in the next decades and the population reached 3,2 million in 1991 and 3,8 million in 2011. A number of factors (including the saturation of the center and the deterioration of the quality of life due to the model of urban growth of the previous period, the expansion of the middle class, the increase of private automobiles, and the attraction of the suburban way of life) led to important internal movements and rearrangements (Maloutas 2000, 2013). A growing movement of middleclass migration from the center to the suburbs (and especially those contained within the Lecanopedio: the Athenian basin) begun in the seventies. The suburbs started to grow faster than the central city and the surrounding working-class districts, which during the 1980s had started to lose population. The suburban exodus continued and intensified during the following twenty years (1991- 2011), and many central areas lost a large part of their older inhabitants, who were replaced by immigrants and refugees. The new suburbanites were directed to the established suburbs in the North and the South, but they also started to populate new suburban or semi-suburban areas in the whole of Attica and beyond. The great infrastructure works constructed in relation to the Olympic games in the period between 1995-2005 (Spata airport, suburban rail, new highways) connected directly for the first time the three physical components of Attica (Lecanopedio, Thriasio, Mesogeia) and reinforced the suburban transformation of Athens. The emerging suburban landscape differed in many ways from the past. The model of the garden suburb with the detached houses was replaced, in most old and new suburbs, by luxurious apartment buildings and residential complexes of small two-storey houses (mezonetes). The suburbs were progressively absorbed in the continuous urban fabric and became “urbanized” as important activities and functions (employment, commerce, entertainment, health services, culture) became increasingly decentralized. A number of peripheral urban centers and zones emerged in the suburbs, while the central areas were largely abandoned and continued to decline. Suburbanization was a middle-class reaction to the problems created by the growth of the city and the particular growth model and in the same time an expression of the attraction of the suburban ideal. The Athenian suburbanization of the last decades confirms the received knowledge that the suburbs are an ATHENS AND BEYOND 15 chapter 2 expression of, and reinforce, a retreat from society and social responsibility, a consumerist way of life, and an attitude of social and racial discrimination. However, as more recent scholarship has shown, suburbanization has been and continues to be a very complex and hybrid phenomenon, comprising different motivations, values and ways of life (Fishman, 1994; Silverstone, 1997). In what follows I try to discern some of the dominant recent trends and practices and I do little justice to the heterogeneity and the alternative ways of life and political movements that appeared during this period in the suburbs. The suburbanization of the last twenty-five years is related to the appearance of powerful new media (especially private television) and a great advance of consumerism in Greek society and culture. The ethic of accumulation and restrained consumption (that prevailed until the 1980s) was replaced by a hedonistic morality of consumption, spending and enjoyment based partly on credit. A series of new features and trends—including the commodification of new aspects of social life, the growing importance of consumption and leisure activities, the pervasiveness of advertisement, the desire for luxury, distinction and individuality, and the increasing emphasis on the design and style of goods and the self—became widely disseminated and found their apotheosis in the suburbs. The sites of the new consumer lifestyles were located there. The suburban home in a suburban location was presented, by the advertisement, marketing and media industries that constructed and disseminated the new consumer and suburban ideal, as the necessary prerequisite for the possession and display of the goods, and the deployment of the practices and identities of modern consumerism. The “temples of consumption” and the “dream-worlds” of the metropolis were also transported, to a large degree, in the suburbs. The first modern shopping centers and shopping malls, as well as new kinds of music halls, dancing clubs and leisure complexes, were built in the suburbs, and they have subsequently marked their space, experience and identity (Rigopoulos, 2003). Some suburban city centers experienced great growth and change and a new postmodern landscape was constructed that included stylistic display, spectacular imagery and simulation, cultural and material consumption and play. The recent Athenian suburbanization is also related to important shifts in political ideology and practice and the creation of new forms of social and spatial control and exclusion. The more recent migration to the suburbs was motivated not only by environmental and lifestyle considerations, but also by a growing fear of otherness and crime, and a desire for increased social and spatial segregation. A landscape of fear is gradually built in many suburbs. Houses and residential complexes are now visually separated from the street, 16 CRISIS-SCAPES Suburban transformations of Athens often hiding behind high walls and other fortifications, and they are equipped with electronic surveillance systems and patrolled by private police services (Papadopoulou, 2003). In some cases, new protected and fortified spaces are formed that approximate the type of the gated community. The demand for greater separation is also reflected in suburban politics. The political scene of many suburbs was dominated by conflicts arising from the urbanization of the suburbs, and in many cases homeowners’ movements appeared that can be interpreted as defending the interests and the separatist strategies of the privileged. More generally, suburbanization, in conjunction with electronic media and consumerism (with which it is structurally related), can be seen as a factor contributing to the disintegration of civic democratic culture and to the transformation of political society towards some form of media controlled meta-democracy (Whyte, 1956; Habermas, 1989). The recent economic crisis in Greece is a local expression of a European and global crisis that revealed the structural workings and the failures of the market economy, the