Alternative takes to the city 9781786302946, 1786302942

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Alternative Takes to the City

Engineering, Energy and Architecture Set coordinated by Lazaros E. Mavromatidis

Volume 5

Alternative Takes to the City

Edited by

Irini Micha Dina Vaiou

First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK

John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA

www.iste.co.uk

www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2019 The rights of Irini Micha and Dina Vaiou to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944557 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78630-294-6

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Irini MICHA and Dina VAIOU

ix

Chapter 1. A City of One’s Own. Territorialities of Migrant Women in Public Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Camille SCHMOLL 1.1. Migrant women in Southern Europe . . . . . . . 1.2. Diversity of migration patterns, but common subordination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3. An incongruous presence: moral geographies of the public space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4. And yet they go out: mixed uses of public spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5. In the interstices of the city . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6. Body politics in public spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.7. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1

..

2

..

3

..

5

. . . . .

. . . . .

Chapter 2. Spatialized Hierarchies: Mirror Effects Between Migrants and Non-migrants in Terzigno (Naples) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adelina MIRANDA 2.1. Scientific co-presence and research relations “at home” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2. Spatialization of migratory forms . . . . . . . . . . .

9 11 13 15 16

21

24 27

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Alternative Takes to the City

2.3. Tensions in and between domestic and public spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 3. The Power of Speed and the Governance of Space in Urban Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriella PAOLUCCI 3.1. For a definition of the concept of time—space compression. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2. The fragmented experience. Acceleration in the void and lack of time . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3. The power of resentment . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33 37 38

43

.....

44

..... ..... .....

49 55 57

Chapter 4. Gendered Aspects of the Everyday. Restructurings of Urban Life in Athens . . . . . . . . . . . Dina VAIOU

59

4.1. Spatializing everyday life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2. Everyday encounters in the neighborhoods of Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3. Living with “strangers”: reciprocal adaptations and invisible borders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 5. Children’s Everyday Flows and Networks in the Neighborhoods of Athens . . . . . . . . . Irini MICHA 5.1. Theoretical arguments. . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2. Alternating images of the city of Athens 5.3. The everyday life of children as a tool for approaching urban space . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62 65 74 76

81

...... ......

85 87

...... ...... ......

93 96 98

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vii

Chapter 6. Social Citizenship and Social Movements in Response to Housing Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Marisol GARCÍA 6.1. Building up an urban social movement and achieving national recognition 2009—2011 . . . . . . 6.2. The PAH innovative strategies and objectives 6.3. Public visibility in the media: amplifying social action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4. Achieving policy results 2012—2015 . . . . . . . . 6.5. Institutionalizing policy from bottom-up claims: a fading away of the Platform’s presence from 2015 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.6. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . 106 . . 111 . . 113 . . 115 . . 118 . . 120 . . 122

Chapter 7. Reading Perceptions of the “Other” Through the Debates and Public Discourses about Islamic Religious Practices and the Presence of Mosques in Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Penny KOUTROLIKOU 7.1. Spatialities of integration (of faith groups) . 7.2. Religion and national identity in Greece . . . 7.3. Migration and violence in Athens . . . . . . . . 7.4. The (almost) “invisible” mosques in Athens . 7.5. Claims to recognition and acts of citizenship 7.6. In the end... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

127 131 134 137 140 143 145

List of Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153

Introduction Theoretical and Methodological Choices

This book has grown out of our interest in the particular ways in which urban life unfolds in the places where we do research and/or live. Among all of us who contributed to this book, we have over the years, exchanged ideas in formal and informal meetings and we have shared our concerns about the many silences and absences, from research and theorymaking, of processes and practices that we had identified as key components of the making of cities. Missing from the picture were the voices, concerns, and perspectives of those who do not hold positions of power, who are pushed to the margins on the basis of gender, ethnicity/race, social class, sexuality, age, and other axes of power and exclusion. However, subjects constituted along such lines, and, most importantly, combinations of these, have been systematically appearing in our own research, as major individual and collective actors, whose everyday practices contribute to making “our” cities livable. This book is a modest proposition for alternative perspectives based on such concerns, which, as expected, require different methodological approaches and priorities about theorizing.                                         Introduction written by Irini MICHA and Dina VAIOU.

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Alternative Takes to the City

Recent decades have been marked by rapid economic and social change — signaled by terms such as “globalization” and “post-industrial society” — in which cities play a central role. Speed also characterizes changes in the dominant discourse on space, which bring to the forefront new political concepts and priorities, new forms of governance, and also dynamic shifts in decision-making centers. Since the 19th century, theories and discourses on the city and urbanization have developed mainly within the historical framework and experience of industrialized countries. These theories are more related to social relations in these countries, their production organization, and their rates and forms of technological development. In this context, different histories of urban development, including those of Southern European cities, were perceived as “exceptional” or “divergent” processes. Among the “divergences” is the fact that the social state has rarely been involved in housing production, while employment and unemployment policies, and care for the elderly or children, among others, pre-supposed the involvement of the family — practically of its female members. Here, the state is a “carer of last resort” that contributes selectively and mainly through cash transfers (subsidies, pensions, etc.) and not through the provision of services (Bettio et al. 2006). This so-called “family” model of care has also marked the production of urban space where informal practices often predominate. These are held responsible for many of the negative characteristics of the urban structure, but at the same time, they have contributed to the formation of “interstices” where newcomers to the city have been able to integrate, thus reducing conflicts in the urban social geography. This condition has proven even more significant after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the opening of previously rigid borders, which led thousands of migrants to Southern European cities.

Introduction

xi

These changes, fueled by political upheavals in Europe and beyond, have helped to initiate a debate on the need to integrate into urban thinking the perspective of local particularities in various fields that influence development and urban life, such as the structure of the local economy, gender relations, migrant presence, diversity of cultural practices, access to housing, or mechanisms of building the city. The debate has been reinforced by significant volumes of research produced in “other” places since the 1970s and systematically communicated to the international academic community through not only conferences and academic journals but also Erasmus exchanges of students and staff. This debate has directly challenged theoretical proposals, as well as urban policies, which focus exclusively on macroeconomic processes and general(izing) interpretations of spatial restructuring. At the same time, abundant, and often contradictory, information causes embarrassment and confusion both to those who do research on the urban and to the everyday relationships in the city. In this context, it becomes urgent to compose new perspectives and alternative ways of approaching and understanding urban space, approaches that weave local particularities with the “big picture” and highlight the trajectories (local and global) that constitute the current conjuncture beyond its economic parameters. Our starting point (urban living) already points to an aim and a perspective. This book attempts to contribute to this effort by bringing together approaches to the city that aim to reveal the mosaic of relationships and sociospatial situations that make up the plurality of everyday space in contemporary cities. The authors of the various chapters share a theoretical framework that treats space as relational, as a product of interrelationships, a dynamic sphere of possibility and multiplicity in which distinct human trajectories coexist (Massey 2001). In other words, we approach urban places, not as sterile and static containers,

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Alternative Takes to the City

but, as Doreen Massey (1995) explains, as a meeting point and accumulation of particular elements. From this point of view, space contains its (own) history and at the same time follows a process of permanent change. From this perspective, the city is perceived as the space of the everyday — what Henri Lefebvre (1981: 131, 132) calls “the spectrum of the city”. The everyday brings together material elements, people, works, conceptions, representations, symbols, and lived experiences in many networks. This means that, in the space of the city, multiple stories can evolve at any given moment — perhaps insignificant, visible or invisible, repetitive or subversive, quite real but also imaginary. Henri Lefebvre’s work has taught us that space is as much socially produced as society is spatially constituted. The same applies to representations. Meanings, rules, and boundaries that are often considered given, “natural”, and indisputable appear under this open and constantly evolving prism — and space is the potential starting point for new and different explorations of other places (Soja 1999). More specifically, the reflections in this book are based on the multidisciplinary study of new forms of mobility, as well as their gendered and spatial implications, in the Southern European context and from a perspective particular to it. This context, characterized by great diversity, is perceived as a complex and contradictory space, i.e. a real laboratory for the local practice of the everyday, as well as for the globalization of flows and networks. On this basis, the authors try, in their various case studies, to highlight multiple aspects of urban life, particularly those that are the least visible, often ignored in the “big picture,” conflictual, and loaded with inequalities. By focusing on varied everyday practices and the struggle for the survival of different social groups, they review the timeless aspects of the city in different contexts and circumstances.

Introduction

xiii

The conjuncture of the current crisis has brought the countries of Southern Europe to the forefront of unpredictable political processes, whose imprint is increasingly evident, particularly in urban areas. The questions raised are numerous and concern both policies attempting to overcome the crisis and the impasses of “global” strategies, as well as the very divergent effects of the crisis in local contexts. The different examples of cities in this book refer to the period of the crisis but do not consider it as their main subject. Rather, the crisis is examined as a circumstance of spatial redefinition, expression of meanings, and alternative representations — allowing a re-interpretation of Europe’s cities in the light of recent socioeconomic, political, and ideological developments. The questions raised in the different chapters include the following: when urban time accelerates and extends over 24 hours, how do different social groups experience the everyday; what is the impact of the shrinking and/or restructuring of social services which used to be generalized; how are the geographies of fear and insecurity mapped onto urban space; what are the processes of debt accumulation and the issues of exclusion/access to housing; how is a way of living “together and apart” shaped with migrant and refugee populations in everyday spaces; what perceptions of urban space do children develop in multicultural societies; and what is the imprint of global mobilities on urban space and society. The texts come from different scientific fields and follow more or less similar points of view and structure: they start with a scene or a snapshot of empirical research. This scene is then analyzed theoretically to conclude with an alternative proposal, providing analytical and methodological tools for the approach of urban space. However, the proposed tools are not passe-partout; they provide inspiration for adaptation to different sociospatial contexts. The first four chapters adopt a gendered and spatial perspective that reveals multiple aspects of the

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everyday lives of women (migrant and non-migrant) in cities in Southern Europe. Camille Schmoll proposes a reading of public spaces in Southern European cities through the specific spatialities and temporalities of migrant women, which she considers to be a good key to understanding the relationship that these female migrants have with host societies. Based on observations made in the context of ethnographic studies in Nicosia, Valletta, Rome, and Naples, she underlines the narrow limits of the dominant vision of public/private relations and reveals the complexity of sociospatial constraints, exclusions and inequalities, and the practices that reproduce or redefine them. She thus manages to explore how public space could contribute to the creation of migrant agency and at the same time shed light on how migrant women, through their practices, contribute to redefining what public space is. Adelina Miranda, by presenting in an original way the processes of gendered spatial inclusion and exclusion in the region of Naples in Italy, highlights how, over time, the gap between an egalitarian ideal of the city and strongly gendered local spatial practices has widened. In this context, the analysis of differences and similarities between migrant and non-migrant women assumes a fundamental theoretical relevance in understanding how exploitation, subordination, and othering can determine the naturalization of relationships of domination between and within gender. Gabriella Paolucci, in her text, takes up the temporal dimension, highlighting how time, transformed into a commodity, penetrates deeply into the structure of contemporary everyday experience. Thus, the city appears as a temporal power machine that marks the rhythms of collective and individual time. Nevertheless, in this process, women and men are affected in different ways: women’s time

Introduction

xv

budgets are highly fragmented and heterogeneous, beyond a dominant normality. Dina Vaiou, through examples of care restructuring in the city of Athens, also adopts the everyday as a theoretical perspective that traces the multiplicity and dynamics of urban life, helping to revalue aspects that tend to disappear. Thus, she highlights the multiple practices and encounters in everyday spaces that have contributed to the familiarization with difference as well as to its “ordinariness” and “domestication,” especially among the new generations. Adaptations and transformations are more reciprocal than is usually thought and provide clues as to how “living together” has gradually been achieved. She argues that care work, to which women contribute abundantly, is a common “missing piece” in the puzzle of this “living together” and of day-to-day survival in the city — a piece that gains particular importance in the context of the persisting crisis. Irini Micha, based on the theoretical framework that considers everyday life as an essential tool for the study of the urban, is interested in the complex relationships that children have with the city. She highlights the questions that the child’s spatial gaze raises about some theoretical certainties and proposes a re-reading of the city of Athens through the habits, routines, and sociospatial networks that develop around their everyday movements. The study of the school district in many educational processes reveals what is at stake today in various places in the center of Athens, and helps to shed light on different aspects of the crisis and to bring out of the shadows the practices that continuously challenge the normative dichotomies of the dominant narrative, both for childhood and for its spaces. The following two chapters focus on issues that have emerged in the current crisis in particular. Marisol Garcia analyzes social movements in response to housing needs that

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have emerged in Barcelona and quickly spread to other cities in Spain. In this text, she highlights their innovative capacity as political actors who have successfully moved from the local to the European level. By focusing on the ways in which the housing crisis, which has left thousands of families homeless, has triggered major social and political actions, she shows how a social movement can play a pivotal role in urban everyday life and, conversely, how the role of the city, as an important framework for social action, can contribute to the formation of new forms of solidarity and urban citizenship. Penny Koutrolikou, for her part, presents a reading of perceptions of the “other” through public debates and discourses on Islamic religious practices in the center of Athens. She identifies the intermediate gray areas between invisibility practices and visibility claims, between recognition and difference, and between formality/ informality in its public articulations, where it is clear that integration is deeply rooted in the definitions of public and private spheres, spaces and practices, as well as in the struggles that concern them. The authors of this book have intentionally considered population movements within and across national borders as a key issue in their research. This applies both to the chapters in which migration is an explicit focus of research and to those that, at first reading, seem to have a different focus. On the other hand, gendered perspectives, and, more specifically, combinations of gender with other markers of inequality and difference, shape alternative understandings and interpretations of public/private divisions, shifting boundaries between “us” and “them” (or identity/otherness), presences and absences in urban debates. In this sense, the contributions to this book, along with other approaches to the urban, transpose research interests toward the practices and concerns of individual and

Introduction

xvii

collective subjects, generally left in the margins of mainstream analyses. By engaging with these subjects, in all their variety and specificity, these chapters unveil different instances of urban life in which everyday spaces and times become fields of communication, exchange, and familiarization with difference and contribute to shaping conditions for living together, within and beyond the current crisis. They also unveil a multiplicity of cultures, dynamics, struggles, conflicts, and negotiations which shape the multiple identities of cities and the processes that contribute to social cohesion and make cities and localities habitable places. To these ends, complex and penetrating methodologies are mobilized, which ultimately result in “alternative truths” and enrich our ways of knowing. Crossing geographical scales and passages from general data and theoretical conceptions to concrete places and to the experiences of particular embodied subjects (and vice versa) reveal different but equally important aspects of the issues under study. They help shape approaches that consciously oscillate between, on the one hand, discourses and explanations constituted by “big pictures” and global analyses, and on the other hand, urban space and the spatialities produced by the bodily presence and everyday practices of individuals and groups, urban residents who actually exist. Thirty years ago, Michaël Papayannakis (1989), in his contribution to the special issue of the Monde Series of the magazine Autrement, titled Grèce un théâtre d’ombres (Greece, a shadow theatre), referred to the “demon of the Greek race” — the “para-economy”1 — one of the                                         1 A necessary and useful neologism, as Papayannakis, among others, described it, explaining that “all the other denominations (underground, informal, submerged, illegal, parallel, black economy...) refer to experiences and forms, certainly similar, but

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characteristics that reinforced the perception of a gap within Western economic development models. He explained how there is an “other Greece”, which the official state pretends to ignore and which everyone knows. This “other” aspect of the country was becoming more and more complex at the time and, little by little, gave way to perplexity and anger. The current crisis is not independent of how dominant narratives treat the world of informal work (migrant and non-migrant), as well as the state’s traditional relationship with them. This “other” face of the city, as well as various other distinctive features, revised the simplistic theoretical categorizations and generalized the national representations. Their fluidity reveals an everyday that is conflict-ridden, complex, multicolored, and certainly interesting. The chapters of this book, each in their own way and through the object of their research, and also all together, contribute to placing emphasis on these obscure and little discussed aspects of moving toward “alternative takes to the city”. Acknowledgments Before concluding this introduction, we would like to thank Lazaros Mavromatidis, Associate Professor at INSA, Strasbourg, and Director of the series “Engineering, Energy and Architecture” at ISTE, for his proposal to undertake this work and for his encouragement throughout the process. We would also like to extend our thanks to the colleagues who read and commented on the draft versions of each chapter: Prof. Claire Colomb, University College London; Prof. em. Maria Dolors Garcia Ramon, Autonomous University of Barcelona; Prof. Ares Kalandides, Manchester Metropolitan University; Dr. Phevos Kallitsis, Senior Lecturer, University of Portsmouth; Prof. em. Maria Mantouvalou, National                                         which risk erasing the remarkable, even confusing, particularities of the phenomena that develop under the Greek sky” (p. 146).

Introduction

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Technical University of Athens; Prof. Maria Prats, Autonomous University of Barcelona; and Dr. Dimitra Siatitsa, National Technical University of Athens. Their contribution to improving our texts has been significant. Finally, we would also like to thank Caroline Babilotte for her meticulous work in the production of this book and for her patience with our divergent temporalities. References Bettio, F., Simonazzi, A., and Villa, P. (2006). Change in care regimes and female migration: The ‘care drain’ in the Mediterranean. Journal of European Social Policy, 16(3), 271—285. Lefebvre, H. (1981). Critique de la vie quotidienne. L’Arche Editeur, Paris. Massey, D. (1995). The Conceptualization of Place. In A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, Jess, P. and Massey, D. (eds). The Open University, Oxford. Massey, D. (2001). Philosophy and Politics of Spatiality. School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens — Editions A. Papasotiriou, Athens. Papayannakis, M. (1989). Le démon de la race. In Grèce. Un théâtre d’ombres, Cogné, C. and Ouvry-Vial, B. (eds). Autrement, Paris, 39. Soja, E.W. (1999). Thirdspace: Expanding the scope of the geographical imagination. In Human Geography Today, Allen, J., Massey D., and Sarre P. (eds). Polity Press, Cambridge.

1 A City of One’s Own. Territorialities of Migrant Women in Public Spaces

In Garibaldi Square, Naples Every Sunday morning, dozens of Ukrainian women occupy Garibaldi Square in Naples, especially the pavement in front of the station. They settle there in groups, of three to four women. They discuss and exchange news. Sometimes, in Garibaldi Square, swarms of Neapolitan men move from group to group and try to make contact. They come to look for badanti to enjoy a pleasant moment of flirtation, or even more if sympathy is developed. Ukrainian women have a bad reputation among Italian women: coming alone from their country of origin, they are known as husband stealers. What is certain is that over the years Garibaldi Square and its surroundings have become fundamental places of sociability for these women (Miranda 2006). And if the station square contributes to forging the bad reputation of Ukrainian women, there are other spaces where, thanks to a sense of                                         Chapter written by Camille SCHMOLL.