European Union, and the local economic and political system and culture. The suburban transformation of the city is an expression and a consequence of the model of urban growth that was established after the war and remained largely intact until recently, and the accompanying ideology of unrestrained growth and crude modernism. The policies and the practices in the land and housing sector during the first post-war decades on the one hand provoked the saturation and degradation of the central city—thus triggering migration from it; and on the other hand, they prepared the suburban exodus by propelling the territorial expansion of the city and the incorporation of many peripheral suburban areas in the city plan. The demand for suburban homes after the 1980s, and the suburban planning and building provisions and codes, permitting the intensive exploitation of the land, secured the robustness of the construction industry in the following decades and the continuation of its economic and ideological role. If the urbanization of the period between 1950- 1970 was the vehicle for the embourgeoisement of the underprivileged strata of Greek society, the subsequent suburbanization enabled and marked their transition to consumerism and political complacency. The eager adoption and the specific form of the recent suburban ideal seem to be the natural continuation of the radical individualism and the unquestioning modernism of the previous period. The abandonment of the center is a reaction to the problems of the city related to the atrophic civic culture and the “anarchic individualism” of the postwar period. The suburbanization of the recent decades appears, moreover, as the logical outcome of an ideology which privileges expansion, newness and the present, instead of preservation, maintenance and the future—and is largely ATHENS AND BEYOND 17 chapter 2 indifferent to the long-term environmental, social and economic viability of the city. The massive destruction of the neoclassical city after the war and its replacement by the monotonous and indifferent modernism of the apartment building stem from the same cultural matrix that led to the rapid devaluation and obsolescence of the central city and the creation of a cosmopolitan postmodern landscape in the suburbs. In this light, recent suburbanization appears as a material and ideological process that reinforced consumerism, political apathy and cultural impoverishment and contributed to the survival of a destructive and unsustainable mode of urban growth. References Fishman R 1994 Urbanity and suburbanity: rethinking the burbs American Quarterly 46 (1) 35-39 Habermas J 1989 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Polity Press, Cambridge Maloutas T 2013 The devaluation of the centre of Athens and the choice of seasonal residence by upper and middle classes in Maloutas T, Kandylis G, Petrou M and Souliotis N eds The Centre of Athens as a Political Stake EKKE and Harokopeio University, Athens (in Greek) Maloutas T 2000 Urban enlargement and dominant ways of housing in post-war Athens and the social morphology of the large urban centres in Maloutas T ed Social and Economic Atlas of Greece EKKE and Thessalia University Press, Athens and Volos (in Greek) Economou L 2012 The Social Production of Urban Space in Post-War Athens. The Case of Voula Pataki, Athens (in Greek) Papadopoulou V 2003 For an anatomy of the suburb in Kazeros N and Lefas P eds Without Limits. The Vast Extent of the Suburbs Futura, Athens (in Greek) Rigopoulos D 2003 The puzzle of new Athens in Kazeros N and Lefas P eds Without Limits. The Vast Extent of the Suburbs Futura, Athens (in Greek) Silverstone R ed 1997 Visions of Suburbia Routledge, London and New York Whyte W H 1956 The Organization Man Penguin, Harmondsworth 18 CRISIS-SCAPES by Dimitra Gefou-Madianou T Messogia, the New ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Airport’ and ‘Attiki Odos’ or, the Double Marginalization of Messogia 3 he 1990s mark a great, aggressive expansion of the city of Athens to the whole Attica region. This took place in the context of modernizing and development projects, which initiated the neo-liberal ‘restructuring’ of Greece and amidst discourses, of Greece’s becoming at last a “fully European country”, affluent, strong and important regionally and globally. The climax of this process was its undertaking the organization of the Olympic Games of 2004 and the numerous, huge infrastructure projects which supported this organization, many of them located in the Messogia region. Prominent among them are the new Athens ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Airport’ and the Attica Expressway (Highway, Freeway) named ‘Attiki Odos’, but also the horse-racing and shooting grounds of Athens (which were moved to Messogia from Athens, not far from the airport), international hotels and business/shopping centers. These constructions have had tremendous repercussions on the organization of space, its social and political uses for the entire region of Messogia. The airport in particular became the emblem of success of the then modernizing PASOK government and was wrapped with discourses of glory, Hellenic grandeur and triumph of Europeanness. Along with the majority of the Greek population, most of the local people embraced the project enthusiastically because they considered it to be an avenue for a long desired access to modernity. As it happens, the Arvanites of Messogia have long been ‘closed’ communities culturally and politically marginalized by central power structures and were considered as backward and uncivilized by the dominant Athenian elite (Gefou-Madianou, 1999). For more than a century the Arvanites of Messogia were molded into a subaltern community in the service of the nearby capital city which got steadily gigantic in terms of population and socioATHENS AND BEYOND 19 chapter 3 economic influence. Their language, ‘Arvanitica’, questioned their Greekness and this together with the use of ‘retsina’ wine by the locals (which turned them into the eyes of Athenians into drunkards) led to violently dismissive characterizations, which amounted to mockery and led to political and economic exploitation (ibid). Certainly this picture had already started to change in the 1980s, due to the gradual expansion of Athens, the industrialization of the area and the ensuing internal migration. This process was intensified in the 1990s with massive flows of ‘economic’ immigrants, many of them from Albania (first wave) and then from Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), who