Alternative Takes to the City, First Edition. Edited by Irini Micha and Dina Vaiou. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Alternative Takes to the City

“entre-soi” (or in-group sociability), one can distance oneself from an everyday life that systematically refers to a subordinate identity of a domestic worker living with an employer: this is the case of the “Russian market” situated at Via Marina where the women go, coming from Garibaldi Square, by taking Corso Lucci. There, dozens of vans from Eastern Europe bring in and take back news, food, and all kinds of consumer goods. There, women are less bothered by men and can buy and exchange all types of products, local or from their own country1. 1.1. Migrant women in Southern Europe This chapter analyzes the place of migrant women in public spaces of Southern European cities, based on the principle that it constitutes a good key to interpreting and understanding the relationship that migrant women have with host societies. Public space is understood here both as a material context and as “the sphere where representations of different audiences are linked to social imaginaries” (Dines 2016). This context is marked by expectations toward certain populations, which come to constitute various moral geographies (Lieber 2016). In the case of migrant women, this space is constituted according to orders of legitimacy, visibility, and desirability that reveal the dual situation of subordination in which they find themselves, as women and as migrants. However, in societies that confine migrants to the private space of work and home, public space can also be a resource space. The aim is then to explore what contribution public space can make to the creation of a migrant agency (Caillol 2018), in the context of highly tense spatial practices. However, it is also a case of shedding light on how, through their practices, these women contribute to                                         1 Observations carried out in spring 2007.

A City of One’s Own. Territorialities of Migrant Women in Public Spaces

3

redefining what public space is. Far from being accessible to all in the same way, this complex space is crossed by multiple contradictions between cohabitation and separation, between diversity and self-segregation, in a double context of urban and social change (Fleury 2007). This chapter is based on the observations made in the context of ethnographic studies conducted since the early 2000s on the spatial practices of migrants in Southern European cities (Nicosia, Valletta, Rome, and Naples). In these Southern European cities, women often appear in public spaces in groups or “bands” (Schmoll 2005). This chapter focuses on the stakes related to research on/with these groups. 1.2. Diversity of subordination

migration

patterns,

but

common

There is a lot of work on female migration in Southern Europe2, and it can even be said that it is a very important part of the field of gender and migration research. This work shows us that not only were these women often part of the first waves of migration to Southern Europe but that they are also still numerous, if not in the majority among migrants, in most Southern European countries. As workers, these women have higher participation rates in the labor market than women in host countries. They often occupy gendered niches as precarious and/or unskilled workers (domestic and care workers, agricultural workers, sex workers, small traders, waitresses, and hostesses). As feminist law scholars have shown, the very system of regulating migration in Southern Europe allows for the recruitment of these women, whether they are the famous                                         2 See, among many others: Andall (2000); Anthias and Lazaridis (2000); Parrenas (2001); Vaiou (2002); Oso Casas (2006); Miranda (2008); Calavita (2005, 2006); and Slany et al. (2010).

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Alternative Takes to the City

badanti (life assistants; Catanzaro and Colombo 2009; Miranda 2008), domestic workers and cleaning women in Spain and Greece, agricultural workers under contract in Spain (Zeneidi 2011), or domestic workers in Cyprus, subject to a temporary visa policy (Christodoulou and Zobnina 2015; Trimikliniotis and Demetriou 2014). Overall, although this observation should be qualified according to the country, the economic crisis of the late 2000s seems to have had less impact on the presence of migrant women than that of men in the labor market (Caritas 2013): according to some interpretations, this is due to the fact that their wage situation was already so disadvantaged compared to that of men, where, paradoxically, their jobs were more resilient to the attacks of the crisis and the fall in income, and to the inflexible need for these women in certain sectors. Country

Female residents born abroad (outside the EU)

Resident population born abroad (outside the EU)

Female share of the resident population born abroad (outside the EU)

Greece

459,254

905,244

50.7

Italy

2,149,596

4,216,330

51

Spain

2,145,010

4,081,245

52.5

Cyprus

34,232

60,018

57

Malta

16,299

35,911

45.4

Portugal

347,729

636,104

54.7

Table 1.1. Share of women in the non-European population born abroad (Eurostat)

These migrant women are also mothers and daughters, and wives and partners, who have been able to migrate as a family or, conversely, come alone to Southern Europe. Many of them have developed strategies of transnational circulation, care, and welfare and maintained close links

A City of One’s Own. Territorialities of Migrant Women in Public Spaces

5

with the families in their country of origin; others have initiated forms of family reunification. However, beyond the great diversity of migration patterns that we have just described, there are some common points among all these migrant women, including the fact that private space, for them, rarely represents a space of autonomy and security. The relationship that women have with their home space is much more ambivalent than in most of the host country’s families. They are often in precarious residential situations: constrained housing, employee housing, working at home, house-sharing, and so on. This has a strong impact on these women’s relationship with public space because it is sometimes the only space in which they can “breathe” and take a little time away from the difficulties of everyday life. However, while there is a lot of research on these women, little research has highlighted the impact that their dual condition of subordination — as migrants and as workers — has on their relation to the city. The territorialities of migrant women in public spaces therefore constitute, in this text, our prism for reading urban spaces. These territorialities are sometimes imposed and suffered by women, but they can also constitute spaces for negotiation and temporary autonomy: “counterspaces” (Caillol 2018; Huang and Yeoh 1999). These migrant territories can only be conceived in relation to the other spaces experienced by these women (work space and home space), in line with the relational approach proposed by Doreen Massey (2004). 1.3. An incongruous presence: moral geographies of the public space The moral geographies of female migration are ambivalent: if the presence of women in these spaces is eminently desired by some, it is at the same time considered

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as a form of degradation of the public space by others. In all cases, these two representations refer to the same process of othering the migrant presence. Indeed, the presence of women in the public spaces of Southern European cities is doubly incongruous, even exotic. Firstly, it marks the emergence of a migrant presence which “is often perceived and depicted as a public problem” in these societies that have become host societies in just a few decades. Indeed, Southern European societies are struggling to cope with this migration shift, which has suddenly made them destination countries in addition to traditional countries of departure3. These migrant populations were becoming resident through major regularization operations in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as through the emergence of second generations, well before what was called the migrant crisis (Barbagli and Schmoll 2011). These countries are currently facing a major paradox: a sizeable population that is foreign and of foreign origin without, however, this situation significantly influencing political decision-making in the direction of improving the rights and status of migrants. And yet, these successive arrivals of migrants transform the landscapes and everyday life of medium-sized and large cities in Southern Europe and destabilize “local narratives” (Amato et al. 1999; Cattedra 2006; Schmoll 2001; Schmoll and Semi 2013). Cities become translocalities, to use Michaël Peter Smith’s expression (1999), namely, places crossed by flows of diverse origins, connected to other places on a global scale and transformed by these connections. In contrast with representations of urban planning based on the paradigm of sedentary and residential living (Martinotti 1999), and spatially bounded and sealed visions of neighborhoods                                         3 The most recent research shows that Southern European emigration has never really stopped and has, above all, increased sharply since the 2008 crisis.

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(Tarrius 1992), these connections make it impossible for any perspective of urban space to be anything other than relational (Massey 2004). This is because migrants, through their practices of movement, constantly connect workplaces and places of consumption and sociability, places of origin and destination, and day and nightlife locations, constituted through interconnections here and elsewhere (Schmoll 2004). In public spaces, migrant men and women establish forms of ordinary cosmopolitanism, sociabilities that would fit with what Wessendorf has coined as “commonplace diversity” (Wessendorf 2014). In the end, it is a discreet globalization that seizes the public spaces of these cities, whose so-called “ethnic” neighborhoods, which are in fact cosmopolitan and multicultural neighborhoods, are the best known and perhaps the most successful form. Some migrant women also distance themselves from these neighborhoods: in the face of the social control that men in their community may exercise over them, they seek housing and hang out in more ordinary neighborhoods, thus contributing to a desegregative dynamic (Schmoll 2004). In any case, all urban issues, whether they concern the use of public spaces, the functioning of the housing market and local labor markets, can only be addressed by taking into consideration this migrant presence that makes Southern European cities increasingly diverse (Vertovec 2007), even if this diversity is sometimes accepted with difficulty. In view of another form of globalization of spaces, much more desirable this time, namely tourism4, international migrations collide with their own undesirability. In this light, we can also interpret the many racist acts suffered by migrants in recent years in the public spaces of Southern European cities. They function as admonitions, reflecting the thin line between the acceptance of the other, and especially the racialized other, in public space.                                         4 According to UNWTO, Mediterranean Europe is the world’s leading tourist region.

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It is a strange paradox, since this very female Other has for decades been a labor force and a driving force for growth within households, as well as in factories, hotels, farms, and agriculture. This is what makes this relationship unique in public space, a space in which, unlike workplaces, the presence of migrant women should not manifest itself. And yet, in these countries, the figure of the immigrant (male or female) is born with their appearance in public space, including as a worker: the street or beach and market trader was indeed one of the first figures to appear in the migratory imagination of Southern European societies (the Senegalese street trader, the so-called “vu’cumpra”, in Italy). In other words, the impossibility of keeping the migrant presence at bay (or invisible) is a source of anxiety for host countries. There is, however, another reason why the presence of migrant women is an incongruous presence in the public spaces of Southern European cities: these spaces are still highly masculinized today. In these societies, the presence of women is highly standardized and regulated according to specific visibility/invisibility regimes. Women who cross these urban public spaces must have a goal, they must work hard, with an objective, at the risk of running into the stigma of being seen as women with bad morals5 (Miranda 2006, 2015). This “moral risk” of women’s presence in public spaces has a history and a geography, and it is even stronger in times of uncertainty, change, or economic depression, as Dina Vaiou has very clearly shown in the case of Athens (Vaiou 2014). Eventually, the public spaces of Southern European cities are aging spaces, like the corresponding societies where youth migration is constantly increasing and where generational renewal is threatened (Cremaschi 2015). Beyond a perspective opposing migrant and local people, it is therefore also necessary to integrate a generational aspect into our reading of urban space: women                                         5 See also, in other contexts: Coutras (1998) and Lieber (2016).

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often represent a young population6 in these aging societies. In the case of migrant women, their presence in public space is experienced and represented as a sign of “availability”, which would represent a threat to the social order of the countries and cities that host them. The stigma of being a sex worker is never very far from these representations: it is often the only explanation we find for the presence of these women in these spaces. It can be seen that what poses a problem in this moral geography of public spaces is the question of visibility, which contributes to defining orders of urban legitimacy: the presence of women can only be accepted when they are at work. 1.4. And yet they go out: mixed uses of public spaces However, in public spaces, migrant women are not always present with a purpose, a matter that they should focus on. First, they may have several purposes: meeting people, finding work, or exchanging news from their country. Some create small activities in public space and offer small services, such as Polish hairdressers in the car parks in Rome studied by Serge Weber (2004). This mix of uses of public space is even characteristic, with public spaces pairing this utilitarian function of linking supply and demand in different sectors with that of spasso, entertainment. These women have an appointment with their friends after Mass, they go shopping and eat together, or sometimes they simply “hang out”. In the purest tradition of urbanity (Lévy 1999; Wirth 1938), migrant women contribute to the density and diversity of space appropriation. However, it is not only a right to the city that is claimed through their practices but also a right to pleasure and idleness, and even to boredom.                                         6 Although women over the age of 40 may be numerous in some groups.

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Every Sunday morning, Asian women (Filipino, Sri Lankan, Vietnamese) occupy the Nicosia bus station area. These women set up a few stands on the sidewalks with food and everyday consumer products (clothes and bags, communication devices). These micro-businesses function as aggregation points, urban devices that allow saleswomen to catch the attention of passers-by, especially co-ethnic women, and to enter into conversations and negotiations as well. Women’s presence around the bus station arouses the interest of older Cypriot men. The interactions between these local men and these migrant women are most often brief. But they are particularly revealing of the social relations characteristic of Southern European societies, where the presence of women — ethnicized and racialized — in certain public spaces is disruptive. They testify to the intertwining between migration regimes and the use of spaces. In the case of Cyprus, this asymmetrical relationship reaches its climax insofar as, for migrant female domestic workers, one of the only ways to remain in Cyprus legally, when their temporary visas expire, is to marry a man and have a child from that union. For these women, finding a good papu (literally, a grandfather) is the only protection against Cyprus’ hostile migration policy7. This mix of uses that women develop in public spaces is of course strongly constrained, in terms of space and time. The ways in which women make use of public space thus permit readings and re-readings of the ordinary transformations of urban societies in Southern Europe. Indeed, research on cities in Southern Europe has long stressed the structuring                                         7 Observations carried out in May 2013 and June 2016.

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role of public spaces between cosmopolitanism and social mix: there may have been a model of the piazza or agora of Southern Europe, often idealized as a porous space, open to all (Dines 2016; Pfirsch and Semi 2017). But this work was followed by a generation of more critical studies that showed the limits of a vision of Mediterranean public space that would resist segregation. On the one hand, this work has shown how neoliberal regeneration operations and gentrification processes targeting some of these areas have undoubtedly taken place in different ways than those in English-speaking and/or Northern European countries; nevertheless, they have led to lasting and violent forms of exclusion. On the other hand, such work has also shown how access to public spaces in Southern Europe was deeply regulated according to the origin of individuals and their gender, class, or race affiliations (Baudry 2017; Dines 2002, 2010, 2016; Rossi 2000). Nick Dines has thus shown, for example, how the urban regeneration operations carried out in Piazza Garibaldi in Naples ignored the migrant presence, which must often be confined to areas that have remained in the shadow of urban renewal (Dines 2006). 1.5. In the interstices of the city Although it is not possible to propose models for locating migrant women practices in Southern European cities, it is possible to note some common features of their urban practices and the spaces they frequent. As a result of Dina Vaiou’s work, the experience of women can be considered as an interstitial experience. When Dina Vaiou proposed the term “interstice”, she was referring to the situation of Albanian women in Athens: she has shown how expressions such as “segregated city” or “dual city” were not appropriate to describe the situation of women whose mobility in urban spaces was varied and extensive and could under no circumstances be reduced to ethnically distinct neighborhoods or spaces. Following Vaiou, interstices can be

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defined as spatial and/or temporal situations that the inhabitants of the city have not yet or only somewhat appropriated, thus making them more accessible to women. The notion of “spatial interstice,” in particular, refers to abandoned, neglected, or marginal spaces underutilized by the locals: gardens, roundabouts, sidewalks, spaces at the margins of urban regeneration operations, wastelands undergoing regeneration, or planning operations that have failed. The Neapolitan seafront of Via Marina or the parking lot of the Ostiense station in Rome, both appropriated and used temporarily on Sunday mornings, are good examples. This is also the case of the square in front of the centro direzionale area in Naples, a gigantic urban planning operation that failed even before its beginning, carried out at a time when public space was not an architectural priority for the city, and whose esplanade was furiously neglected until the arrival of the Ukrainian women. These are interstices in the sense that they are not high places, strategic nodes, or landmarks, to use Lynchian terminology. These are trivial spaces, saved by the presence of migrant women from the status of being non-places. The notion of “temporal interstice”, on the other hand, refers to the times during the day or night, working days or days off, during which these women use these spaces. Sunday is usually the most important day in terms of women’s territoriality in public space and their visibility: while many Southern European families still respect the Sunday break and stay at home, these women, for whom Sunday is often their day off, meet in the public spaces of city centers. This is the case, for example, for the station square in Naples, the municipal park of Nicosia in Cyprus, or the public gardens in the Ostiense and Testaccio neighborhoods in Rome, which become picnic areas for women from Central and Eastern Europe.

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But the notion of temporal interstice does not only refer to the everyday dimension of urban time; it also refers to the longer term, that of the acceleration/deceleration of urban change in Southern European cities, which experience contrasting and complex dynamics of social transformation, between gentrification, patrimonialization, and touristification. From this point of view, interstice situations can last for several decades. In the city center of Nicosia, the double movement of deconcentration, marked by its abandonment after the war, and peri-urbanization, have made its appropriation possible: but in Nicosia, the first traces of gentrification, very slow and partial, are developing like bandages on the scars of the past, and one can imagine that, if the trend continues, migrant women and men will gradually be driven out of the center (Akoka et al. forthcoming). 1.6. Body politics in public spaces Women in public spaces take time for themselves and develop forms of sociability that are rarely mixed, that is to say not mixed at all. This is because, for many of these women, private space is a space of exploitation and public space becomes a place of recovery and amusement. Here, we touch on the paradox of moral geographies of migration: the places of visibility created in public spaces, often condemned by local society as places of debauchery, are actually places of “intimacy”, in-group sociability, and even places “of one’s own”, to use Virginia Woolf’s (1991) words. The empowerment and resource function of these spaces can be observed through the body politics that they initiate. Indeed, the bodies of migrant women can be considered a key issue in host societies. As a working tool for women, bodies are rarely recognized in public space other than as working bodies. In the media, female bodies are usually found in stereotypical, degrading, and stigmatizing forms. They are

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often the object of essentialist and naturalizing prejudices and represented “in relation”: the sex worker who leans against the window of a potential customer’s car, or a domestic worker who carries, accompanies, embraces, cares for, and supports, who is constantly with (children, the elderly or the sick). The bodies of these working women can thus be described and considered as relational bodies, as an extension of care work. In line with Donna Haraway, one could even speak of a hybrid or assemblage to qualify the working figures of migrant women (Gardey 2013; Haraway 2007). And at the same time, there is a need to keep these working bodies in society at a distance. Policies to move them around or relegate them to the outskirts or rural margins are perhaps the most obvious example (Dahinden and Lieber 2010; Lieber 2016; Saitta 2009). In the case of domestic workers, it is within the space of the home that the bodies of women are kept at a distance; the corporeality of migrant women must be as discreet and effaced as possible, despite their full-time presence. Employers will thus recommend that the domestic worker not cook foods different from those they usually have (for fear of being bothered by smells), retreat to their room at certain times of the day or the week, and be humble and quiet. From this point of view, migration is undoubtedly a bodily challenge, and it can also include a form of resilience/ resistance. Bodies can become ways to escape, places/locus of healing, of pleasure, and of care for the self. Bodies then become a resource. This is when the appropriation of public spaces becomes a place of bodily liberation. In Nicosia, some spaces act much less as spaces of encounter and interaction between groups than as places of in-group sociability. This is the case, for example, of Nicosia’s Central Park, which is frequently appropriated by Filipino women workers during holidays or gatherings. The

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women laugh, dance to the rhythm of various choreographies, from traditional dances of their region to Korean K-pop; they install a karaoke machine and engage in musical performances. They enjoy, around a buffet, culinary specialties that they cannot eat near their employer, who is too sensitive to the smells of their food. They practice sports there: hiking and volleyball matches. All these sensual and bodily pleasures allow them to be free or, at least, to escape the tensions of everyday life. In these spaces, for a Sunday, it is no longer a relational body but a liberated body, a resourceful and rediscovered body that takes over8. 1.7. Conclusion This is not to exaggerate the subversive scope of migrant territorialities in public spaces. First, their presence can lead to multiple admonitions in the form of bullying (insults, inappropriate gestures), to use Maryse Jaspard’s (2001) term, or even more violent physical attacks. Women try to protect themselves from these situations by adopting different tactics and strategies for collective safety: one of them is not mixing, the other is moving in groups (or bands: Schmoll 2005). However, these tactics are fragile, reflecting the position of these women in societies. What we can observe above all is that once these women’s positions in host societies have been consolidated, they will retreat into other types of spaces, often private (Miranda 2015). It is, therefore, high time to acknowledge the contribution of migrant women to the transformation of Southern European urban areas. The transient and minority centralities they create (Raulin 2009), and the territorialities                                         8 Observations carried out in May 2013.

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they develop, contribute to transforming the city through the use of urban regeneration practices from below, while also appearing as counterpoints of forms of exploitation and violence taking place in the private sphere. Finally, what can we think of the fragility of these practices in a context of crisis in Southern European democracies, as we can currently observe in Italy? The interstice is a form in tension and can be closed at any time. The cosmopolitan parenthesis of Southern Europe would then have lasted only for as long as the flutter of a migrant woman’s eyelash. 1.8. References Akoka, K., Bernardie-Tahir, N., Clochard, O., and Schmoll, C. (2013). Un dimanche à Nicosie. Available: http://migrinter. hypotheses.org/1301. Amato, F., Cattedra, R., Memoli, M., and Ventriglia, S. (1995). L’immigrato extracomunitario tra emarginazione e integrazione: Italia, Mezzogiorno, Campania. In Terra d’Africa, Turco, A.(ed.). Unicopli, Milan, 129—196. Andall, J. (2000). Gender, Migration and Domestic Service. The Politics of Black Women in Italy. Ashgate, Chippenham. Anthias, F. and Lazaridis, G. (eds). (2000). Gender and Migration in Southern Europe, Women on the Move. Bloomsbury, London. Barbagli, M. and Schmoll, C. (2011). Stranieri in Italia. La generazione dopo. Il Mulino, Bologna. Caillol, D. (2018). The Spatial Dimension of Agency: The Everyday Urban Practices of Filipina Domestic Workers in Amman, Jordan. Gender, Place & Culture, 25(5), 645—665. Calavita, K. (2005). Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Calavita, K. (2006). Gender, Migration and Law: Crossing Borders and Bridging Disciplines. International Migration Review, 40(1), 104—132.

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Caponio, T. and Schmoll, C. (2011). Lo studio delle seconde generazioni in Francia e in Italia. Tra transnazionalismo e nazionalismo metodologico. In Stranieri in Italia. La generazione dopo, Barbagli, M. and Schmoll, C. (eds). Il Mulino, Bologna, 103—146. Caritas. (2013). Dossier Statistico Immigrazione. Idos, Rome. Catanzaro, R. and Colombo, A. (2009). Badanti e co. Il lavoro domestico straniero in Italia. Il Mulino, Bologna. Cattan, N. (2012). Transterritoire — Repenser le lieu par les pratiques spatiales de populations en position de minorités. L’information Géographique, 2, 57—71. Cattedra, R. (2003). Espace public et cosmopolitisme: Naples à l’épreuve d’un inédit métissage urbain. Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 67, 313—344. Cattedra, R. (2006). Espaces publics et nouvelles migrations à Naples. In Villes méditerranéennes d’Europe et leurs périphéries, Crozat, D., Volle, J.-P. and Viala L. (eds). CNRSMTE Publications de l’Université Montpellier III, 79—101. Christodoulou, J. and Zobnina, A. (2015). Investigating Trafficking in Women for Labour Exploitation in Domestic Work: The Case of Cyprus. In “I Thought I Was Applying as a Caregiver” Combating Trafficking in Women for Labour Exploitation in Domestic Work. University of Nicosia Press, Nicosia, Cyprus, 37—82. Cremaschi, M. (2015). Questo non è un paese per giovani. In Città tra sviluppo e declino. Un’agenda urbana per l’Italia, Calafati, A. (ed). Donzelli, Rome, 227—242. Coutras, J. (1996). Crise urbaine et espaces sexués. Armand Colin, Paris. Denèfle, S. (2008). Utopies féministes et expérimentations urbaines. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes. Dines, N. (2002). Urban Renewal, Immigration, and Contested Claims to Public Space: The Case of Piazza Garibaldi in Naples. GeoJournal, 58(2—3), 177—188. Dines, N. (2010). Tuff City. Urban Change and Contested Space in Central Naples. Berghahn Books, New York.

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Dines, N. (2016). From ‘Southern’ to ‘Ordinary’. Méditerranée, 127 [online]. Available: http://journals.openedition.org/mediterranee/ 8480; doi: 10.4000/mediterranee.8480 [Accessed November 19, 2018]. Fleury, A. (2007). Les espaces publics dans les politiques métropolitaines. Réflexions au croisement de trois expériences: de Paris aux quartiers centraux de Berlin et Istanbul. PhD thesis, Université de Paris 1, 675. Available: http://tel.archivesouvertes.fr/tel-00259957/fr/. Gardey, D. (2013). Donna Haraway: poétique et politique du vivant. Cahiers du Genre, 55, 171—194. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women: Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books, London.

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Jaspard, M. (2001). Nommer et compter les violences envers les femmes: première enquête nationale en France. Population et société, 364, 1—4. Leontidou, L. (1990). The Mediterranean City in Transition. Urban Change and Social Development. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Levy, J. (1998). Le tournant géographique. Penser l’espace pour lire le monde. Belin, Paris. Lieber, M. (2016). Qui dénonce le harcèlement de rue? Un essai de géographie morale. In L’intersectionnalité. Enjeux théoriques et politiques, Fassa, F., Lépinard, E., and Roca i Escoda, M. (eds). La dispute, Paris. Martinotti, G. (1999). A City for Whom? Transients and Public Life in the Second-Generation Metropolis. In The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays on the Late-20th-Century City, Beauregard, R., Body-Gendrot, S. and Beauregard, L. (eds). Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks. Massey, D. (2004). Geographies of Responsibility. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86(1), 5—18. Miranda, A. (2008). Migrare al femminile: appartenenza di genere e situazioni migratorie in movimento. McGraw-Hill, New York.

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Miranda, A. (2015). Trouble des frontières spatiales. Assignation à l’espace domestique et appropriation de l’espace public par les femmes immigrées à Naples. In Espaces et rapports de domination, Clerval, A., Fleury, A., Rebotier, J., and Weber, S. (eds). Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 231—242. Oso Casas, L. (2006). Prostitution et immigration des femmes latino-américaines en Espagne. Cahiers du genre, 1, 91—113. Parrenas, R. (2000). Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor. Gender and Society, 14(4), 560—580. Pfirsch, T. and Semi, G. (2017). La ségrégation dans les villes de l’Europe méditerranéenne. Méditerranée, 127 [online]. Available: http://journals.openedition.org/mediterranee/8375. Raulin, A. (2009). Minorités urbaines: des mutations conceptuelles en anthropologie. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, 25(3), 33—51. Rossi, U. (2009). Lo spazio conteso: il centro storico di Napoli tra coalizioni e conflitti. Guida, Naples. Saitta, P. (2009). Un nuovo ordine per le strade. In Sex Industry. Profili economici e sociologici della prostituzione, Signorino, G., Saitta, P., and Centorrino M. (eds). Thinkthanks, Naples, 99—136. Schmoll, C. (2004). Une place marchande cosmopolite. Circulations commerciales et dynamiques migratoires à Naples, PhD thesis. Université Paris X, Nanterre. Schmoll, C. (2005). Pratiques spatiales transnationales et stratégies de mobilité des commerçantes tunisiennes. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales (special edition “Femmes, Genre, Migrations et Mobilités”), 21(1), 131—153. Schmoll, C. and Semi, G. (2013). Shadow Circuits: Urban Spaces and Mobilities Across the Mediterranean. Identities, Global Studies in Culture and Power, 20(4), 377—392. Slany, K., Kontos, M., and Liapi, M. (eds). (2010). Women in New Migrations. Jagielloian University Press, Cracow.

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Smith, M.P. (1999). Transnationalism and the city. In The Urban Moment: Cosmopolitan Essays for the 21st Century, Beauregard, R.A. and Body-Gendrot, S. (eds). Sage, London, 199—239. Trimikliniotis, N. and Demetriou, C. (2014). Cyprus. In European Immigration: A Source Book, Gropas, R. and Triandafyllidou, A. (eds). Ashgate, Aldershot, 45—58. Vaiou, D. (2002). In the Interstices of the City: Albanian Women in Athens. Espaces Populations Sociétés, 3, 373—385. Vaiou, D. (2014). Les aspects genrés de la crise à Athènes. Les cahiers du CEDREF. Centre d’enseignement, d’études et de recherches pour les études féministes, 21 [online]. Available: http://journals.openedition.org/cedref/979 [Accessed November 19, 2018]. Vaiou, D. and Liapi, M. (2010). Changing Patterns of Female Migration: Greece in a Southern European Perspective. In Women in New Migrations, Slany, K., Kontos, M., and Liapi, M. (eds). Jagiellonian University Press, Cracow, 201—232. Vertovec, S. (2007). Super-Diversity and its Implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30(6), 1024—1054. Wessendorf, S. (2014). Commonplace Diversity: Social Relations in a Super-Diverse Context. Springer, Berlin. Weber, S. (2004). Des chemins qui mènent à Rome: trajectoires et espaces migratoires roumains, urkainiens et polonais, PhD thesis, Université Paris 1, Paris. Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 1. Woolf, V. (1929). A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, London. Yeoh, B. S. and Huang, S. (1998). Negotiating Public Space: Strategies and Styles of Migrant Female Domestic Workers in Singapore. Urban Studies, 35(3), 583—602. Zeneidi, D. (2011). Migrations circulaires temporaires et déni de reconnaissance, l’expérience de l’injustice spatiale des ouvrières agricoles marocaines à Huelva (Espagne). Justice spatiale/ Spatial Justice, 3. Available: http://www.jssj.org.

2 Spatialized Hierarchies: Mirror Effects Between Migrants and Non-migrants in Terzigno (Naples)

Ismail: “I have not arrived in Europe” Ismail, 25 years old, arrived from Mali in November 2016 and has since been living in the Terzigno Reception Center. As he testifies, “Traveling was not at all easy. With God’s help, we got here. And today the situation has not calmed down at all, it is not what we want at all. Our dream has not yet been realized because in Africa what I thought was not at all like this. I don’t feel I’ve arrived in Europe. We haven’t gotten there yet. Some of the people we have made the journey with together are in Germany or France and we talk about the situations we live in. The way they explain it to us, I can see that there is a difference. They are in Europe, we are told that we are in Europe here, but why these differences then? Our patience here is because we want the documents, and then we go to France, Germany, and other European                                         Chapter written by Adelina MIRANDA.

Alternative Takes to the City, First Edition. Edited by Irini Micha and Dina Vaiou. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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countries. Because the way we are treated here is quite serious. Someone is breaking the law and there’s nothing you can do. We’re doing demonstrations, but it’s not working. Your rights, you can’t do anything about them. We want the operators to work for us. They have to take care of the people here. You work, they give you 10 euros for the whole day, but we have no choice, because we have to change clothes, we can’t find the cards to call home, we have to do it. That way, we accept the job if we find it. There are often very dangerous jobs, but that’s it, you take your risks” (Interview conducted in April 2018). In the current Italian context, the study of migrants and non-migrants in a relational perspective has both theoretical and political relevance1, which makes it possible to understand the links between the processes of otherness and naturalization of dominant relationships (Agier et al. 2008; Hovanessian et al. 1998; Martiniello and Simon 2005; Martuccelli 2004). The critical approach to the spatial dimension of social relationships complicates this analytical framework (Clerval et al. 2014; Denèfle 2004; Direnberger and Schmoll 2014; Mahler and Pessar 2001; Rey 2002). Indeed, adopting a gendered spatialized perspective to study migration questions the supposed neutrality of space based on a vision that opposes domestic space and public space. On the one hand, it makes it possible to study the symbolic and material values of forms of inclusion and exclusion (Low 2008), and on the other hand, to observe migration fields such as “mobility interconnected” (Hannerz 2010) that reorganize the productive and reproductive spheres (Miranda 2008).                                         1 The migration phenomenon has become increasingly trapped in an essentialist political discourse, and from the public arena, we are witnessing the production of discourses on migrant otherness that support migration policies.

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In this contribution, I will explore these issues in more detail with the case of Terzigno, a municipality in the Neapolitan suburbs2. In this municipality, migratory movements generate intertwining between the categories of migrants and non-migrants, and this process participates in the phenomenon of redefining foreignness and belonging. At the same time, migration reality is localized through a game of inclusion and exclusion that creates moveable and permeable borders, giving a new meaning to sociospatial proximity and distance. This process reflects the inseparable link between sedentariness and mobility, and shows that between “being here” and “not being here” the gradations are ordered from a hierarchical vision of otherness that produces accommodations, and also generates conflicts and tensions (Penttinen and Kynsilehto 2017). In what follows, I discuss the methodological issues of doing research “at home”; I explore in greater depth how different forms of migration coexist in the same space, and finally, I focus on the tensions between migrants and nonmigrants in both public and private places. Two hypotheses guide my reflection. The first is familism and heteronormativity structure of social relationships among the Terzignesi, and that these values give meaning and significance to the social and spatial practices of both migrants and non-migrants; the second is that the intertwining of different migratory forms demonstrates the difficulty in separating the categories of migrants and nonmigrants. To explore these questions, I adopt a spatialized approach based on the theoretical approach of A. Signorelli (1996) who considers human subjects as always localized and places as always subjectivized. Based on his proposal to study the relationships between subjects and places, I argue                                         2 Since 2015, Terzigno has been a part of the “Città metropolitana di Napoli,” one of the most densely populated areas in Italy, which, due to its geological position, is marked by volcanic and environmental risks.

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for the importance of adopting a localized approach3 in migration studies. 2.1. Scientific co-presence and research relations “at home” This chapter is based on the data collected during three visits to Terzigno in 2018, and it is also the result of longterm fieldwork which develops a reflexive methodology in the production of knowledge. Following this approach, it is important to underline that I am a native of Terzigno. Given my origins, it is easy to imagine that the Neapolitan region is very familiar to me. However, during each visit, it presents itself as a space of astonishment that constantly invites me to reflect on my main research theme, migration, and on how dialectic otherness/familiarity structure research relations (Ghasarian 2004; Ouattara 2004; Prébin 2009). My research therefore requires specific consideration of how the subjects understand my presence as a researcher and the tools that I use. During my field practice, I have given a predominant place to a form of observation organized over repetitive stays of variable durations, combined with in-depth interviews. I also questioned both my gender affiliation and my participation in multiple networks to understand the local dynamics. Regarding the first point, I had to take into account the responsibility that local society assigns to a                                         3 The localized approach refers to the importance of studying “small spaces” in order to examine how phenomena are localized. It is a methodological approach and also a procedure for analyzing social facts, because it makes it possible to find the influences or determinants of global processes in the local context. It goes past the classic monograph based on geographical or administrative division which values continuity and challenges ethnographic patterns that make community and locality coincide (Miranda 1997).

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woman (although she is absent on a daily basis) and, above all, I considered the controversies that accompany the lives of women who take care of their parents. Caring for the elderly involves a constraining organization of domestic life: from daily nursing to medical assistance, from meal preparation to the thorny issue of not leaving them alone at night. However, visiting public places also revealed to me the importance of my gender affiliation. All along the way from the train station to my mother’s house, the people I know have always kindly offered to travel home by car. It must be said that very often there is only me and foreign women on the street. An event allowed me to understand the importance of female presence in public space. During an observation on a Sunday in July 2008 at the main station in Naples — where foreign women go to meet each other — I was shouted at several times by men; the umpteenth proposal to have a drink together, I reacted firmly. I read the embarrassment on the face of this man who slipped in a sentence: “I didn’t think you were Italian”. With regard to the second point, it is important to recall that I was often presented or seen as “the daughter” or “sister” while being perceived as a university professor living in France. This bilocation strongly marked the progress of my research. For years, I alternated my life between the Parisian and Neapolitan suburbs, between work and family holidays. While working on how Terzignesi manage social relations with foreigners and the place they give to immigration, I was confronted with my “scientific copresence.” This concept is inspired by that of “migrant copresence” (Berthomière and Hily 2006). I intend to highlight a rupture with traditional ethnography which considered the spatiotemporal framework of investigation as stable, durable, and fixed in time and space. My experience shows the importance of considering the proximities and borders, contiguity and disjunctions, bifurcations and transitions created by carrying at several field research studies in identical and/or different temporalities.

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The reflection on “scientific co-presence” has enabled me to make three main observations. The first is that the relationship between subjects and researchers is also affected by mobility, and the researcher’s social and cultural pluri-belonging. The increasing complexity of the research world and the working conditions we face refers to the fact that a multiplicity of places of belonging or reference remains in the lives of both subjects studied and researchers. The second observation is that it is necessary to take into account the separation between the different worlds of work, emotional and family life, and the way in which the researcher crosses them and constructs their belonging. The researcher adjusts to the field, learns to manage their different implications4, to integrate the multiple and diversified perspectives that subjects have on them. The third is that we often make comparisons, implicit or explicit, through a mind that is not cumulative, but rather related to issues5. The practice of distant fieldworks — sometimes in space, sometimes in time, sometimes by theme — makes it necessary to explain how knowledge recomposed in an interpretative framework that goes beyond national contexts. In my research practice, the experimentation of distance is an intellectual procedure, based on the distance between the conceptual and interpretative frameworks and the emotional relationships we are surrounded by. This posture is similar to that of D. Haraway (2007), for whom personal                                         4 This posture allowed me to observe how the factor of territorial belonging and identity is combined in a changing way, moving from the extreme of great involvement to that of exteriority through all intermediate positions. 5 This ethnographic practice refers to the exercise of multi-sited ethnography as recommended by Marcus (1995) to develop the comparative dimension from fractures, discontinuities, and movements connecting various places as if they belonged to a single geographical map.