reinforced available work force and increased local productivity in all sectors and especially the agricultural one. Yet, the locals’ embodiment of the subaltern status, died hard—even if they had themselves become ‘masters’, so to speak. Today the Messogia communities have become cities and their population has tripled. In this context, the airport construction was perceived as a sign of openness (culture and language-wise) to modernization and cosmopolitanism, hence it’s enthusiastic reception. At the same time, any critical voices were muted. There were more reasons for this positive stance, some material, other symbolic, even imagined. The value of land increased making some people rapidly rich either through land expropriation for the construction of the big projects (the new airport and ‘Attiki Odos’) or through the dramatic changes in the uses of land. Land formerly exclusively reserved for agriculture (or forest/ public) was now turned into residential, business and industrial zones. Access to the capital city from which many Messogites felt ‘excluded’ became quick and easy, at least for the first years. On a symbolic level, locals felt that the capital was moving towards them via the airport and they felt they had become “from a periphery, the center of Attica”. Messogites have appropriated the airport in many ways vividly integrating it into their life-worlds and everyday activities: shopping, entertainment, jobs and leisure time activities (Gefou-Madianou 2010). The fact that the airport was situated on their fathers’ vineyards has probably invested it with “ownership” meanings. And all this imaginary of progress and modernity have underplayed and suppressed all the dramatic changes which the airport construction and operation had generated. First it was the landscape and their relationship to the land, to their fathers’ land. The “Messogitic plain” (kambos) was lost forever. Vineyards were destroyed; the vine cultivation and wine production, the area’s most central and century-long cultural and economic characteristics were irreparably upset; small hills were taken down; olive trees were uprooted; agricultural roads were deviated or more often destroyed; archaeological excavation sites were ruined; little out-churches were moved to other places and in some cases removed 20 CRISIS-SCAPES altogether. The topography of the area changed radically. All previously known signs and markers of places leading to peoples’ properties and fields were eliminated, thus making orientation in space and property location very difficult, especially for older people. The absence of a central ‘ktimatologio’ (cadastre) in the area complicated the situation even more. Old people were worried, and still are, that their children would not be able to locate their fields and the remaining vineyards (ibid). It was during this period that Messogia region progressively started turning into a ‘disordered’ space. The whole process of preparations for the new airport and ‘Attiki Odos’ constructions (land expropriation, immense digging, uprooting of vineyards, other cultivations, olive trees and forest), the flows of workers and migrants moving into an already over-populated area, the expansion of industrial zone in the area, the building of villas and other illegal houses with no residential plan, all these and the lack of administrative control generated pictures of a deregulated space. ‘Attiki Odos’ has split the Messogia region into two, thus making inter-community communication difficult and expensive, sometimes breaking up a community, therefore making social life hard. Work in the vineyards and fields, an everyday activity for some locals became difficult, even impossible for older people—for driving in the highway was impossible for them, due to the speed, the strong lights in the night, and the traffic signs. Thus, the cultivators’ relationship with their land was changed dramatically or even destroyed. Many people had pointed to an upcoming environmental catastrophe (air and land pollution, affecting cultivation products and food chain) but general euphoria silenced their voices. After all, these concerns were problems of the less economically privileged Messogites. The wealthier and those espousing the modernization agenda at that time, saw and expected only benefits and opportunities, envisioning a share of the airport ‘movement’ and commotion: of incoming tourists visiting the area and reinforcing consumption and commercial activity; of attracting big construction projects such as condominiums, hotels, shopping-malls and urban housing-projects, promising jobs and wealth for the local population. All movements against the airport and ‘Attiki Odos’ construction organized by local activists (archaeologists, environmentalists, geologists, artists, school teachers and some local mayors) failed in mounting opposition. The PASOK government was very strong at the time and had succeeded to attract the support of a large segment of the locals, who were traditionally conservative and in favour of the monarchy (traditionally named King’s villages—‘vassilochoria’). Local politicians played an important role in the negotiations and the manufacturing of consent. Messogia, the new ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Airport’ ATHENS AND BEYOND 21 The airport was inaugurated in 2001 along with the main part of ‘Attiki Odos’ leading to it; the rest of it was completed in 2003-04. While during the first years of their operation, both the airport and ‘Attiki Odos’ were easily accessible to Messogites—hence these images of appropriation and welcoming—just before, during and increasingly after the Olympic Games of 2004 the situation changed dramatically. It was then that it became clear what this ‘progress’ and development implied; what this brutal and neo-liberal modernity was aiming at; and how it thoroughly reorganized the logic of public space. Both the airport and ‘Attiki Odos’ turned into quasi-private, confined enclaves as ‘barriers’ were set up limiting access to them. The airport was controlled and policed for security and order reasons; free parking was prohibited, and controlled parking was expensive; walking around, window-shopping, and promenading (as was done before) was not allowed. Commuting for work or visiting relatives and friends from one Messogitic town to the other(s) became difficult, time-consuming and expensive. The airport was transformed into an area of strict discipline. At the same time, access to and operation of ‘Attiki Odos’ was strictly