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factors are present in all scientific activities, although they can be declined under specific angles when applied in a specific when doing research at home. This position is in line with methodological feminism, which points out that the construction of scientific knowledge starts from the intersubjectivity and decentralization of the subject (Clair 2016; Ramazanoglu and Holland 2002). To pursue this objective, it is necessary to experience a shared production of knowledge. Following this recommendation, the text gives a significant part to the life stories of the subjects encountered. 2.2. Spatialization of migratory forms In 2017, 18,584 people resided in Terzigno, of which 2,650 (14.3% of the resident population) were foreign: 62% from China, almost 8% from Morocco, more than 7% from Ukraine, 4.5% from Nigeria, almost 5% from Bangladesh, 3% from Romania, 2% from Poland and 1.5% from Gambia6. This foreign presence links Terzigno to the flows that cross the Mediterranean while organizing it in the national and international space, as well as in the long history of Italian migration. Indeed, the case of Terzigno confirms that the migratory framework of the peninsula has been, and continues to be, stratified and that the intertwining of emigration and immigration, internal mobility and migration to and from abroad, mobility of emigrants between Italian regions, structures the local reality determining the coexistence of different migratory forms (Corti and Miranda 2018). Couple F.: an unfinished return Mr. F. was born in a village in the south of Campania in 1947. At the age of 15, he left for                                         6 https://www.tuttitalia.it/campania/19-terzigno/statistiche/cittadinistranieri-2018/.

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Germany to join his brother. “I had a brother in Germany. I was a minor, I couldn’t leave and my father had to sign the authorization for me. I entered a factory, learned typography, and I became an important person. What an idiot I’ve been (to come home)! For 8 years I was a member of the union, I was on the list of unions for foreigners because I spoke German very well. There were about 600 of us (workers) and they accepted 1 or 2 foreigners because the percentage of foreigners was high.” In this factory, he met his future wife, a native of Terzigno. Born in 1951, Mrs. F. had followed her sister, married to a Terzignese. “We met and got married 4 months after engagement. My family didn’t know him.” My mother said: “Are you crazy? You don’t know his family!” After their wedding in Terzigno, they moved back to Germany and settled in a rented house. “I always said: God, please let me have a house like this. I built a house like the one I had in Germany!” When her children were born, it became difficult to reconcile work and familial life. “I sent the children to kinderschol. In fact, I sent the eldest to Italy. It was my biggest mistake. My son still suffers from it today. Two were there and one was here.” In 1984, the couple returned to Italy and settled in Terzigno in the house they had bought with the savings made in Germany. After a difficult start, they improved their situation: they took over the management of their first store and then opened two others, which they managed with their children. After economic difficulties, the eldest son married and moved back to Germany, where he ran a restaurant with his paternal uncle. As Mrs. F. points out, “Now it is my son who is in Germany. He’s the best of my children, tidy and hardworking. When he was 15, he went to see his

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uncle who told him to stay. He came home, but his idea was to leave. After the sale of the business, he left. That is a great regret. I know it’s better than here, because I’ve been to Germany. But I don’t see the grandchildren all the time.” Mr. F. adds, “A boy like I was, we would like it in Italy. The best ones are leaving. I am 71 years old, but if I could, I would leave as well! Now they give you a place.” The presence of foreigners in Terzigno complicates their view of migration. As Mrs. F. points out, “I have my son in Germany, I have lived in Germany. I don’t want to talk badly about immigrants. But we’ve paid taxes, even for the church. For them, it’s different” (Interview conducted in August 2018). The life story of couple F. illustrates the long history that links Terzigno to Germany. During the 1960s, single men, couples7, and entire families left. Some of them returned during the 1980s, but many have settled permanently abroad or are moving back and forth. As shown in the case of couple F., these migratory chains are always open networks that can be reactivated if necessary, especially by young people. Indeed, in Terzigno, as in all of southern Italy, we are witnessing a resumption of migration, both abroad and in the north of the country. This mobility is structured around increasingly fluid and diversified individual routes (Colucci and Gallo 2017; Dubucs et al. 2017)8. Teachers make daily round trips between Terzigno and Rome; adults settle                                         7 As in the case of couple F, emigrants often entrusted their children to mothers and stepmothers who had remained in the country. 8 According to SVIMEZ (Associazione per lo Sviluppo dell’industria nel Mezzogiorno), about 1,800,000 people have left southern Italy since 2012: half of them were under 34 years old.

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permanently abroad or in the north of the country in search of a better-paid job; young people leave the municipality after completing their studies or during schooling to better prepare their professional careers. We are thus witnessing unprecedented migration situations. This is the case for Mrs L., who went to teach in an elementary school in a municipality in the province of Milan, taking her youngest son and mother with her; she entrusted her eldest son to her mother-in-law and her husband who ran a store. After 3 years, she was given tenure and her husband joined her after selling the house they owned in Terzigno to buy a new one. Mr S., born in 1986, studied in Naples at the Faculty of Engineering. After graduating in 2012, he immigrated to Milan where his brother — an engineer too — had already settled. Well, my brother’s presence influenced my choice; between going to Turin, where I didn’t know anyone, and Milan, where there was my brother, the choice was quickly made. As he points out, the offer from the job market has combined with the desire to change one’s life and especially to live in a big city. After working for 6 years for an American group, he is currently working for an Italian multinational. To support his project, Mr. S.’s mother guaranteed his mortgage. After his marriage and the birth of a child, Mr. S. can count on the help of both parents and parents-in-law if necessary. As for Mrs. L., her decision to leave Terzigno is accompanied by new forms of family care and economic real estate investments that transfer capital from the south to the north of Italy. The departures of the Terzignesi cross with the arrival of immigrants, especially the Chinese who represent the largest group9. As I had the opportunity to highlight in my                                         9 Already in 2004, 907 Chinese were officially present in Terzigno, out of a total of 1,028 foreigners. However, the scandal that broke out in March 2016 shows how difficult it is to keep count of them.

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research (Miranda 2007, 2014), their arrival is linked to the transformations of the region’s manufacturing industry. Until the 1980s, in Terzigno, small and even very small enterprises produced clothing for important apparel companies. Their international competitiveness was based on the use of an undeclared and poorly paid workforce, mainly women who often worked as seamstresses in their own homes. Over time, the Chinese have changed this system of production; they have opened first production workshops and then stores, and their presence has now become essential for the regional economy. However, the “commercial diversity,” i.e. the creation of proximity between natives and immigrants based on the sharing of the same workspace, is accompanied by a distancing process of the image of the Chinese trader. This practice is elaborated from local references, the Terzignesi attribute to the Chinese mafia structure that invades the entire economy. The immigration space of Terzigno was further complicated after the opening of a Centro Accoglienza Straordinaria (Extraordinary Reception Center) in 2015. This structure, which is isolated and not connected by any means of transport to the center of the municipality and the train station, accommodates more than 250 young asylum seekers, all of sub-Saharan origin, including from Nigeria, Mali, and Gambia. Their presence, which is increasingly stigmatized, is based on two representations. The first refers to an image of violent black young people broadcast by the media (Miranda 2018a) which is locally based on the story of two episodes. In July 2016, 18 asylum seekers were expelled from the center because they allegedly used “violent words                                         An investigation was opened against five people of Italian nationality, including two employees of the town hall of Terzigno, for issuing false residence certificates to Chinese in exchange for marriage; these documents were used to issue residence permits to those who did not live in Terzigno.

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and skills” regarding the manager10. On July 18, 2017, a Nigerian was murdered following an argument with another asylum seeker. The second reason is their visibility in the public space. These young men find themselves in the early morning — and sometimes all day long — at a roundabout selling their labor force. They walk or cycle11 long distances in search of low-paid work. They are thus integrated into highly marginalized economic interstices, particularly masonry and agriculture, where they work for about 10 euros a day12. The location of the Extraordinary Reception Center confirms that the way migrants occupy the inhabited space contributes to the development of its stratification and segmentation. In this regard, it should be noted that despite the risk of an eruption being present, since the 1970s, Terzigno’s area has become much denser due to two concomitant logics. The first is the modernization of traditional dwellings that were organized around the cortina, i.e. a common space surrounded by houses that generally consisted of a single room. The second is real estate speculation, which has partly allowed money laundering by the camorra, the local mafia. New buildings on several floors have been built, and in most cases, the old ones have been abandoned13. The various immigrant groups occupy this space differently. While people from the Central                                         10 Subsequently, thanks to the support of local associations, they were able to integrate other reception centers and continue to benefit from the protection system. 11 A store specializing in the sale of bicycles was opened just next to the structure. 12 There are rumors that young people are prostituting themselves for five euros. 13 The emigrants, as we have seen throughout the history of couple F, have contributed to changing the inhabited space: they have modified or built new houses which, especially for those who have not returned, have sometimes remained unfinished.

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and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) and African countries usually live in old houses, Chinese people rent workshops, shops, and apartments. Despite their economic integration, they rarely buy housing and often several families live in small buildings that have been built recently, but are not yet finished. 2.3. Tensions in and between domestic and public spaces The research I have carried out in the Naples region on immigrant women shows the tensions that cross domestic and public spaces (Miranda 2008). To understand this issue, it is necessary to consider that the “home service model” in Italy is supported by families who use the work of immigrant women. In most cases, they are employed as assistants for the elderly (badante) or cleaning women and by their work they seize the places of local intimacy by placing themselves at the heart of the division of labor that structures hierarchies between the private/public spheres (Coutras 1996; Tabet 1979). In Terzigno, the use of foreigners’ labor force follows the transformations of existing relations between capitalism and patriarchy (McDowell and Massey 1984) and also kinship relations14. Mrs. R., according to local custom, assisted her mother-in-law with another daughter-in-law until her death, allowing their husbands to share her retirement. However, the situation seems more difficult to manage with her mother: There are five of us children. I wanted to bring my mother back to my house, but one sister did not want to. Now, we no longer speak to each other, we would kill each other. Now there is a Polish woman15 and everyone takes my mother                                         14 Traditionally, caring for the elderly was a task for daughters-inlaw. 15 The term “Polish” is used to indicate any cleaning lady or badante, regardless of her nationality.

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home on Sundays. The presence of foreigners often plays a pacifying role in intergenerational relations, but their presence can be accompanied by strong tensions, especially when they work as assistants for the elderly during the day and during the night. In many cases, they do not have a personal room and may be subjected to verbal and physical abuse. To understand the tensions that cross the public space, it is necessary to take into account that the practices of immigrants “disrupt” the spatial boundaries developed by the local society (Miranda 2014). However, observation of subjects in public places shows that their stigmatization is only a manifestation of the sexual segregation that assigns women, both migrant and non-migrant, to the domestic space. The tensions experienced by foreigners must be linked to spatial heteronormativity and the Neapolitan migratory situation testifies to the fact that gender membership determines differentiated access to public space. Indeed, the women of Terzigno, especially the youngest, demonstrate an “egalitarian vision of space” (Denèfle 2004) which contrasts with spatial practices. Native women rarely walk the streets, cross the public space or use it to perform a specific task, and they settle there exceptionally, differently from men. In addition, there are still meeting places, i circoli, which are only frequented by men: they go there to play cards, watch TV (especially football matches), and spend their free time. Sara: “I never walk around” Sara, 21, a physiotherapy student, points out how from the age of 17 she started going out with a group of friends, but never walks to Terzigno: “There is never anyone on the streets, there is nothing. And behind my house, there are Poles

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drinking. It’s scary. My mother wouldn’t let me walk around. She’d be worried. Sometimes I wait for my friends outside the house, the cars pass by and they (the men) stare at you. And you develop anxiety.” Moreover, despite the fact that girls frequent the same places as boys, the practices and the remarks of the latter constantly put “them back them in their correct place”. “Boys can do anything and if we do something they do, for example, drink or dance, for them, you are not well.” Especially when “engaged” girls are even more heteronormative: often the girls no longer go out in groups, but only with their fiancé. “Their (boys’) idea is that the girl should stay at home.” With the arrival of immigrants, this heteronormativity has become racialized. Foreign women rarely go to cafés and when foreign men settle there “in 90% of cases”, there are fights that break out with the locals who “feel superior”. (Interview conducted in July 2018). Many of the migrant women I have met over the years have been confronted with the effects of the heteronormativity that Sara talks about. They testified to their difficulty in appropriating public places and the harassment suffered by young and old, on the street and in public transport. While native women still travel — even for short journeys — by car, foreign women — especially on Sundays, when most of them “are free,” — use public transport and meet in the vicinity of railway stations, in the gardens of the main squares or by the sea in neighboring municipalities. The temporalities of these collective spatial practices, which make their presence in the public space even more visible, are interpreted as a sign of their “availability toward men,” a stereotype that influences the representation of foreign women. In addition to the logic behind their

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subordinate place in the domestic space, there is the stigma derived from the way they use public places. The only way to escape this process is to hide from the gaze. As a result, over time, immigrant women are learning to use social and spatial local codes and are beginning to move away from public places, especially when they are in a relationship with a native man. Mrs. A.: “My partner and I always go out together” Mrs. A. worked as a chief accountant for 30 years in a large state-owned company in Bulgaria, before moving to Italy. “I was married to a soldier, he was very mean; he treated me and my son like soldiers. He was very egotistic... Following democracy, I lost my job and came here.” In 2004, to ensure her son’s studies, Mrs. A. decided to go to Italy. She needed 650 euros to pay for her trip, relying on a network of Bulgarians and Italians that she did not hesitate to define as “the mafia.” To finance the trip, she sold some of her jewelry. After various odd jobs, she arrived in Terzigno to take care of her current partner’s wife. After the woman’s death, Mrs. A. moved in with him and continued to work as a cleaner, always with the aim of subsidizing her son’s education. When he had completed his studies, she decided to stay in Terzigno with her partner. “(My companion) is a very good person. It’s stronger than love, because love can end. We always go out together, we go to cafés or restaurants. But I have a house in Sofia where I can return.” This accommodation represents a form of security for Mrs. A., as her partner is very old and his children have never integrated her into family life. They accuse her of having started the relationship with their father before the

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death of their mother; this is considered a sign of a lack of respect toward their biological mother (Interview conducted in August 2018). 2.4. Conclusion The Terzigno case shows, on the one hand, that gendered hierarchies structure the coexistence in the same temporalities and in the same spaces of different migratory situations and, on the other hand, it underlines the importance of analyzing migratory dynamics through a perspective of both relational and localized articulation. As Massey points out, “the notion of articulation. It is a move, in terms of political subjects and of place, which is antiessentialist, which can recognize the difference, and which yet can simultaneously emphasize the bases for potential solidarities” (Massey 1994: 8). This concept also makes it possible to understand the conflicts and tensions determined by the presence of foreigners in the “production of locality” (A. Appadurai). As Bauman (2005) underlines, the dynamics that accompany the arrival of foreigners in “our neighborhoods” reflect global forms of power, but it is in everyday life that they are put to the test. With the arrival of migrants, Terzignesi react not only to being next to each other, but to being next to others (Hannerz 2010) whom they consider to be profoundly different. This otherness is developed by mobilizing specific distinctive features (Barth 1995; Castellanos and Miranda 2005) referring to national origins and also to gender and race. In most cases, Terzignesi use national categories (Chinese, Polish, Bengali) or skin color to name their foreign neighbors. The “Black” population, as commonly defined as young asylum seekers, occupy symbolic places and materially at the margins of society, and are not considered to belong to the same native living space. Migrant women are subject to a process of gender-based stigmatization:

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assigned to the domestic space by their work, when they appropriate public places, they assume visibility that is negatively judged by Neapolitans. The spatial representations and practices of Terzignesi express the refusal to construct any form of shared proximity with immigrants. On the contrary, despite spatial remoteness, Terzignesi living abroad or in the north of the country are still considered as belonging to the category of neighbors and classified as Terzignesi. This case study shows that adopting a localized perspective provides a theoretical and methodological framework for considering the discontinuities, changes, and conflicts inherent in the relationships of domination that cross different forms of migration. They overlap and intertwine, arranging neighborhoods and localities that are configured as spatialized situations at the intersection of gender social relations, articulated on combinatorial places between the different migratory scales and the articulations between productive and reproductive spheres. 2.5. References Agier, M., Bazenguissa-Ganga R., and Mbembe A. (2008). Mobilités africaines, racisme français. Vacarme, (43), 83—85. Althabe, G. and Hernandez, V.A. (2004). Implication et réflexivité en anthropologie. Journal des anthropologues. Available: http://jda.revues.org/1633. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Barth, F. (1995). Les groupes ethniques et leurs frontières. In Théories de l’ethnicité, Poutignat, P. and Streiff-Fenart, J. (eds). PUF, Paris, 203—249. Bauman, Z. (2005). Vite di scarto. Editore Laterza, Roma-Bari.

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Berthomière, W. and Hily M.-A. (2006). Décrire les migrations internationales. Les expériences de la co-présence. Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 22(2), 67—82. Castellanos, A. and Miranda, A. (2005). Fronteras límites y fruentes. Alteridades, (30), 3—7. Clair, I. (2016). Faire du terrain en féministe. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, (213), 66—83. Colucci, M. and Gallo, M. (eds). (2017). In cattedra con la valigia. Gli insegnanti tra stabilizzazione e mobilità. Rapporto 2017 sulle migrazioni interne in Italia, Donzelli, Rome. Corti, P. and Miranda, A. (2018). Editorial: Coexistence, imbrication et superposition des flux migratoires italiens. Revue européenne des migrations internationales, 34(1). Available: http://journals.openedition.org/remi/9903. Coutras, J. (1996). Crise urbaine et espaces sexués. Armand Colin, Paris. Clerval, A., Fleury, A., Rebotier, J., and Weber, S. (2014). Espace et rapports sociaux de domination. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes. Denèfle, S. (ed). (2004). Femmes et villes. Tours, Maison des Sciences de l’homme “Villes et territoires”, Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, Toulouse. Direnberger, L. and Schmoll, C. (eds). (2014). Le tournant spatial dans les études genre. Les cahiers du CEDREF. Available: http://cedref.revues.org/953. Dubucs, H., Pfirsch, T., Recchi, E., and Schmoll C. (2017). Les migrations italiennes dans la France contemporaine. Hommes & migrations, (1317—1318), 59—67. Ghasarian, C. (2004). De l’ethnographie à l’anthropologie réflexive. Nouveaux terrains, nouvelles pratiques, nouveaux enjeux. Armand Colin, Paris. Hancock, C. (2014). L’espace ressource ou leurre: qu’est-ce que penser spatialement fait gagner et perdre à la réflexion sur le genre? Les Cahiers du CEDREF. Available: https://cedref.revues.org/958.