organized; the highway was constantly patrolled; toll-stations increased; driving through it was considered by locals complicated and expensive. But most importantly, all these generated a sense of alienation. They felt the place was ‘other’ to them, or themselves ‘others’ in this place. This neoliberal space-logic became more clear and visible to many with the eruption of the recent economic crisis in the country and the area of Messogia. Class differences have become more evident, for some locals became rich by expropriating land or by turning it into residential plots (oikopeda). One can now more clearly discern two groups of people in Messogia. On the one hand are those who consider themselves modern and identify with the state hegemonic discourse aiming at progress in the community, thus still in favor of the airport and ‘Attiki Odos’. They represent wealthy, strong local families who had always been able in forcing amnesia and the orchestrating of forgetting regarding certain periods of the past, like their Arvanitic past or the Civil War. On the other hand are those less economically privileged locals, usually agricultural cultivators who are experiencing all these changes with distrust and bitterness (Gefou-Madianou 2014). Yet both groups encounter pollution problems—both in the atmospheric air and on the ground. These have become more evident in the recent years, affecting people and cultivations, and they are attributed both to the new airport and ‘Attiki Odos’ but also to the local industries’ chemical waste. From recent examinations it was found that the water table in the area is contaminated and the air is heavily polluted. A photochemical cloud very often covers the whole area and the fields adjacent to ‘Attiki Odos’ are also heavily chapter 3 22 CRISIS-SCAPES polluted. The food chain also seems to have been affected by this pollution (Stouraitis and Methenitis 2013), thus making agricultural products unsuitable for sale. Some areas suffer serious noise problems from air traffic. Shops are closing down in the Messogitic cities, jobs are not easily found in the area, and as result many immigrants are leaving it. ‘Attiki Odos’ is progressively less used by Messogites because of gas cost and the toll ticket, which are considered expensive. They prefer to travel by the old agricultural roads or take the bus and/or the ‘Metro’ when they visit Athens for work or other business. Only a small percentage of the population (mainly the wealthy), still use the ‘Attiki Odos’ on a somewhat regular basis. For the average-income Messogites or the economically disadvantaged ones space is more alienated than ever. Especially for the vineyard owners this feeling of ‘otherness’ is more prominent. Their land has become a ‘no place’—neither agricultural or industrial, nor urban; they themselves feel neither agricultural cultivators, nor urbanites; they do not know what they are any more. The new big constructions on their land, namely the airport and ‘Attiki Odos’ brought dramatic changes to the area and also generated a cultural impoverishment of their lives. They are experiencing a sense of severe alienation and feel double marginalized and confined by the whole situation. The dream and prospect for ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’, which the new airport and ‘Attiki Odos’ have promised seem to have failed irretrievably. References Gefou-Madianou D 1999 Cultural polyphony and identity formation: negotiating tradition in Attica American Ethnologist 26 (2) 412-439 Gefou-Madianou D 2010 Ethnography in motion: shifting fields on airport grounds in Melhuus M, Mitchell J P and Wulff H eds Ethnographic Practice in the Present Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford 152-168 Gefou-Madianou D 2014 ‘Eyes shut, muted voices’: narrating the post Civil War era through a monument in Argenti N ed Social Analysis, in press Stouraitis A and Methenitis K 2013 Monitoring the quality of air in East Attica Paper presented at the Scientific Conference of S/E Attica Koropi 17-20 October (in Greek) Messogia, the new ‘Eleftherios Venizelos Airport’ ATHENS AND BEYOND 23 by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Yannis Kallianos1 Infrastructural Flows, Interruptions and Stasis in Athens of the Crisis 4 I n the summer of 2011, representatives of the Athenian elites made a series of biopolitical statements regarding the anti-austerity movement of Syntagma Square2. In order to justify their political opposition to the camp-styled protest gathered across from the House of Parliament they argued that the protestors posed a risk to public health and to the city’s public image. Following the final police attack on the camp in July 2011, municipal cleaning workers were immediately brought in, to collect the broken tents and other items of the destroyed protest-camp and throw them into the refuse trucks. In yet one more sign of social deregulation, the very same people who have been forced several times to call a halt to their industrial actions on the basis that their strikes pose a ‘public health risk’, were now the same ones who were obliged to finish off the police operation which was legitimized based on the same argument. Four months later, in October 2011 this story was once again repeated, when these municipal workers were forced, by court order, to abandon their strike and go back to work, due to the risk to public health. The strikes of workers in the city’s cleaning service have proved critical moments in the life of the city. It is at these moments when it’s dwellers are confronted with their own and their neighbours’ waste. The criticality is based precisely on the pause of the flow of refuse. Such interruptions bring the less noticeable aspects of the infrastructural flows to the forefront of the senses (vision, smell etc.) A process that echoes the argument of Humphrey 24 CRISIS-SCAPES (2003) who has stressed the value of infrastructure and its flows for social order, examining the case of another infrastructural interruption, heat, in a post-soviet city. Indeed such ethnographic material confirms once again Mary Douglas’ (2008) definition of disorder as the interruption of a pattern. These interruptions and disorders materialize in everyday life of the critical mass the completely socially embedded—and socially invisible by then—infrastructural existence that is based on the flows and their rhythms. Moreover, the disorder can be caused by the lack of the infrastructural flow altogether without ever starting and so paused, as it has been argued in the case of the highways in Albania (Dalakoglou, 2012). Thus, it can also be the material affordances of an infrastructure which imply certain flow/activities and thus the pattern’s discontinuity and disorder. To extend this argument even further, it is also the entire lack of an infrastructural materiality or the promise for the construction of an infrastructure in the future that may trigger particular flows or interruptions and thus disorders and other socio-material phenomena. Overall what is important for our case is the infrastructural flow and its discontinuities which then activate, mobilize or challenge other kinds of flows in the city ultimately re-defining the urban condition. These diverse (non)flows may then become an intriguing point in the study of infrastructures and specifically of the infrastructural dynamics which they make possible in different contexts and levels. In this sense, the infrastructure per se is not a fixed rigid category, it is not even a substratum or medium, it is a matter of affinities that take shape (or not) (Mitropoulos, 2013:116). Therefore, an approach to the ‘infrastructure of experience’ (Dourish & Bell, 2007:417) or even better to the experience of infrastructure, shows that discontinuities and arythmia are the rule of the infrastructural (non-)affinities, rather than the exception. As such, the question emerging becomes: what are the differentiations among the various interruptions and disorders? Before trying to answer this question, some ethnographic elaboration is necessary at this stage. Waste-Money-Water-Soil-Bodies Four ethnographic observations are clear in reference to waste infrastructures and flows. The first three were pre-existing conditions which took on different meanings since the outbreak of the crisis and the fourth is directly linked with the 2010 crisis. First, everyday life in Fili town (where the landfill of Athens is located) is unbearable due to the waste treatment facilities and flows. Second, there is an inability and difficulty for the Greek authorities to find Infrastructural Flows ATHENS AND BEYOND 25 spaces to situate new waste treatment infrastructures. Third, waste treatment is big business and implies big flows of money. Fourth, there are significant transformations in everyday flows of waste, starting at the bins in the city. Starting from the latter, an evident fact is that since 2010 there is an increasing number of scavengers looking for valuable materials (usually scrap metals) within the city’s recycling or mixed garbage bins. Several individuals scout the area around bins for things that might come in handy. Additionally the number of people who just search for food in rubbish bins has also greatly increased. Austerity policies have rapidly created a new level of extreme poverty, the most ‘fortunate’ social classes simply consume less (generating less garbage) while the lowest classes struggle to survive, sifting through and consuming the rubbish of the others. Starvation in Greece and the life of the starving people is an entirely separate issue that needs to be addressed, but probably this has to happen in political rather than academic contexts. For now, what one can state is that the aforementioned phenomena lead to a decrease in the volume of the rubbish that flow toward the landfill. In the land(of)Fili During the last two decades and due to pre-crisis economic growth Greece has experienced a significant increase in the volume of waste. The predominant method for waste management in the country is landfilling. Up until 2005, 90% of all refuse was disposed in sanitary landfills and open dumps. Today, almost 80% of urban waste ends up in landfills3. In Attica, even though more than eight dumpsites are in use, only one of these is operating legally—this is the landfill in Fili town4. Fili town is almost 20km from the centre of the city. It emerged in 1997 from the unification of a group of municipalities: Zefyri, Fili and Ano Liosia, where the landfill is actually located. The name Ano Liosia or just Liosia often exacts negative reactions partly in reference to the Roma people who reside there but primarily due to the landfill and the pollution associated with it. The name ‘Fili’ is less charged than Liosia, however it has gradually taken on similar negative connotations. One of the ethnographic anecdotes accompanying the relationship between the city center and Fili is that of teenagers waiting for the bus. When they were asked for information regarding their destination along the bus route they pretended that they were getting off well before Fili and yet they remained on the bus until Fili, which probably fills them with shame. The site has been used since the 1950s as the main dumpsite of Attica and has been extended twice to accommodate the capital’s trash disposal demands. It is currently burdened with around 10,000 tons of garbage per chapter 4 26 CRISIS-SCAPES day, triple the volume of refuse that it has been designed to accommodate5. Currently the landfill’s total surface area is over 1,000 acres. The present site has a depth of 500 meters, 250 metres underground and 250 metres above ground. This is next to the old inactive landfills of Ano Liosia 1 and 2 and the inactive Ano Liosa dumpsite. The site is built very near the town, and less than 300 metres away from residences. Indeed the settlement closest to the landfill is the Gennimatas workers’ dwellings (the Greek equivalent of a council estate). Some of the last houses built in the area were built in 2012, just before the closure of the public organisation that was tasked with building them. The landfill is strictly guarded by threatening security staff and the facilities are surrounded by a 3-metre high barbed-wired fence. Despite this, one can see vehicles carrying toilet waste entering through the landfill gates. Such vehicles are not supposed to unload their refuse in the landfill, but, as the cost for disposing of such liquids in purpose-built facilities is very high, it is easier to go the ‘other way’. Parallel to the inflows of waste is the inflow of money toward the Fili landfill, both formal but probably also informal given the aforementioned example. Each municipal authority of Attica (wider Athens) pays Fili municipality per ton of waste deposited at the landfill—moreover, money from the central state authorities also flows towards Fili. This condition likely makes Fili one of the wealthiest municipal authorities in the country. No doubt various local micro-contractors receive a share of this wealth via small contracts that the