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Hannerz, U. (2010). Explorer la ville. La complexité culturelle. Études de l’organisation sociale de la signification. A la Croisée, Paris. Haraway, D.J. (2007). Manifeste cyborg et autres essais: sciences, fictions, féminismes. Exils Ed., Paris. Hovanessian, M., Marzouk, Y., and Quiminal, C. (1998). La construction des catégories de l’altérité. Journal des anthropologues, (72—73). Available: http://jda.revues.org/2694. Lefebvre, H. (1985). La production de l’espace. Éditions Anthropos, Paris. Low, M. (2008). The Constitution of Space. The Structuration of Spaces Through the Simultaneity of Effect and Perception. European Journal of Social Theory, (1), 25—49. Mahler, S. and Pessar, P. (2001). Gender Geographies of Power: Analyzing Gender Across Transnational Spaces. Identities, 7(4), 441—459. Marcus, G.E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sites Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95—117. Martiniello, M. and Simon, P. (2005). Les enjeux de la catégorisation. Revue européenne des migrations internationales. Available: remi.revues.org/2484; doi: 10.4000/remi.2484. Martuccelli, D. (2004). Figure de la domination. Revue française de sociologie, (3), 469—497. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place, and Gender. University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis, Minneapolis. McDowell, L. and Massey, D.A. (1984) Woman’s Place? In Geography Matters! A Reader, Massey, D.A. and Allen, J. (eds). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 124—147. Miranda, A. (1997). L’approccio localizzato. Un incontro mancato tra sociologia e etnologia. La Ricerca Folklorica, (34), 103—113.

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Miranda, A. (2007). Le commerce chinois: conflits et adaptations dans la structure socio-économique napolitaine. In Nouvelles migrations chinoises et travail en Europe, Roulleau-Berger, L. (ed). PUM, Toulouse Le Mirail, 161—178. Miranda, A. (2008). Migrare al femminile. Dinamiche culturali e appartenenza di genere in situazioni migratorie. McGraw-Hill, Milan. Miranda, A. (2012). Les enjeux des échelles migratoires. In Le genre au cœur des migrations, Cossée, C., Miranda, A., Ouali, N., and Sehili D. (eds). Petra, Bargoed, 21—25. Miranda, A. (2014). Los empresarios chinos en la realidad económica napolitana. In Precariedad urbana y lazos sociales. Una mirada comparativa entre México e Italia, Giglia, A. and Miranda A. (eds). UAM/UNIDAD LERMA, Mexico, 279—306. Miranda, A. (2015). Troubles des frontières spatiales. Assignations à l’espace domestique et appropriation de l’espace public par les femmes immigrées à Naples. In Espace et rapports sociaux de domination, Clerval, A., Fleury, A., Rebotier, J., and Weber, S. (eds). Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, 231—241. Miranda, A. (2018a). “Contrastes d’images. Les usages culturels de la figure des migrants arrivant en Italie par la Méditerranée. Revue Science and Video, (7). Available: http://scienceandvideo. mmsh.univ-aix.fr/numeros/7/Pages/02.aspx. Miranda, A. (2018b). Assegnazioni sociospaziali e accomodamenti locali delle politiche abitative nazionali nella banlieue parigina. Etnoantropologia, 3(2), 179—194. Available: rivisteclueb.it/ riviste/index.php/etnoantropologia/article/view/187. Miranda, A. and Signorelli, A. (eds). (2011). Pensare e ripensare le migrazioni. Sellerio, Milan. Ouattara, F. (2004). Une étrange familiarité. Les exigences de l’anthropologie «chez soi». Cahiers d’études africaines, (175), 635—658. Penttinen, E. and Kynsilehto, A. (2017). Gender and Mobility. A Critical Introduction. Rowman & Littlefield, London.

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Prébin, É. (2009). Trouver la bonne distance: étrangère, marginale, ethnologue et parente en Corée du Sud. Ateliers du LESC. Available: http://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/8214; doi: 10.4000/ateliers.8214. Ramazanoglu, C. and Holland, J. (2002). Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. Sage, London. Rey, M. (2002). Genre et lieux. Du neutre conceptuel à un nouvel ordre spatial urbain ? Espace, populations, sociétés, (3), 347—359. Signorelli, A. (1996). Antropologia urbana. Guerini, Milan. Staszak, J.-F. (2001). L’espace domestique: pour une géographie de l’intérieur [For an insider’s geography of domestic space]. Annales de Géographie, (620), 339—363. Tabet, P. (1979). Les mains, les outils et les armes. L’Homme, (4—5), 5—61.

3 The Power of Speed and the Governance of Space in Urban Life

Zhuangzi’s crab Among other virtues, Zhuangzi was skilled in drawing. The king asked him to draw a crab. Zhuangzi replied that he needed five years and a villa with twelve servants. After five years, he had not yet started drawing. “I need another five years”, said Zhuangzi. The king granted them to him. At the end of the tenth year, Zhuangzi took his brush and in an instant, with a single gesture, drew a crab, the most perfect crab we had ever seen (Calvino 1988). It is with this brief account that Italo Calvino concludes his lesson on Rapidity (Calvino 1988). The meaning of this story and its charm lie in the connection between Zhuangzi’s quick gesture and the long space of time that precedes it; a coming together that causes the reader a certain stupor, because it contrasts with common sense, according to which speed and slowness, and instantaneity and duration, are opposite dimensions. When the drawing appears in its perfection with the speed of lightning, we perfectly perceive                                         Chapter written by Gabriella PAOLUCCI.

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the need for integration between the speed of the gesture and the long duration that precedes it and the need for intertwining between the instantaneity of the drawing and the magnitude of the space (the villa with the 12 servants). This is what seduces and surprises, as is the case every time common sense is somehow taken in reverse: the speed with which Zhuangzi draws the crab is not opposed to slowness. It does not restrict time or space; it does not destroy them, but it feeds on them. As in the Latin maxim festina lente, here, duration is a constituent part of speed, just as space is a function of speed. Whether speed and slowness are perceived as dimensions that are mutually exclusive depends on the fact that the society in which we live is full of values and ways of acting that are inspired by this discrepancy. Indeed, the speed with which our social model is nourished is of a different nature from the idea that Calvino wanted to bequeath to the future. It is deeply marked by a chronophagous trend which, far from considering time and space as essential components for action, instead tends to mobilize social energies to annihilate them. In other words, not only are we being swept away today by an ever-increasing acceleration of social life but, in addition, devouring time and space has become a value. 3.1. For a definition compression1

of

the

concept

of

time–space

What is the difference between the kind of speed that is added to the dilatation of time and space and the specific form of velocity of our time that, on the contrary, likes to cancel these two fundamental dimensions of human existence? We can answer this question by trying to identify

                                        1 This chapter is based on an older text by the author in Italian (see Paolucci 2003).

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the origin and the “function” of this phenomenon, which now represents a dominant aspect of the current era. Although the acceleration of social times and the progressive elimination of spatial barriers have always characterized the history of capitalism, there are periods during which the contraction of time and space took on a particular intensity and determined a break that disrupted previous balances (Harvey 1989; Rosa 2013). Today, we are undoubtedly experiencing one of these moments: this is commonly demonstrated by a vast theoretical and empirical literature which, in many cases, does not hesitate to refer to time—space compression as the main criterion for defining our model of society. This is, therefore, a significant epistemological reversal in relation to the sociological tradition of the first half of the 20th century, which considered time and space at most as objects of research among others. The transition to the post-Fordist social model — begun some 40 years ago, by introducing new forms of accumulation — has not only drastically reduced the time and space of the production cycle, but has brought the whole of social action into this process, by profoundly transforming the use and social representation not only of time, but also of space. From politics to culture, from forms of thought and language to the mode of communication, all aspects of social life are indelibly marked, with profound anthropological consequences. The new phase of time—space compression has also modified all the activities necessary for individual reproduction. The ways in which time exercises its normative function in everyday life have changed, as have the spatial coordinates of personal life, as can be clearly seen when we observe contemporary urban life, suffocated by space—time traffic jams that we are unable to manage (Aslanoglu 1996; Paolucci 2001, 2007). The inclination

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toward speed has led the ordinary experience toward new scales of values, shaped by the importance given to the new “virtues” of instantaneity and simultaneity. The concentration of experience in the hic et nunc redefined the temporal and spatial horizons of memory and project, while exerting ambivalent effects on the perception of the past and the future, of proximity and distance. Given that the contraction of time is accompanied — and very often includes — the narrowing of space, it can be observed that both have an objective and, at the same time, a subjective dimension. If we consider the objective dimension of temporal contraction, we can see that the notion refers to the reduction of time socially and historically necessary for social action2. This dimension includes taking into account the limit that historical, social, and technological conditions state as insurmountable. There is therefore only a “time—space compression” in relation to specific situations, subjects, and environments (Harvey 1989). That is, it is not a substantial type attribute, it is not an “essence” independent of the relationship with the framework in which it is found. We can speak of a contraction of time and space only in relation to something else: to the historical past, to specific spheres of society in relation to others, to certain social models, to certain places, and so on. This observation paves the way for consideration of the subjective profile of the concept: that relating to the perception of the acceleration of social life and the “disappearance” of space, as well as the practices put in place by the individual to deal with this in everyday life. The                                         2 The socially necessary time is equal to the minimum amount of time technically necessary to perform any action: for the production of goods, to move from one place to another, to perform many of the actions necessary for daily reproduction, and so on. The same can also be said of space.

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modalities of this response vary according to the society to which they belong, the position in social stratification, the possession of cultural and economic capital, gender, and so on. However, there is something that unifies individual responses: it is the perception that compressing time and reducing distances, canceling the duration of action, and aiming at the suppression of space is nevertheless an opportunity offered by techniques that are gradually being renewed. Decreasing the time required to perform a certain activity or reducing the distance is not always effectively practicable by each individual, each social group, in any social model and all regions of the planet. But precisely because it represents a limit or, in other words, a finish line, the time— space compression is perceived in any case by individuals as a possibility that is not always concretely achievable. The temporal dimension is probably the key aspect of the phenomenon because it is the impulse to compress the time of action that determines, in most cases, the narrowing of space. The standards for reducing the time socially necessary for action are dictated to society by technology, and through it, by the sphere of production and the circulation of goods. It suffices to refer to this as one of the most significant aspects of the current framework, the particularity of which can be identified in the rapid development of information technologies, which is combined with, and feeds into, the development and worldwide diffusion of the post-Fordist social model. This has very important consequences for our discussion. As Marx (1857—1858) observed, every economy is an economy of time; however, in any social formation and at any time, there are specific ways in which time is saved in the production of wealth. In capitalist societies, the reduction of the time needed for the production and movement of goods has always been a primary objective. But today, in the era of

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flexible accumulation, the rate of acceleration of production times is much higher than in the industrial era, as Harvey (1989) pointed out in his study on the post-modern condition. In late modernity, goods, both tangible and intangible, are produced thanks to much greater time-saving than in the past: the acceleration of the cycle of production—circulation— accumulation has no equal in the previous phases of capitalism. However, this is only a purely quantitative factor: the increase in the rate of time-saving. We are witnessing — for at least four decades now — qualitative changes in the very composition of the productive forces, as pointed out, with different emphases, by a current of thought that goes from Lyotard to Harvey. It is this complicated, and by no means linear, process that has transformed knowledge into a real immediate productive force. As Manuel Castells (1989, 1996) noted, in the informational mode of development, accumulating knowledge induces new knowledge as the main source of productivity and social change, through its impact on productive, cultural, and political processes. In short, in the post-Fordist mode of production, the inclusion of knowledge in production has, so to speak, a directly productive value. This is what allows the acceleration of the economic process used by the flexible accumulation regime to develop and reproduce. Time, in this new setting, has changed the function it performed during industrial modernity: it has ceased to be the measure of work. The exclusion of immediate work and its replacement by knowledge makes the temporal criterion for evaluating work, what Thompson (1967) calls timed labor, totally obsolete. Work, as an activity structurally modified by the presence of factors, such as knowledge or information, cannot be measured on the basis of abstract units of time because today, much more than in the past, it incorporates the aspects that are totally outside the scope of temporal measurement criteria.

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How can we measure by the clock the informality of communication or non-computerized knowledge integrated into the design of software? Consider the number of activities defined as “free time” that are now directly part of the the production of commodities process. How can we calculate, by using time, to what extent reading a novel or watching a movie affects the process of realization of the goods that post-industrial society produces? Time calculation tends to be replaced by other methods of evaluating work which do not apply to supply times, but rather to the task performed, to the product created, and to the service provided3. The adoption and dissemination of task-oriented guidance has at least two consequences: the intensification of organized labor activity and the associated propensity to accelerate action to reduce time. Such transformations do not change the status of time, which in any case remains part of the universe of economic resources, as it has been since the dawn of capitalism. The normative function of time as an economic resource — which, in industrial society, has been exercised through working hours and their standardization — thus changes its connotations but does not disappear. 3.2. The fragmented experience. Acceleration in the void and lack of time Although our society is strongly characterized by timesaving, everyday life is impregnated by a perception of shortage that relates precisely to the temporal dimension: a worrying and paradoxical phenomenon, if we think that it                                         3 In a certain way, these new models are similar to models of work measurement widespread in pre-industrial societies and resemble the task orientation discussed, among others, by Thompson and Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1963; Thompson 1967) in their studies on agricultural societies.

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occurs precisely at a time when time-saving has become everyday life’s organizing principle. The spaces and times of contemporary cities are saturated by excessive use, which creates a time—space compression, associated with the material conditions of existence as well as the congestion produced by the simultaneous use of the same spaces. There is an increase in expectations and misconceptions of what can be achieved at a particular time — an intensive use of urban space—time that leads to feelings of stress, especially among adult women. Contemporary cities seduce with their enormous depictions of goods, activities, people, and identities. Everything is displayed to tempt individuals to take on their daily time. The utilitarian perception of time as an economic resource collides with the limits imposed by the class and gender structure of society, which deeply affects particularly women’s everyday lives. Urban space and time necessary for social reproduction are diversifying and lead to an extension ad infinitum of abstract possibilities for the realization of reproductive choices. Spatial barriers proliferate and divide the city, creating simultaneously a variety of times. Women, in their diversity, have developed valuable skills to cross these barriers that delimit unpredictable and random time—spaces. Their everyday lives are no longer determined by paid work, family, or home, thereby randomizing time allocation priorities. This difficulty in defining such priorities affects men much less than women because the latter engage in a plurality of practices that extend to diverse places and fragments of time which defy coordination — a real jigsaw puzzle of space—time. This urban space—time appears in the social imagination more as a representation than as a material entity, understood through the mediatized urban experience and random encounters. Virilio (1998) refers in this respect to the “overexposed city” where perceptions of

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space are altered by the intrusion of new communication technologies. We could observe this paradoxical situation by reasoning on questions of a distributive nature and observe that timesaving in the production of wealth, thanks to the introduction of new technologies and the consequent acceleration of the production cycle, is not redistributed socially nor between production and reproduction. The rise in productivity has not led to more time being made available to everyone, let alone to every woman. The share of time saved has gone elsewhere: to the creation of an increasing mass of unemployed people and to the increase of private benefits. We could also take into consideration the gendered sense of lack of time as a consequence of the fact that time is inscribed in the order of economic rationality. The transposition of time to the sphere of exchange induces subjects to set up economic maximization schemes similar to those adopted for other commodities — pushing them to ignore the particular characteristics of duration so that any allocation of time tends to meet the principle of maximum productivity (Crary 2013). Both explanations are certainly plausible and convincing, as they provide elements of great importance to explain the roots of the perceived lack of time. However, these factors are not sufficient to illuminate the entire framework. The complexity of a feeling such as lack of time — the same feeling that drives people to lead everyday life with haste and speed, volatility, and disposability — is such that it requires explanations that integrate analysis of the structure with that of gendered meanings of action. The contraction of time conveyed by technology through the economy dictates temporal discipline in society, but it is the concrete women and men who have the mission of

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integrating this “order of speed” (Virilio 1977, 1998) into everyday life. A mission destined to fail, since everyday life cannot — by definition — integrate the omnivorous temporal order of technology. It cannot, because the everyday resources of time, space, and money are limited, and also because there is an impassable barrier, that of the human body, itself also gendered, which does not succeed, beyond a certain limit, in responding to the acceleration of machines. This is a link that can also be a last resort. Therefore, we conclude that the general feeling of a lack of time is one of the ways in which individual submission to the domination of time-consuming speed as an undisputed value of our society is manifested. The perception of a gap between abstract acceleration possibilities and concretely achievable speed in everyday life creates a feeling of dissatisfaction and frustration, which is metaphorically expressed as “a lack of time”: a typical syndrome of excessive acceleration, present especially among adult women, as we have already noted. Pushed into a kind of competition with machines, the pace of everyday life is accelerating because speed is a socially shared value. The subject must find a justification that motivates and legitimizes the acceleration of everyday life. This justification is the “lack of time”, which practically only proposes as a solution the very cause of the unease. Thus, “being aware” of time in terms of calculation and measurement leads to the dispersion of meaning and individuality, as Heidegger’s philosophy has admirably illustrated (Heidegger 1927). The acceleration of everyday action is therefore not only due to objective factors. There is also the active adherence of subjects to a model of life based on the contraction of time and space: a kind of self-constraining acceleration, as Sennett (2000) calls it in his study on the effects of flexibility on people’s character (Tempest and Coupland 2017), which reduces the horizons of time and space to the dimension of the hic et nunc. The propulsion factor of this subjective

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mechanism is mainly composed, as we have seen, of technologies that constantly re-start competition over time. They incorporate the imperative of time—space compression, which is difficult to resist. From time-saving machines, which promise to reduce the time of daily reproduction, but which probably have no other effect than unnecessarily encumber the living space of our homes, to electronic machines, which constantly increase the acceleration of their own operations in an infinite self-referential race; and to modes of transport which compress space and reduce travel time on the planet, the range of possibilities to contract action time is virtually as wide as the market itself. Even if individuals are not able to realize all the possibilities offered to them in the form of commodities, the fact remains that a scale of values takes root in everyday life, based on the axiological priorities of maximum time-saving, haste, and instantaneity. In such a context, the perception is unavoidable that the time available every day is too short in relation to the scope of opportunities. Thus, the gendered subject of daily life feels the pressure of a selfreferential speed that pushes them toward consumption of time that has no purpose other than to compress the durations, until they are canceled: the exact opposite of Zhuangzi’s story. It is almost as if the present of everyday life — the absolute present mentioned by Agnes Heller (1999) — had by secularizing it, integrated into its horizon, the future that has been eradicated from the perspective of history. In these relationships with the “not yet” of everyday life, there is indeed something of the forward-looking mode that characterized modern consciousness, which now has integrated itself into the horizon of the absolute contingency of the present. It is this “acceleration in the void” — to use Baudrillard’s expression — which, by leveling every moment in the movement towards the “not yet”, towards the after, which generates daily dissatisfaction with a temporal dimension that is experienced as poor and insufficient.