municipal or the landfill authorities allocate. However, despite this, the town does not look like a particularly wealthy place, certainly not one which invests in its public services. Simultaneously the fetid smell of rotting waste is present in the air people breathe 24 hours per day. There seems to be a wider plexus of socially and/or legally accepted but indeed also unaccepted in/out-flows taking place in the landfill. According to the official announcement of the inter-municipal authority published on 20th December 20136, at least six times during that month dangerous medical/ hospital waste was discovered inside the landfill. The incidents involved private corporations who illegally smuggle toxic or harmful waste into the landfill (hospital or other kind of debris that is not legally allowed to be refused there). Moreover from June 2013 until January 2014 the operation of the infrastructure has been disrupted and suspended eleven times (this is the official number) because of the invasions of scavengers who look for valuable scrap and other materials. These are usually the Roma people who live next to the site as well as poor immigrants, however, gradually as the crisis progresses some people who do not belong to either of these two categories have begun to appear. Infrastructural Flows ATHENS AND BEYOND 27 chapter 4 Landfill technology is based on the burial of the waste within the soil. In Greek a landfill is colloquially referred to as homateri—etymologically this derives from the Greek word for soil, homa=χώμα. However it is not only garbage that comes and gets buried in Fili; there are bodies also: human bodies have often been discovered in homateri. These bodies originate from two main sources. Firstly, the unfortunate scavengers are often accidentally crushed by the tons of garbage which come all day while searching for something valuable. However, more sinisterly the homateri is also used by criminal organizations who apparently make use of the landfill or rubbish bins in the city for disposing bodies or body parts. According to the bible soil is the cosmogonical element per se (together with water). Thus, according to the Christian Orthodox tradition after death the body which allegedly was made out of these two materials must return to the soil7. According to local residents in Fili the pollution created by the homateri leads to a massive percentage increase of deaths by cancer in the area; that is the reason the main term the anti-landfill residents’ initiative uses is cancerlandfill (karkinohomateri=καρκινοχωματερή). In addition, not only is it responsible for the deaths but the homateri continues to torment the bodies of the Fili residents into the afterlife. The current graveyard of the town is built on the hill that remains behind inactive cell of the Ano Liosia landfill. Bodies buried there do not decompose, due to the pollution in the soil that has destroyed the underground flora and fauna which aids decomposition. ‘Dead soil for the dead people’ is how one of Fili’s residents referred to it. The only solution has been to build cement boxes for the coffins to be put in. Sometimes soil bought separately in plastic sacks is poured in the box before the gravestone is put in place sealing the bodies, so that at least if and when exhumations occur the gravediggers or relatives do not come across practically undecomposed bodies. The other cosmogonical element of the Judeochristianic tradition, water, flows in the opposite direction to the garbage. Very close the homateri is the channel of Mornos River. This artificial channel contains water flowing towards the capital city, poorly maintained the cement-made canal has water pouring out of its cracks, while at points it is completely uncovered exchanging elements with the environment and thus the homateri. The channel’s rectangular cement walls echo the small rectangular cement grave boxes. Contesting landfills Over the last decade or so the government has made plans to build two new landfills in Attica. The two new sites proposed are next to the towns of Keratea and Grammatiko. In the case of Keratea, a small town in East Attica, local 28 CRISIS-SCAPES opposition against the building of a landfill culminated in a major physical conflict between riot police and the community that lasted from December 2010 until March 2011, forcing the halting of the ‘investment’. Police violence in Keratea was extreme and the local residents responded dynamically to what was a proper invasion of Special Forces of the police into the town and in its periphery. The community blockaded one of the major highway artery and almost daily clashes occurred. Generally local residents in both places and others throughout the country (e.g. Lefkimi in Corfu) have radically resisted the proposals as they expect an environmental and public health catastrophe similar to the one of Fili. Moreover, the most notorious—for corruption—private/public works contracting company in the country has undertaken the building of the new sites8. At the same time the terms of agreement do not appear to be protective of the Greek state’s interests. For example, according to a documentary film produced by the federation of municipal workers union (POE-OTA 2013) the new facilities will be in reality private businesses, while the capacities of these planned infrastructures is much larger than the expected generation of garbage. Nevertheless the contracts for new landfills signed between the state and private contractors instruct that the state will pay the managing companies based on capacity, rather than weight of wasted matter (as is the case with Fili). For the time being what has flown from the centre of the city towards these future landfill areas are riot police officers who protect the private investments and try to implement the wishes of the government to make the country an investment-friendly territory. Diggers and other machinery has also flown there for now from elsewhere, since no local sub-contractor wants to get involved in this work. Moreover, money flows from state coffers towards the private contractor who is receiving compensation for work delays due to protests. Disorder, Crisis and Stasis The government and corporate media often employ arguments that try to turn the residents of the three areas against each other; for example, arguments about local villagers who do not care about the common good or who do not want Fili to get a lighter or not load of waste are used. The public health argument is also employed. The residents of Keratea and