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Such a mode of relation with the future undermines the possibility of the project, the opportunity to project oneself beyond the present day. It is the very meaning of projecting, of bending the future to the realization of a telos, that disappears. Contraction of time and a decrease in the ability to carry out projects thus go hand in hand, encouraging each other. Not only because the reason related to a project needs time, a lot of time, to make room for reflection and for the tortuous paths of decision, as Schutz explains it to us in memorable pages (Schutz 1962—1966), but also because a project is combined with a narrative organization of life that the framework of time-consuming speed simply prevents. In his study on the effects of flexibility on people’s character, Richard Sennett (2000) points out, in this respect, that the loss of the narrative and project perspective also undermines the meaning of everyday life itself. Experienced as a moment suspended in the emptiness of time without a framework, it shatters, also dispersing the identity of the subject: in other words, everyday life without a future even degrades as the present. With the same force with which the acceleration of the present devours the future, compromising the possibility of the project, it also cannibalizes, the past and memory. Remembering means using, in the present this past experience (Jedlowski 2001; Paolucci 2007), this experience that the contraction of daily time and the annihilation of space make it difficult to absorb. In this regard, David Gross notes that since our experience has become more synchronic than diachronic, memory becomes not only irrelevant and useless, but simply impossible (Gross 2000). There remains only the present, a time that suffers from the absolute contingency mentioned by Agnes Heller (1999). The daily effort to consume time by canceling it out has been effectively described by Bauman as the ultimate attempt to exorcize the fear of death by repeating the lack, the loss. Bauman (1992) points out that daily life becomes a

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general repetition of death. The speed that destroys time is death in small doses, every day. Thus, death has positioned itself on the stage of everyday life. The strategy of postmodern life has stripped mortality of its abject terror, dragging it from its hiding place and throwing it into the realm of the familiar and the ordinary, as something to be practiced from day to day. It is an attempt to exorcize death by many and repeated everyday “endings”. 3.3. The power of resentment The time—space compression cannot certainly be considered as a negative phenomenon in itself. The processes it generates in society are ambivalent, and certainly not unambiguous. Techniques that make it possible to reduce the time of action and reduce distances can indeed be seen, in many cases, as a conquest of humanity to be carefully safeguarded. However, a social model that turns the compression of space and time into a value in itself is a condemnation. Where speed and slowness cannot coexist, where time and space are considered only as obstacles to be eliminated, and acceleration has no other purpose than itself, modes of being take shape based on dissatisfaction and resentment. Moreover, they make impracticable the responsibility to which Agnes Heller entrusts the only possibility of salvation for the post-modern subject; the latter, deprived of the future and the past, is forced to take the horizon of absolute contingency as the only framework of existence (Heller 1999). Dissatisfaction and resentment are a powerful vehicle for domination. In their study on the post-modern temporal condition, Agnès Heller and Ferenc Fehér (1988) argue that the reproduction of the “dissatisfied society” is made possible by the fact that forms relating to the creation, perception, and distribution of individual aspirations reinforce

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resentment, regardless of the real satisfaction of any concrete need. In short, dissatisfaction acts as a powerful motivator for the reproduction of a society that is based on it. The notion of a “dissatisfied society” can be useful to shed light on the dynamics of unease, resulting from living under the domination of the order of speed. The unease generated by “dromocraty”, to use a term dear to Virilio, generates, as we have seen, a mechanism that is constantly being repeated. The aspiration toward speed increases all the more strongly when the acceleration of everyday life is not satisfied, therefore creating an increase of discomfort and resentment. The symbolic power of speed thus creates a dynamic that curls in on itself, with no way out. An integral part of this mechanism is the discursive production on temporal dissatisfaction itself, which is today so widespread. We should ask ourselves whether discursive production on temporal dissatisfaction is not, by chance, one of the most effective vehicles for the domination exercised by space—time compression. We could then assume — in line with Foucault and Bourdieu’s argumentative strategy — that it works alongside this rule, which explicitly dictates the constraints socially relayed by the use of time, a “positive technology” that domination itself stages in order to produce its own truth about time, a knowledge that already incorporates the contents and symbols of power. A discursive production that, as it develops the list of grievances on speed, acceleration, and everyday haste, legitimizes their existence. In other words, we could hypothesize that domination over time has been transformed into domination by time, which is legitimized through assertive paths that integrate into habitus (Bourdieu 1980), thus laying the foundations for instructions on the use of time, to be not only followed but also actively shared. Of course, it is not easy to verify this hypothesis. But if we believe, like Bourdieu, that the task of sociology is to reveal and explore the less obvious forms — and, for this reason, more legitimized — of domination it may be useful to make an attempt in this direction from the same

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social sciences, which are among the most significant expressions of discursive production over time and space. 3.4. References Aslanoglu, R.A. (1996). Globalism and the World City. Science and Society, (69), 108—127. Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Polity Press, Cambridge. Bourdieu, P. (1963). La société traditionnelle. Attitude à l’égard du temps et conduit économique. Sociologie du Travail, (1), 24—44. Bourdieu, P. (1980). Le sens pratique. Minuit, Paris. Calvino, I. (1988). Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Castells, M. (1989). The Informational City. Blackwell, Oxford. Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Crary, J. (2013). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, London. Gross, D. (2000). Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst. Harvey, D. (1989). The Condition of Post-Modernity. Blackwell, Oxford. Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit. Neimer, Halle a.d.S. Heller, A. (1999). A Theory of Modernity. Blackwell, Oxford. Heller, A. and Fehér, F. (1988). The Postmodern Political Condition. Columbia University Press, New York. Jedlowski, P. (2001). Memory and Sociology. Time & Society, 10(1), 29—44. Kundera, M. (1995). La lenteur. Gallimard, Paris.

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Marx, K. (1857—1858). Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. In MEGA2: Ökonomische Manuskripte 1857/58, vol. II, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1976. Paolucci, G. (2001). The City’s Continuous Cycle of Consumption. Towards a New Definition of Time? Antipode, 33(4), 647—660. Paolucci, G. (2003). Il potere della velocità. L’accelerazione della vita sociale nella città contemporanea. In Cronofagia. La contrazione del tempo e dello spazio nell’era della globalizzazione, Paolucci G. (ed.), Angelo Guerini, Milan, 13—31. Paolucci, G. (2007). Libri di pietra. Città e memorie. Liguori, Naples. Rosa, H. (2013). Alienation and Acceleration. Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. NSU Press, Malmo. Schutz, A. (1962—1966). Collected Papers. Nijhoff, The Hague. Sennett, R. (2000). The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in New Capitalism. Norton & Company, New York. Tempest, S. and Coupland, C. (2017). Lost in Time and Space: Temporal and Spatial Challenges Facing Older Workers in a Global Economy from a Career Capital Perspective. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 28(15), 2159—2183. Thompson, E.P. (1967). Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism. Past and Present, 38, 56—97. Virilio, P. (1977). Vitesse et politique. Galilée, Paris. Virilio, P. (1998). La bombe informatique. Galilée, Paris.

4 Gendered Aspects of the Everyday. Restructurings of Urban Life in Athens

Dorata: “It’s like being in my own town” On a warm evening in May 2016, I was having coffee with Dorata, a woman from Albania whom I had met in 2000, in the context of a preliminary research project, and have kept in touch with since (see Vaiou 2003). Having read in the newspaper that many migrants were going back to Albania as a result of the current crisis, I asked her about her plans. She responded (in Greek) in a rather reproachful tone: ...we have been here in Kypseli more than 20 years. I came first, together with Tiko and my elder daughter. Then came my sister and my nieces and my sisters in law. Also a couple of my best friends from Berat — all here in Kypseli. Where can I go back to? Here I have family, neighbors, friends — all, all of us we are very close, we are here for each other. That’s why we don’t go. We are used to the neighborhood. It’s like being in my own town — that’s how I feel.                                         Chapter written by Dina VAIOU.

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Conversations like this have triggered my interest in urban everyday life as a gendered process and the need to explore what it means to live in cities “constituted by different histories and histories of difference” (Simonse 2008: 99), as well as how the coexistence of strangers (of people “we” construct as “strangers”/“others”) leads to transformations of “we” (us), through power geometries of inclusion and exclusion, which are not exclusively unilateral. Such questions, reformulated and re-elaborated several times over the years, have been approached in a number of research projects whose material includes different kinds of interviews, women’s life stories, systematic observation in many neighborhoods, informal discussions in public spaces, elaborations and mappings of statistical and other data, literature reviews, and so on1. In the years of austerity, after                                         1 Mainly from the following projects: Hadjimichalis, C. (coordinator) 1993—1996, Informal forms of work and production and urban development in Greater Athens (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki — member of the research team) (General Secretariat of Research and Technology); Vaiou, D. (coordinator) Development of Research tools for the comparative study of neighbourhoods in big cities of the European Union (NTUA, Support for Basic Research); Vaiou D. (coordinator) 2005—2007 Intersecting patterns of everyday life and socio-spatial change in the city. Migrant and local women in the neighbourhoods of Athens (Ministry of Education, Pythagoras II Programme); Kontos, M. (coordinator) 2006—2008, Integration of Female Immigrants in Labour Market and Society. Policy Assessment and Policy Recommendations (FeMiPol) (Institute for Social Research, Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main — member of the Greek research team) (European Commission, 6th Framework Programme); Stratigaki, M. (coordinator) 2007—2011, Gender, Migration and Intercultural Interactions in the Mediterranean and South East Europe: an interdisciplinary approach (GeMIC) (Panteion University, Athens — member of the Greek team on gender and urban space) (European Commission — 7th Framework Programme); Stratigaki, M. (coordinator) 2009—2012 Transnational Digital Networks, Migration and Gender (mig@net)

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2010, when research funds for social/urban research almost disappeared from academic life, I started to “re-visit” the sites and subjects of earlier research, in an attempt to come to grips with the effects of the crisis on the city whilst “putting women in the picture” (see Vaiou 2014a, 2014b). It has been for some decades now that the literature on cities and urban development in the south of Europe has “met” migration studies and has started to foreground issues of mobility, borders and boundaries, and multi-cultural and connected lives. Athens, from which my paper broadly draws, is no exception: since the downfall of the Berlin wall and the opening of borders with the former “socialist block”, an intensive research effort has taken place from a variety of disciplinary fields, perspectives, and political inclinations. The (conditions of) arrival and settlement of migrants, initially from the neighboring Balkan countries and Eastern Europe and later from further afield, posed intense questions, both in the academy and in politics, to do with “living together” in the city of groups and individuals which may be products of different histories, marked by ethnic antagonisms and cultural heterogeneity. The urban scene has changed significantly in the past three decades while living with difference and handling how “strangers” become part of an inevitably changing “we” is a prime challenge on a variety of spatiotemporal scales, from day-to-day bodily encounters to national policy and international claims and relations. The restrictions of austerity policies imposed on Greece (and other Southern European countries) by recurrent memoranda from the IMF, the ECB, and the EU since 2010 in the context of the global financial crisis have left their visible imprint on Athens, particularly on its poorer neighborhoods and social groups. The same areas and social                                         (Panteion University, Athens — scientific advisor to the research team) (European Commission — 7th Framework Programme).

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groups have been affected by the spectacular rise of the extreme right and its violent attacks against residents of migrant origin, against LGBTQI people and other “nonconforming” individuals and groups. These developments have contributed to destabilizing the conditions of co-existence in the city which had been reached through decades of everyday negotiations, informal practices, and (timid) institutional arrangements. This chapter aims to approach the variety and complexity of urban life and work on the transformations of the city since the early 1990s, as they are inscribed in particular places, from the perspective of everyday life. Such a perspective, as I argue, is highly gendered and brings to the foreground of enquiry issues usually ignored or undervalued in dominant narratives of the city. The first section discusses the spatiality of everyday life as a theoretical perspective on an urban condition increasingly characterized by transnational relations, multi-scalar practices and experiences, as well as very local, material encounters. The following section, where I draw from research in Athens, discusses transformations of everyday life in central neighborhoods of Athens where migrants have settled since the early 1990s. Finally, in section 4.3, I draw together some concluding comments that may inform theoretical formulations about living together and apart in the city, as they come out in people’s everyday practices. 4.1. Spatializing everyday life Everyday life is a concept with a long history in philosophy and in the social sciences (for a review, see Felski 2000; also Konstantopoulou 2009), in which the work of Henri Lefebvre holds a prominent position. His repeated elaborations have raised the everyday to an object of critical reflection (among many: Lefebvre 1946, 1962, 1968, 1981; Lefebvre with Régulier 1992). What is important in his

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contribution is the spatialization of everyday life, his insistent connection between the everyday and the spatiality and multiplicity of urban living. Such an approach leads to a radically different perspective on the urban in which research interest and theoretical value include not only global processes and “big” events but also futile anxieties, the myriad things that need to be done every day for oneself and for others, and all those details of everyday life which are usually deemed humble, repetitive, taken-for-granted, and in any case unimportant for the constitution of theoretical and explanatory frameworks. However, everyday life does not include only routine and repetitive practices, adaptations, and consent, but also collisions with various structures of space and time which mobilize transgressions within the everyday itself (Lefebvre 1990; also de Certeau 1984 on acts of resistance and subversion). Momentary and fragmented as these transgressions may be, they contain the seeds of a non-alienated life and the possibility of individual and collective emancipation2. In this line of thinking, everyday life crosses over dichotomous conceptions and reveals continuities through different spheres of experience and interlocking spatial scales (Gardiner 2000; Simonsen and Vaiou 1996; Smith 1987; Vaiou 2000). Among these interlocking scales, the neighborhood, a highly contested concept in urban studies, emerges as an important reference (for a discussion, see Bridge et al. 2004; Germain 2002; Simonsen 1997). Its meanings extend far beyond its spatial determinants and invest it with a renewed importance, distanced from old identifications with community and locality. The                                         2 In this sense, Lefebvre marks out the political dimension and the revolutionary meaning of the everyday, which is also developed by A. Heller (1984), although not in exactly the same terms, in her discussion of the potential, indeed almost a utopian promise, included in everyday life for the reconstruction of meaning and the transgression of alienation.

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neighborhood here is not understood as a bounded space but as an important sociospatial scale at which much of day-today urban living unfolds and links the local with global processes. Such a conception of neighborhood, with frequent reference to migrant settlement, supports what Doreen Massey calls “a progressive sense of place”: a conception of place as a particular moment in intersecting social relations, continuously in the making, through probable or unforeseen transformations and connections, which may or may not materialize in the context of a system which includes not only heterogeneity, indeterminacy and openness to future restructurings, but also powerful geometries of power (Massey 1994, 2005). The literature usually emphasizes routine, repetition, and habit, identification with “home,” housework, and care, all identified primarily with women and with “the realm of the insignificant, invisible yet indispensable” (Featherstone 1992: 165; Felski 2000: 80). This, however, ignores the repetitive and routinized character of most paid jobs, leisure activities, and other aspects of everyday life outside the home and family women (Chaney 2002). On the other hand, it also ignores the collisions and transgressions within the everyday itself (Lefebvre 1990), as well as the cultural and technological developments that blur such space—time divisions. The lives of people on the move point to the multiple ways in which urban everyday life is increasingly influenced by transnational relations in the form of multiscalar practices and experiences (Beebeejaun 2017), as well as encounters between different “strangers” (Simonsen 2008). These “strangers”, migrant women and men whose everyday experiences and practices are brought together in the following sections of this chapter, are now located at the heart of Southern European cities, including Athens, where they seek to be included, to a greater or lesser degree, in the economic, social, and political institutions and in the

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patterns of everydayness. At the same time, they transform and reposition these patterns and places, linking them to supra-local, even global, processes. But they belong elsewhere as well: they nurture relations, material, and emotional exchanges and everyday practices across borders. Care for those who have stayed in their place of origin (children, parents, or other relatives) is a case in point here. Their multiple allegiances to “here” and “there” point to a conception of the everyday which cannot be identified exclusively with the local or with immobility. Local identifications, however, are necessary in order to sustain transnational networks and complex relations of moving and settling across borders (Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Guarnizo and Smith 1998; Leitner and Ehrkamp 2006; Salih 2003). As such they appear prominently in migrant women’s narratives where the neighborhood holds a central place. A perspective which emphasizes “things that do not matter” but which make the city livable is an inevitably gendered and feminist perspective, which values the experiences and practices of women — with all the differences and inequalities included in the category. As many feminists have been arguing for several decades, challenging dominant modes of knowledge production yields different kinds of knowledge about the city which recognize the existence of multiple realities (rather than a single objective “truth”) — hence the importance of standpoint and of analytical categories which make women’s diverse experiences visible and their voices heard (see, for example, Haraway 1991; Harding 1986; also McDowell and Sharp 1999). 4.2. Everyday encounters in the neighborhoods of Athens The region of Athens, Attica, has attracted the majority of migrants who came to Greece after 1989. The urban geography of migrant settlement in Greater Athens is marked by concentrations in the central neighborhoods of

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the city, in some of which one in four residents is of migrant origin (census data, 1991—2011). As is the case with other Southern European cities, the attractions of these urban areas include affordable housing (mainly small flats in lower floors of old apartment buildings), employment opportunities, both formal and informal, proximity to the city center, access to social and support networks, and good connections by public transport. In the preceding decades (1971—1991), a movement of younger local households to the suburbs can be observed, leaving a significant part of the building stock unused. Elderly households though remained in the bigger and better apartments of the upper floors, usually family property. This movement never reached the dimensions of an “exodus” but it led to transformations of use (e.g. small manufacturing units in the ground floor and basement of apartment buildings, as well as a significant volume of empty stock), thus keeping property prices low3. It is in such apartment buildings that migrants later settled in the lower floors, intensifying what has been called vertical segregation (Maloutas 2019; Maloutas and Karadimitriou 2001). In this sense, it is difficult to talk about geographical isolation of migrants or of the constitution of “ghettos”; however, invisible boundaries do exist and reproduce different versions of “our” city and “their” city in the experiences and perceptions of different people. The campaigns against migrants launched by mainstream media in the early 1990s argued that entire areas were being downgraded because of migrant presence. The argument was based on references to an unqualified urban past in which no                                         3 The Olympic infrastructures and urban renewal projects, along with the construction of metro stations in various neighborhoods, contributed to the rise of property prices and to significant population movements, whereas the effects of austerity policies have not yet been assessed and mapped.