Grammatiko as well as those from Fili, who protest, are accused of posing a danger to public health and order. However, does the government care so much for the environmental impact in Fili or even for public order? After all, similarly to Keratea, the use of extreme police violence is also visible in Northern Greece, in Chalkidiki, where gold Infrastructural Flows ATHENS AND BEYOND 29 chapter 4 mining ‘investments’ are resisted by the local residents who (rightly) believe that the gold mines will destroy the natural and social environment in their area. Public disorder prevails and is implemented by rigid political decisions which instruct for the investments to be carried out by all means, if necessary with illegal arrests, severe injuries of protestors and even with large-scale antiterrorist operations targeting local residents. The argument which wants these infrastructures to be necessary for wider social and public order and the rhythmic and normal flow of waste (in our case) are not convincing. First of all the infrastructures and their flows are interrupted, paused and delayed daily. These interruptions are embedded in the process, in the regular rhythm and pattern of the flow, they are not exceptional. For example when people enter homateri searching for valuable items the work of the infrastructure and the flows are paused, when bodies are discovered in homateri its function is also paused, when the municipal vehicles stop to empty rubbish bin in the city the flow of vehicles behind them is also interrupted, etc. On a different scale, everyday life in Fili is a constant interruption and disturbance with the stinking air which is probably toxic and lethal, with waste tracks speeding daily via the roads of the town and with people dying on mass scale due to the pollution. Simultaneously the water of the capital city flows next to the homateri. Overall, disorder is the rule rather than exception of this large system. When it comes to this waste infrastructure and its flows, disorder and arrhythmia are part of the ‘normal’ infrastructural patterns for the people who have direct experience of the infrastructure. Perhaps these disorders are embedded in a system that wishes to devaluate as much as possible the function of the current infrastructure and push towards the new private units. Probably Fili landfill has reached its physical and social limits. On a larger scale, disorder, disruptions and deregulation are endemic characteristics of neoliberal governance—especially in its most extreme form, as it is being applied in Greece since the agreement of 2010 with the IMF, the EU and the ECB. For example, until recent times the state authorities were responsible for a multiplicity of flows, e.g. provision of social housing to vulnerable groups, managing waste flows, construction and extension of infrastructures etc. However, now in the times of crisis the most social of these activities have been paused from above while the most profitable have been or are in the process of being privatised. As such, during the crisis all of the previously existing patterns have been interrupted but from above. Thus, the only flows that remain uninterrupted are flows of public assets towards the private sector and the flow of violence against anyone who may resist such policies. 30 CRISIS-SCAPES The question hereby posed is therefore what might distinguish these systemic interruptions and disorder from the interruptions and disorder that come from protests: whether we talk about striking municipal workers, the Syntagma Square occupation or anti-landfill struggles, these incidents function as an oppositional force to the systemic flows (including their disorders and interruptions). This is the reason that representatives of the elites are so harshly against these flows trying to protect the disruptions caused from above. So as one needs to start thinking anew these disruptions and disorders as qualitatively different phenomena, the use of another term needs to be employed, that of stasis. Stasis in that sense can refer to non-systemic interruptions of flows and non-systemic disorders, which have anti-structural potentialities. Stasis challenges the neoliberal normality and its rhythms which include the systemically embedded disorders and interruption of patterns. References Dalakoglou D 2012 ‘The road from capitalism to capitalism’: infrastructures of (post) socialism in Albania Mobilities 7 (4) 571-586 Douglas M 2008 Purity and danger: Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo Routledge, London and New York Dourish P & Bell G 2007 The infrastructure of experience and the experience of infrastructure: meaning and structure in everyday encounters with space Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34 (3) 414-430 Humphrey C 2003 Rethinking infrastructure: Siberian cities and the great freeze of January 2001 in Schneider J and Susser I eds Wounded Cities Berg, Oxford 91-107 Mitropoulos A 2012 Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia Minor Compositions, London POE-OTA 2013 Garbage Plants: The Big Party of the Contractors Documentary film produced by the Federation of Municipal Workers and Infowar Infrastructural Flows ATHENS AND BEYOND 31 chapter 4 Endnotes 1 We thank very much Anna Christofidi for helping us with this article and various people in Fyli, especially H. and D. for their help, moreover many thanks go to Antonis Vradis, Christos Filippidis and Klara Jaya Brekke for their help. 2 Those issuing such biopolitical statements were the current and former mayor of the city, the president of the merchants’ association, governmental ministers, corporate media journalists etc. See http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_ articles_ell_100033_09/07/2011_448731 http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_ articles_politics_100017_09/07/2011_448709http://www.skai.gr/news/greece/ article/174513/protovoulia-kamini-gia-tin-plateia-sudagmatos/http://www. newsbeast.gr/politiki/arthro/198924/prepei-na-katharisei-i-plateia-sudagmatos/ 3 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25454100 4 http://www.wtert.gr/attachments/article/271/%CE%94.%CE%A3.%CE%91.%20 %CE%95%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%B4%CE%B1.pdf 5 http://www.kathimerini.gr/491991/article/epikairothta/ellada/apovlhta-apomykono- ston-xyta-ths-fylhs 6 http://www.edsna.gr/index.php/info/press-romm-2/354-nosokomeiaka-6 7 Cremation was illegal in Greece until 2006 because of pressure applied by the Church of Greece. 