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working-class neighborhoods existed in the city; “everybody” was well-off (above average) and lived in modern and wellequipped apartment buildings (polykatoikies). Such narratives, coupled with institutional gaps which took time to fill and aggressive activities by ultra-right wing groups, fueled initial attitudes of resentment/enmity against migrants. What escaped the attention of such narratives is the fact that many residential areas in central Athens were downgraded and partially depopulated already before the arrival of migrants. Actually, migrants were attracted to those areas because living conditions kept rents low and more affordable when shared among several people. Experiencing urban change The geography of migrant settlement in Greater Athens and in the municipality of Athens contributed to a population mix in areas that were already suffering from lack of maintenance of buildings and public spaces, inadequate infrastructures and social services, and lack of green spaces — all of which kept housing prices low. Thus, the center of Athens continues to exhibit the highest concentrations of the migrant population, 2.5 times over the mean in the metropolitan area as a whole. Places of settlement include neighborhoods of intensive growth in the 1950s and 1960s, with six-storey apartment buildings of various sizes and qualities; old working-class neighborhoods where some of the older stock had survived; refugee neighborhoods of the interwar period; and urban “voids” resulting from the restructuring of industrial activity4. As employment becomes more regular and incomes improve, migrant households move to better housing units,                                         4 The area near the railway station, where a number of cheap hotels exist, has been a temporary and transit place of initial settlement upon arrival, which has led some researchers in the early 1990s to point to a ghettoization of migrants.

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in some cases owner-occupied, quite often in the same neighborhoods where networks are already established. Thirty years later, their presence has more permanent characteristics, with important effects on the property market as well as on everyday life in central neighborhoods where now people of more than 200 different ethnic origins live. Shops with signs in various languages and “strange” products, ad hoc religious and meeting spaces, internet cafes and call-centers, satellite dish antennas, sounds in “unknown” languages, and intensive use of public spaces are some of the most visible signs of urban transformations and pose continuous challenges for living together. One afternoon in May 2016, after re-interviewing Arvena, an Albanian woman in her late 40s who had participated in an earlier research project (Vaiou et al. 2007), I sat to review my notes on a bench in Kypseli square, next to two women overseeing children playing in the square. Two elderly men from a bench across from me got interested in what a “stranger” was doing in the place of their regular outings. When I explained, the following (informal) exchange of views started, to which other regulars soon got involved: — This is not Kypseli square, this is Tirana square. After ten in the evening, you do not see any Greeks here, only Albanians… — They don’t do any harm. They are not dangerous. We just don’t like to meet them here all the time. — We would prefer Greeks, to exchange views, to talk politics. One of the women next to me, apparently Albanian, contributed a different perspective in perfect Greek: — …When I first arrived, I was afraid to walk around because there were not many Albanians

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around and I was afraid […] now it is full of blacks and I am afraid to walk around after dark. Another woman, probably Polish, intervened rather angrily also in Greek: — I don’t let my kids play with Albanian kids here in the square. Their mothers let them loose and I don’t like what they do. Informal talks like these do not, of course, lend themselves to any conclusive interpretation, but they indicate a certain atmosphere of everyday encounters in a public space. Together with material gathered by other methods, they help grasp (local) attitudes about transformations of everyday life in material and emotional terms. The neighborhood square is a place of multiple encounters that may be linked to everyday uses of space (e.g. children’s play, sitting on a bench and talking) as well as with implicit rules of coexistence, feelings, and memories (e.g. fear, discomfort, and resentment). As such, they contribute to the constitution and modification of perceptions of the “familiar” and the “strange” which cross over ethnic boundaries and initiate a slow process of adaptations and transformations of the spaces and practices of everyday life and thus shape the conditions of a bearable everydayness. Memories and narratives Original resentment and frequent aggressions on the part of locals, fueled by the media throughout the 1990s, and fear on the part of migrants, gradually gave way to (more) welcoming attitudes, support networks, migrant organizing, relationships beyond the local/migrant dichotomy. Living in the same neighborhood and often in the same building has contributed to modifying attitudes, while neighborhoods changed to cater to the needs of their changing population. Special commerce, shops and services, and also uses of public

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space and the embodied subjects which populate and activate them, do not resemble pre-1989 Athens. Nikos, a man in his early 50s, born in the neighborhood of Sepolia where he has lived all his life, epitomizes the developments: “Now we remember the neighborhood, we do not see it anymore”. And he continues: Grocery stores have disappeared from the neighborhood. Now we have mini-markets operated by foreigners. We have our Pakistani corner shop, our Chinese clothing outlet […]. You see strange bodies around. You see richer and poorer people […] In the streets and the balconies you hear languages that you do not understand. Women sit on the sidewalks, like in the old days, they knit, they talk to people across the street. Their children play around, they talk to each other in languages that we do not know (Interviewed in 2006). Elisa, a woman in her early 30s who came to Athens from Albania when she was 9 years old and has a degree from the University of Thessaly, has fond memories from her school years in Kato Patissia: Katerina, a Greek woman neighbor, used to take me to school together with her son, Yannis, because my mother had to leave for work very early. We had good fun on the way […] My best friends, Loretta from Sierra Leone and Eva from Poland. We are still friends but we followed different paths, they did not study (in the university) […] We had a very good time as children, from all over the world; we played every day on the steps of the church, we had carnival dances and other festivities at school, we exchanged visits and went to each other’s

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birthdays […] The lady-owner of the kiosk always kept an eye on us, she knew our mothers — that’s how this neighborhood was (Interviewed in 2013). Media and political discourse mobilize narratives to do with the construction of boundaries, a process of naming which excludes entire areas of the city as “ghettos,” building on a binary dichotomy of “us” and “them”. A homogenized “strangeness” inside these areas was (and periodically still is) counterposed to a homogenized Greekness outside them (see also Simonsen 2008), failing to acknowledge the multiplicity of subjectivities and collective identities included among both “Greeks” and among “strangers” striving to survive and “make life good”, as many women interviewed over the years have put it. On the other hand, the experiences of younger people, with a variety of ethnic backgrounds, including Greek, are embedded in these relations; they have no other memories than living together in the multi-cultural neighborhood with school mates and neighbors from places near and far. Neighboring through care For more than 20 years already, children have been born here and gone through the school system, and most men and women have engaged in paid work, populated public spaces and participated in leisure activities in the spaces of the everyday. Their efforts to maneuver in the social and cultural landscape in all its variety and transformations, and to learn to respect the difference in and through their everyday practices, contributed to an increasing ordinariness and normalization of difference and strangeness and to the constitution and sustenance of cross-cultural relations. Central neighborhoods of Athens presented (and continue to present) for migrants different opportunities for inclusion in (or exclusion from) urban life. At the same time,

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neighborhoods change according to the lifestyles, the ways of using urban space and the everyday practices of migrants which inevitably intersect with, and transform, those of Greeks. In this changing landscape, neighboring practices acquire significant value and care comes out as a key component of such practices. They are the medium through which struggles for belonging take place and, often, that which is at stake in such struggles5. Elena, a woman from Albania in her late 40s, resident of Kypseli since 1996, gives a multi-faceted and comprehensive account of neighboring through care also in perfect Greek: My sister in law had come two years before us. She knew a lot of people and a neighbour of hers, a Greek lady, rented the house to us and then she helped me — she found jobs for me… Then she arranged for this house to be redeveloped and when it was finished she says: do you want to come? […] Now we go out, her window is across from here. She may call even at night, she may need something […] When I cook something good, I bring some to her… When she buys from a take away that my daughter likes,…she will buy for my children as well… (Interviewed in 2007 and 2014). Sofia, an elderly Greek woman in her 80s, and also a resident of Kypseli since 1947, contributes a similar view from her perspective: Yes, yes, they stay with their kids. Now, let me tell you, there was this young woman who worked for me for two years. Now she works as a nursery teacher… very very good, she has two children.                                         5 The aggressive and racist activities of ultra-right groups, most prominently but not exclusively Golden Dawn, openly challenge and may ultimately destabilize/endanger this process.

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Even now and then she comes with her children, she comes to my house, she talks to me, very well-mannered, to help me, to see if I need something. They are like grandchildren to me (Interviewed 2006). Elena, like many female migrants, underlines the ways in which they have come to relate with local women, their neighbors, how they have been assisted by them, how they reciprocate by caring for them in many informal but critical ways. As part of their everyday routines, they walk the streets and cross the neighborhood square innumerable times and make their presence seen and felt in the neighborhood: they do shopping in local shops and supermarkets; they stop at the bakery, the pharmacy, or the local kiosk; they escort the elderly person they may be looking after to their daily outings; they take their own and other children to school, to the day care, to the doctor, and to the playground; and they visit and share time with neighbors. Such relations are highly valued in that they help them navigate through the difficulties of adaptation in the unknown place, provide “tips” about how to cope, are a potential source of emotional and often practical support. Sofia, who has experienced long-term transformations in the neighborhood, values the neighboring practices which have developed since the settlement of migrants, and migrant women in particular, and contributes her advice and care for the children. By now, solid relationships have been established among residents, while young people, born and/or grown in Athens, make friends through school and work — visible in neighborhood public spaces, cafes, and bars. Here, gender differences come out prominently: migrant men are more likely to spend time with other men from their own community or from work, while migrant women are predominantly the ones who come into contact with neighbors practically by sharing common everyday routines. These routines involve relations of power but seem to be

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reciprocal and contribute to investing neighboring with meanings and qualities long lost. In this sense, neighboring relations gradually lead to processes of familiarization, coexistence, and ultimately perhaps inclusion. In addition, caring and shared everyday practices modify earlier attitudes of both locals and migrants, which now take shape not by media representations or preconceived ideas but by reference to their own familiar neighbors. Although racist language and aggression against migrants are not absent from the scene, attitudes change when the homogenizing reference to “strangers” is replaced by naming Anja, Nikos, Narin, Sokol, Mustafa, Sofia — one’s real embodied neighbors. 4.3. Living with “strangers”: reciprocal adaptations and invisible borders The narratives of local and migrant women and men, cited in the previous section of this chapter, indicate ways in which the everyday is re-invented and re-told over and over again and appears as a field of communication and exchange and not only as a field of conflict and disagreement, as is quite often described. Experiences of urban change, albeit lived and interpreted in different ways, contribute to coming to terms with “strangers” and yielding converging narratives about the importance of the commonplaces of everyday life, the neighborhood with all its material and emotional meanings. In this process, the terms of inclusion in a changing “we” (us) are continuously negotiated and the boundaries of divisions and exclusions change across the lines of ethnicity, class, gender, and age, albeit in a context of power geometries determined by such lines (Massey 1999). Here, a number of conditions and developments are decisive. The first has to do with the “heritage” of the urban history of Athens, which has left material and cultural possibilities for various “others” to settle and start a new life

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in the interstices of the city (Vaiou 2003). Humble tactical appropriations of space, so common in the practices of women of different ethnic backgrounds, ages, and social standings, fill (and fit into) such interstices and shape the conditions of day-to-day and long-term survival (Schmoll 2014). It is precisely this heritage that is overtly challenged by the aggressive activities and racist discourse of the extreme right, most prominently Golden Dawn, as it claims, among other things, territoriality in the very places of everyday coexistence. The second has to do with the recurrent encounters in the spaces of the everyday, including apartment buildings, doorsteps, shops, public spaces, bus stops, local hangouts, school gates, and more. These have been important for familiarization with difference as well as for its increasing “ordinariness” and “domestication” (Simonsen 2008) which shape “living together” in the now multi-cultural central neighborhoods of Athens. Adaptations and transformations are more reciprocal than commonly thought and provide clues about how “living together” has gradually been achieved. Such processes are ever more embedded in the next generation, for whom growing in the multi-cultural city has made commonplace all those “other” school companions, “other” neighbors, “other” outfits, “other” languages and sounds, the taste and smell of “other” food, and the different ways of being in space. The third refers to those aspects of urban life and urban development that go unnoticed unless the urban is approached from the perspective of everyday life. Among these, the bulk of care work, abundantly contributed by women, is a regular “missing piece” in the puzzle of everyday survival in the city. This piece acquires particular importance in the context of persisting crisis. The struggle for survival does not stop with conditions of austerity or with

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changing patterns of mobility and settlement6. On the contrary, the needs for care and support, in material and emotional terms, become more complicated, particularly among low-income urban residents. The labor necessary to cover such needs has a deeply gendered content and extends over a range of geographical scales, from the household and the neighborhood to the global trajectories of migrant women and the macroeconomic maneuvers of capital. In this sense, care cannot be missing from theoretical formulations which aim to explain how living with difference becomes possible; it is a key component of everyday life and a constitutive concept in a theoretical understanding of urban living and urban development inclusive of the gendered and embodied practices of living together and apart in the city. 4.4. References Beebeejaun, Y. (2017). Gender, Urban Space, and the Right to Everyday Life. Journal of Urban Affairs, 39(3), 323—334. Bridge, G., Forrest, R., and Holland, E. (2004). Neighbouring. A Review of the Evidence. CNR paper 24. ESRC Centre of Neighbourhood Research. Available: http://neighbourhood centre.org.uk. Chaney, D. (2002). Cultural Change and Everyday Life. Palgrave, London. de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley. Ehrenreich, B. and Hochchild, A.R. (eds). (2003). Global Woman. Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Granta Books, London.                                         6 The refugee crisis, along with the controversial policies of the EU and several member states, presents yet another turn in the changing patterns of care and the question of living together — this time with people who stay for intermediate periods of time and, in any case, have not chosen this place as their preferred destination.

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Featherstone, M. (1992). The Heroic Life and Everyday Life. Theory, Culture and Society, 9(1), 159—182. Felski, R. (2000). Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. NYU Press, New York. Gardiner, M. (2000). Critiques of Everyday Life. Routledge, London. Germain, A. (2002). The Social Sustainability of Multicultural Cities: A Neighbourhood Affair? BELGEO, 4, 377—386. Glick-Schiller, N., Basch, L., and Szanton-Blanc, C. (1992). Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration. New York Academy of Sciences, New York. Guarnizo, L.E. and Smith, M.P. (eds). (1998). Transnationalism from Below. Transaction Publishers, New Brunwick and London. Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs and Women. Reinvention of Nature. Free Association Books, London.

The

Harding, S. (ed.) (1986). Feminism and Methodology. Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Heller, A. (1984). Everyday Life. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Konstantopoulou, C. (2009). A Sociology of “Everydayness”. Introduction to the Sociology of Everyday Life. Papazissis, Athens (in Greek). Lefebvre, H. (1946). Critique de la vie quotidienne I: Introduction. Grasset, Paris. Lefebvre, H. (1962). Critique de la vie quotidienne II: Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté. L’Arche, Paris. Lefebvre, H. (1968). La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne. Gallimard, Paris. Lefebvre, H. (1981). Critique de la vie quotidienne III: De la modernité au modernisme. Pour une métaphilosophie du quotidien. L’Arche, Paris. Lefebvre, H. (1990). Everyday Life in the Modern World. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick.

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Lefebvre, H., Régulier, C. (1992). Eléments de Rythmanalyse. Introduction à la connaissance des rythmes. Editions Syllepse, Paris. Leitner, H. and Ehrkamp, P. (2006). Transnationalism and Migrants’ Imaginings of Citizenship. Environment and Planning A, 38, 1615—1632. Maloutas, T. (2019). The Social Geography of Athens. Social Groups and Built Environment in a Southern-European Metropolis. Alexandreia, Athens (in Greek). Maloutas, T. and Karadimitriou, N. (2001). Vertical Social Differentiation in Athens: Alternative or Complement to Community Segregation? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28, 699—716. Massey, D. (1994). Space, Place and Gender. Polity Press, Cambridge. Massey, D. (1999). Power Geometries and the Politics of SpaceTime. Hettner-Lecture 1998, University of Heidelberg. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage, London. Mavridis, H. (2004). The Meaning of Everydayness in Social Theory. The Greek Review of Social Research, 114B, 27—60 (in Greek). McDowell, L. and Sharp, J. (eds). (1999). Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings. Arnold, London. Salih, R. (2003). Gender in Transnationalism: Home, Longing and Belonging Among Moroccan Migrant Women. Routledge, London. Schmoll, C. (2014). Gendered Spatialities of Power in ‘Borderland’ Europe: An Approach Through Mobile and Immobilised Bodies. International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 1(2), 173—189. Simonsen, K. (1997). Modernity, Community or a Diversity of Ways of Life: A Discussion of Urban Everyday Life. In Cities in Transformation — Transformation in Cities. Social and Symbolic Change of Urban Space, Kalltrop, O., Erlander, I., Ericsson, O., and Franzen, M. (eds). Avebury, Aldershot.

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Simonsen, K. (2008). Practice, Narrative and the ‘Multicultural City’: A Copenhagen Case. European Urban and Regional Studies, 15(2), 145—159. Simonsen, K. and Vaiou, D. (1996). Women’s Lives and the Making of the City. Experiences from “North” and “South” of Europe. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 20, 446—465. Smith, D. (1987). The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Northeastern University Press, Boston. Vaiou, D. (2000). City and Citizens. Everyday Life and the “Right to the City”. In The Sustainable City, Modinos, M. and Efthymiopoulos, E. (eds). Stochastis and DIPE, Athens (in Greek). Vaiou, D. (2003). In the Interstices of the City: Albanian Women in Athens. Espace, Polpulations, Sociétés, (2), 373—385. Vaiou, D. (2014a). Is the Crisis in Athens Also Gendered? Facets of Access and (In)visibility in Everyday Public Spaces. City, 18(4—5), 533—537. Vaiou, D. (2014b). Tracing Aspects of the Greek Crisis in Athens: Putting Women in the Picture. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(3), 220—230. Vaiou, D., Bacharopoulou, A., Fotiou, T., Hatzivasileiou, S., Kalandides, A., Karali, M., Kefalea, R., Lafazani, O., Lykogianni, R., Marnelakis, G., Monemvasitou, A., Papasimaki, K., and Tounta, F. (2007). Intersecting Patterns of Everyday Life and Socio-Spatial Transformations in the City. Migrant and Local Women in the Neighbourhoods of Athens. L-Press and NTUA, Athens (in Greek).