8 This is almost inevitable since the law was reformed in the 1990s allowing only companies of a certain size to undertake mega-infrastructure constructions. For almost a decade the very few such companies saw their profits increase immensely, yet the crisis and pause in public works led to the survival of only one such company. 32 CRISIS-SCAPES Navarinou self-managed park in Exarcheia Athens. Photographed by Andreas Chatzidakis ATHENS AND BEYOND 33 by Andreas Chatzidakis Athens as a Failed City for Consumption (In a World that Evaluates Everyone and Every Place by their Commodity Value) 5 I A Consumer City in the Making grew up in Athens throughout the 80s and 90s, in the midst of a transition period that brought dramatic changes to the Athenian cityscape. In many ways, the “ancient city” was in a fully-blown and ferocious transformation into a “consumer city”. For despite the ubiquitous view of the Acropolis and other ancient sites, Athens began to look more like any other European “futureoriented” city: introducing some of the biggest shopping malls in Southeast Europe, iconic buildings by celebrity architects, bigger and wider motorways for ever-so-bigger and wider cars, new museums, urban lofts, retail parks, theme parks, and various new cafés, artspaces and multi-purpose buildings for an emerging and increasingly confident “creative class” (Florida, 2002). By 2004, the year of hosting Olympics, Athens was keen to erase its more recent memories and eager to fetishise antiquity in its rebranding as a worldclass destination. Major facelifts and investments in urban infrastructure had turned the city itself into an alluring object of consumption: contemporary yet rich in history, sophisticated, even as “chic” as Paris1 and as “creative” as Berlin2, and above all full of opportunities for consumption catering to all cosmopolitan tastes and sensibilities. 34 CRISIS-SCAPES Athens as a Failed City for Consumption But the transition of Athens into a city of consumption was far more pronounced not in the physical surroundings but in the everyday logics and practices of its residents. In the neighbourhood I grew up, and which in many ways epitomised the Greek model of urban gentrification, the formation of new subjectivities akin to the neoliberal consumer-citizen began to manifest in all spheres of daily life. At least for some time, nearly everyone seemed blessed with the freedom of experimentation and identity differentiation through the acquisition of an ever-expanding list of consumption objects. Soon it became not only about what people were consuming but also where, marking the formation of neighbourhoods with distinct class identities. Popular songs and TV series, for instance, narrated stories of people from different districts of Athens (middle versus working class) that were to fall in love and strive a life together despite different class-related tastes and sensibilities. For a city that never underwent a process of heavy industrialisation and class-stratification, as for example Paris or London, this was a remarkable cultural shift. Concurrently, some academic studies began to take note of Greece’s transition from a “collectivist” to an “individualist” culture (e.g. Pouliasi and Verkuyten, 2011). A Contested Consumer City The years of the Athenian spectacle ended violently and abruptly in December 2008, uncovering various underlying tensions and contradictions, not least in the consumption-led model of urban development (see Vradis and Dalakoglou, 2012). Capitalist “cracks” (Holloway, 2010) and “societies within societies” (Papi, 2003) began to appear in various parts of Athens and beyond. One of the most striking examples, for instance, was what is now known as “Navarinou park” or “the park”, a former parking lot that was turned into an open squat by Exarcheia-based residents (and other enthusiastic supporters) who, in the aftermath of the 2008 riots: “…united to squat on the space and demand the obvious, that the parking turns into a park! They broke the asphalt with drills and cutters, they brought trucks carrying soil, planted flowers and trees and in the end they celebrated it”3. Operating on the basis of self-management, antihierarchical structuring and anti-commercialisation, the park aspired to be: …a space for creativity, emancipation and resistance, open to various initiatives, such as political, cultural and anti-consumerist ones. At the same time, it aspires to be a neighbourhood garden which accommodates part of the social life of its residents, is beyond any profit or ownershipdriven logics and functions as a place for playing and walking, meeting and ATHENS AND BEYOND 35 chapter 5 communicating, sports, creativity and critical thinking. The park defies constraints relating to different ages, origins, educational level, social and economic positioning4. Consumerist society and atomised logics and practices were at the heart of critique in various other “here and now” experimentations with doing things differently. There was a collective, for instance, that directly traded with Zapatistas and various other alternative trading networks that brought together politically like-minded producers and consumers without intermediaries. There were also various no-ticket cinema screenings, collective cooking events, time banks, gifting bazaars and “anti-consumerist” spaces where people could come and give, take, or give and take goods without any norms of reciprocity. For a consumer researcher, post-2008 Athens seemed to be an ultimate laboratory where alternative tactics of consumer resistance and modes of consumeroriented activism were constantly tried out. A Failed Consumer City Fast forward five years, however, theories and critiques of consumerist society and possessive individualism (Graeber, 2011) have to a certain extent been made redundant. As Skoros, an anti-consumerist collective put it: “When we started Skoros… everything was easier. It was much easier to propose anticonsumerism, re-use, recycling and sharing practices. Later however the economic crisis arrived—of course the social and cultural crises pre-existed—and made us feel awkward. How can one speak of anti-consumerism when people’s spending power has shrunk considerably? How can one propose a critique of consumerist needs when people struggle to meet their basic needs?…” (leaflet by Skoros, Dec 2011). Indeed, Athens is now by and large inhabited by people who can no longer fully express themselves on the basis of what they consume and where. Their city is no longer a “world-class” city for consumption (Miles, 2010) and cannot pr