 

5 Children’s Everyday Flows and Networks in the Neighborhoods of Athens

Metaxourgio-Keramikos, 64th Elementary School of Athens Last week, I was unable to go to school. The children worked with Eleni on the positive/ negative aspects of the neighborhood, what they would like to change… We continued in the same spirit. The meeting was difficult because, in the morning, the children had participated in a carnival celebration. They were all quite excited and many of them had already left. From the group the two Anna’s, Marinella, Angelika, Mido and Mehmet were present. But Mehmet didn’t participate. He was upset (because they hadn’t had sports lessons) and left at 3:30 p.m., like Angelika. The children had written their comments on a large piece of paper. I attempted a discussion on the reactions commonly reproduced through stereotypical and widespread views. For example,                                         Chapter written by Irini MICHA.

Alternative Takes to the City, First Edition. Edited by Irini Micha and Dina Vaiou. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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in their proposals, they noted that they wanted to build a school for refugees, because “they may not be good people and they may not be accepted in public school” (as Anna said). In their idea, they had located it at the border of the country… We discussed and agreed that their exclusion is due to their lack of papers, such as medical certificates. That’s how they decided that the new school would have doctors. Mido proposed to use the money that the European Union gives to refugees to improve the neighborhood. We talked about the fact that these two ideas can coexist. For example, we could build an area in the main square where they could play ball games (all together). I told them that my grandmother was also a refugee from Izmir. When their verbal expressions deviate from their lived experiences, it is necessary to find ways to raise awareness — particularly because in this school already a large number of pupils are refugee children from Syria and Afghanistan, but from the children’s view, they mainly have the identity of schoolmates (8th meeting, 03/11/16. Extract from my personal research diary). The above scene took place in the framework of an educational project focusing on “the school and its neighborhood” and resulted from the special collaboration that we have developed since 2012 between elementary and higher education teachers1. Our objective is to establish a                                         1 The problem raised in this text comes mainly from my collaboration (as an Assistant Professor at the National Technical University of Athens) with the teacher Eleni Zahou, the artist Elena Akyla, the young pupils of the 51st and 64th Elementary Schools of the city of Athens and the students of the NTUA School

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dialogue on our common spaces in the city — to share experiences, thoughts, and concerns. The process of the 64th Elementary School involved a school year of field work (2015—2016) with the fifth grade pupils (10-year-olds) of the long schedule school day2. The school neighborhood, Metaxourgio-Keramikos, is located in the center of Athens and is part of the old city, whose highly productive character changed radically at the beginning of the 21st century. Today, the symptoms of the current crisis and the traces of previous processes of gentrification and tourist development are both visible. Our objective was to explore with the children the sociospatial microcosm (and the “micropublic”3) of the school by focusing on their experiences and their gaze: their personal stories, their thoughts, their worries and their routines. We were looking for ways in which they perceive, associate, transform, or reject the various reactions that the city exerts on their everyday lives and we were trying to find connections between these experiences that transcend local boundaries and may involve other neighborhoods and stories in different times and places (Chombart de Lauwe 1990: 35).                                         of Architecture who participated in three different programs from 2012 to 2016 (see also Micha 2016). It also comes from my experiences as the mother of a 10-year-old child, who follows the everyday flows and sociospatial networks of our neighborhood. 2 The “long schedule school day” is the afternoon school timetable, which follows the official program, in which some of the pupils participate voluntarily — in principle those whose parents work. 3 This term is used by Ash Amin (in Parks 2015: 893) to highlight the role of the “micropublics” of everyday social interaction in “reconciling and overcoming ethnic cultural differences” and the “negotiation of difference” within these micropublics. In this work, we explore “micropublics” by trying to identify the “spatial practices” and “lived geographies” of children and their parents in these spaces.

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In this project, our objective was to study, with the children, the school neighborhood, to connect elementary subjects (Greek, mathematics, geography, history) with their everyday spaces. The school neighborhood has become the field where research has developed and the pupils have become the main actors in this process (Lehman-Frisch and Vivet 2011). My role in this project was to act as a tutor, working together with the schoolteacher, yet maintaining a distance from formal teaching (see also Pyyry 2014: 105). This link between pedagogical practice in elementary school and university has proven to be very rich. It has provided us with the motivation to constantly redefine our objectives and methodology. It has also helped us to understand that, if we want to explore the complex relationships that children have with the city, we must approach them as interlocutors and experts about their own lives. In addition, this chapter records the difficulties we encountered when we sought to develop a conscious distance from our usual attitude toward space. The hypothesis examined is that the dominant narrative about the city, simplistic and normative, could be challenged on the basis of greater attention paid to the lived everyday realities and the dynamics of rebuilding social and spatial attachments. In addition, as described in the following sections, our goal was to build a bridge between the theories, methods, and practices of the elementary school and those of a university. As Emilia Fägerstam (2012: 28) points out: Although there is an increased interest in place, there is a need for a closer connection between theories on place from a geographical or environmental psychology perspective and theories on outdoor teaching and learning. One of our intentions is to contribute to filling in this gap.

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5.1. Theoretical arguments Studies on children’s relationships with their environment have gradually developed in many Western countries since the 1970s. Among others, we can cite the work of Roger Hart (1979), Kevin Lynch (1977), as well as Marie-José Chombart de Lauwe (1977), who, even then, underlined that children’s lived experiences are far removed from the reconstructions and narratives we make of them; moreover, their perspectives, words, and practices are systematically devalued by those responsible for the city — those who formulate policies and who manage and design the spaces of our everyday lives. Since 1990, thanks to attempts at approaches to childhood in geography, social sciences, political science, feminism, and other fields, a scientific field of children’s geographies has been gradually constituted. It is in this context that the emphasis is placed on the social construction of children’s identity and its intersection with multiple axes of gender, ethnic origin, and so on, which shape even more complex differentiations. Thus, several studies focus on everyday practices and pathways, school spaces, and living and play spaces. These studies above all engage with the children by considering them as active social actors, as “other” adults who do not simply go through a transitional period of maturation, but who perceive, understand, appropriate, and jointly shape everyday spaces (see among others Christensen and James 2000; Dudek 2005; Holloway and Valentine 2000; Ramsey 2004). New approaches broaden and enrich this multidisciplinary theoretical framework by analyzing specific examples and highlighting the sociospatial multiplicity in particular political and cultural contexts (see Lehman-Frisch et al. 2012; Van den Berg 2013; Weller and Bruegel 2009). Other studies underline the relationship between education-training and sociospatial cohesion (André

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et al. 2012), the importance of focusing our research on placebased education (Preston 2015), but also the need for critical pedagogy, following the lead of critical urban geographers, to be encouraged to explore the spatiality of human life in relation with its socio-historical dimension, focusing mainly on sociospatial hierarchies between genders and races, in knowledge and power (McLaren 1998: 454). Through these approaches, children have emerged as a key source for understanding the dynamics of their everyday experiences (Christensen and James 2000), experiences that — as Doreen Massey used to point out — involve intricacies of relationships that range from the local to the global level. However, while in this intense international debate about children’s lives in the city, it is highlighted that cities differ and that every urban space involves a complex and difficult process of negotiation, the discussion is very largely dominated by Anglophone bibliographies, while the remarks on habits and everyday life mainly refer to Western cities. In this chapter, our intention is to broaden the dialogue by enriching it with fragments of the mosaic of Southern Europe, from a point of view derived from the specific spatial and social conditions specific to the South. Through this approach, our aim is to strengthen the idea that children occupy both complex and contradictory spaces in contemporary cities (Christensen and O’Brien 2003: 2). Therefore, it is important in urban studies to focus on the various geographies that are formed by different cultures of communication, social codes, language use, or practices of managing the everyday. In the neighborhoods of Athens, the discussion with elementary school pupils has brought to the surface insecurities, children’s reluctance to talk about the brutal aspects of the crisis, and entrenched stereotypical conceptions — as we have seen in the scene above. But it has also informed us about the practices of appropriating space, modes of “living” and ways of investing in space with

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alternative meanings. The children thus informed us about different ways of thinking about the city and the social order in general (Gayet-Viaud et al. 2015: 2). 5.2. Alternating images of the city of Athens Children’s everyday flows and networks around the school We started the project with a recognition game… At the end, I stayed with Mido, who was my game partner, and we talked a little more. He told me he loved soccer. After school, he goes home, eats, rests a little and then goes to a square (all alone) to play soccer. The school and the square are near his home (Metaxourgio-Keramikos, 64th Elementary School of Athens, 1st meeting, 12/11/15. Extract from my personal research diary). Various sociospatial networks are articulated around the school, and especially the public elementary school, which is formed in relation to the children’s program and often constitute the central axis of a neighborhood organization. Each public school must accommodate the children who live in the surrounding neighborhoods; pupils constitute a significant percentage of the inhabitants of each neighborhood, and the smallest (like perhaps most elderly people) live more “locally”. By focusing on their habits and routines, we identified everyday flows and networks that included not only the school, sports halls, places for private courses, and health facilities, but also play areas, recreation areas, or simply meeting places. We saw that children played an important role in the organization of the social worlds in which they lived. These social connections, which were dispersed, informal, more or less visible, with a strong gendered character, generated relationships of trust and mutual support and strengthened the local community and urban sociability, while helping parents — especially those

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from other neighborhoods and distant places — to communicate and integrate (see also Gayet-Viaud et al. 2015; Weller and Bruegel 2009). In the central neighborhoods of Athens, children often play alone in small squares or unbuilt plots, while someone, usually a woman, watches them from a balcony while she does household chores. Other women go down to their doorstep, bringing along a “private” activity (they peel potatoes, knit, etc…). In the most remote areas, children are usually accompanied by either a parent or a childminder. There, on the benches in squares, playgrounds, and parks, as well as when waiting for the bell to ring to announce the end of school, there is an exchange of opinions and fears about raising children, useful information about extracurricular activities, practices for the care of children and the elderly, as well as advice regarding health issues or job searches (especially in conversations among childminders). Friendly relationships, psychological support, and mutual aid practices for better management of the everyday are developing. These networks help children’s socialization and transition to adulthood, help them live together with people of different ages and nationalities; at the same time, they cover, at least at a small scale, needs that have appeared during the last decade of the crisis, with reductions in public and/or municipal services (health, childcare, education, etc.), and income, as well as rising living costs, and unemployment, often long term. This social network is promoted through a qualitative approach to space based on an open set of research tools that mobilize the capacity for observation, monitoring, and listening. For us, this is the capacity to listen to children, to discover their spatial and temporal paths and to hear their own stories.  

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— Is there a resident or place in the neighborhood that scares you? Pretty much all of them: drug addicts, dogs. Marinella: once a dog chased Giannis and ran very far. — Are you more afraid at night? Mido: I’m more afraid in the morning. In the evening, there are people around and there are no drug addicts. Eleni explained to me that many of the school pupils are familiar “with night-time” because they or their parents sell flowers in nightclubs and restaurants (Metaxourgio-Keramikos, 64th Elementary School of Athens, 4th meeting, 01/29/16. Extract from my personal research diary). As Henri Lefebvre (1981: 131, 132) argued, the city is the space of everyday life and everyday life brings together, in many networks, material elements, people, work, ideas, representations, symbols, and lived experiences. This means that, in city spaces, multiple stories can take place at any given moment — perhaps insignificant, visible or invisible, repetitive or subversive, and quite real but also imaginary. Everyday life hides all these useful—useless things found in an attic, as Michel de Certeau (1984: 122) characteristically pointed out. These practices and stories may not be seen on television, or read in textbooks. Practices that teach people to deceive, to manage, that institute treatments of space, as he argues. For children, the most ordinary things (going to school, crossing the road or an abandoned site, playing soccer, having friends, talking with neighbors, etc.) are all objects of an uncertain and precarious conquest (GayetViaud et al. 2015: 3). By talking to them about these small

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daily achievements, we give them the right and the means for questioning and reflecting on these worlds and practices (Pyyry 2014: 103). The everyday is not simplistic and predictable. On the contrary, the city is full of unexpected improvisations. The images of photowalking in the school neighborhood (dirt on neglected sidewalks or smells from buildings where drug users and homeless people have found refuge) showed the need to talk about subjects that children considered taboo, to overcome fears and to challenge widespread statements. As Doreen Massey (2005: 154) notes, the daily negotiation of a place does not require the conscious collective contestation of its identity. Mechanisms producing this contestation are formed in the long term through a myriad of everyday practices — through the practising of place. Flows and networks in time and space – between local and global We sat around the table to develop the questionnaire for the grandfathers and grandmothers we were going to meet at the Elderly Friendship Club [see footnote 4]. Marinella told us that she asked her grandfather who has lived in the neighborhood since he was 4 years old; he remembers the gas factory, and especially the smoke that came into their houses. Marinella asked him if the women worked there, he told her no — this had impressed her when we visited the museum. He also told her that, one day, a friend of his who worked there passed in front of his house, but he was so black because of the coal that he didn’t recognize him. Mido asked his father to tell him a story, but he told me he didn’t dare to tell it in front of

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everyone, so he didn’t go out at recess and told me: his father would sneak out of the house and go to the stadium when there were matches… they would look for him and then he would get beaten up (Metaxourgio-Keramikos, 64th Elementary School of Athens, 10th meeting, 04/01/16. Extract from my personal research diary). By searching for traces of memory through everyday life and its spatial imprints, we reveal space-times that go beyond established conceptions. It can also help us conceptualize the historical narrative as a tool to locate our journey in space, to identify threads of history, and to also question and challenge widely held beliefs. In the neighborhood of Metaxourgio-Keramikos, with the silk factory and gas factory as its main features, which have determined the historical development of the surrounding area, we looked for traces of production activities that survived in the neighborhood and their links with the current economy. But mainly, through the oral testimonies we have collected4, we have discovered multiple perspectives of memory, which often transcend the silences of history, challenge the logic of its enlightenment (Bada 2016: 232), and reveal to us different places in our own space. In my presentation to the group on the creation of the Metaxourgio neighborhood, I mentioned at the beginning Moria Gate, where gypsy ironmongers                                         4 The proposal by the Directorate of Elementary Education of the First District of Athens to participate in the collection of oral testimonies on the Athens Gas Factory (1857—1984 and industrial museum since 2013) which is located just outside our neighborhood, allowed us to enrich our interviews by including elderly people from the neighborhood’s Elderly Friendship Club, as well as with two school supervisors who had lived in the district for a long time. The children composed the questionnaire and conducted the interviews.

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were settled. Mehmet laughed a little bit and said that we are not supposed to use vulgar words at school. I tried to explain to him that at the time, gypsy meant Egyptians, without any negative connotations. But he started making fun of Mido, whose father is Egyptian and Mido hit him… They became enthusiastic when they realized that they knew the building that housed the silk factory (1855—1875). “But I live next door!” exclaimed Marinella. They were impressed by the Xatzikonsta Orphanage (1855—1960) which nowadays houses the Chinese market, while recently, drug addicts and homeless people have found refuge in its inner courtyard (MetaxourgioKeramikos, 64th Elementary School of Athens, 2nd meeting, 01/16/16. Extract from my personal research diary). Talking with the children of the school in the Metaxourgio-Keramikos neighborhood about the space-times of our lives and family histories brought their origins to the surface, while helping them both to validate and strengthen family ties and inquired into the different historical dimensions of their families’ lived experience from the nearest past to the farthest (Brockmann 2016: 151, 152). Belonging to a second or third generation from Egypt, Poland, Turkey, Romania, Russia, and especially Albania, the pupils in our group were aware of the current state of their lives, but were confused by their family’s past, because there was information that was often, consciously or not, hidden from them. Everyday life still leads us to understand space as the sphere of possible multiple stories of becoming-other, as a set of crossed trajectories that constantly transform each other, through inter-correlations and interactions, from the vastness of the world to the smallest scale. This is what the

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expression “journey: something from elsewhere, something from everywhere” that the children of Metaxourgio used in order to refer to our interactions, making us discover that they are not passive victims of the processes of globalization but that, on the contrary, they exercise control over their lives (Holloway and Valentine 2000: 9). Moreover, our research shows that they were so familiar with global pressures that they worked with them “locally” in their own way. We took photographs of the school street that showed international exchanges (store signs, products, and urban uses). This incorporation of fragments from everywhere, so striking in their everyday life, underlines the idea of “thinking of place as a ‘meeting place’” (Jess and Massey 1995: 62)5. As Cindi Katz (2004: xv) explains, by describing the geographical range of global economic restructuring and some of its common effects on young people in different parts of the world, this countertopography gestures toward novel sorts of spatial and political consciousness that might disturb and exceed the assumptions of local identities. Working along those grounds (between local and global) means insisting on the development of political responses that “do not eat away at the young to make their future”. 5.3. The everyday life of children as a tool for approaching urban space We found ourselves at school and departed from there for the Elderly Friendship Club, but with a delay because the school principal had to take care of the arrival of a new student from Syria. This                                         5 As Lou Preston states in his study on teaching space in elementary schools in Australia (2015: 44), “place is thus conceived in relational terms and, even at this young age, there is opportunity for students to be introduced to the idea that the ‘lived reality of our daily lives’ is utterly dispersed” (Massey 2005: 184).

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happens often, all year round — that’s how Elis arrived at school too and joined our program in the middle of the year. For communication, Mehmet helped by acting as a translator, as the child and his family had lived in Turkey. He will enter 6th grade and I hope he will be with us next year… (Metaxourgio-Keramikos, 64th Elementary School of Athens, 12th meeting, 04/20/16. Extract from my personal research diary). Children’s everyday experiences overturn dominant narratives about urban space. Why imagine a school for refugee children on the country’s border, far from our neighborhoods, when our own trajectories are refugee ones? When our school already accepts new students from far away, even during the school year; when this poor working class neighborhood has already welcomed many refugees and migrants, a wealth of social intersections and clashes through which cultures and living practices have emerged. Children’s geographies highlight hidden aspects of the city that force us to frame urban questions in different terms and consequently to reconsider our priorities and proposals for intervention. Thierry Paquot (2005: 59) suggests that we bend our knees to find ourselves on the sidewalk at children’s eye level. It is then, he argues, that we will understand the change of scale of space, cars, and urban equipment, how much speed increases and sounds increase, how frightening and foreign the city can seem. This experience reveals not only the paradoxical manipulations of adults in spatial planning but also the rigidity of their conception of space. By observing the everyday spaces of small inhabitants, we can also grasp the rules aimed at the control and regulation of their bodies and minds, leading them along a precise linear path of maturing (James et al. in Holloway and Valentine 2000: 9) and/or practicing a certain form of living that

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follows the rules of the middle-class “child-friendly city” (Van den Berg 2013). Early childhood development theorists report that young children tend to organize information in broad categories that are often rigid and dichotomous (Ramsey 2004: 32). Spaces are beautiful or ugly to them, people are nice or mean, and their association with someone is often linked with either offering safety or danger. However, such a trend does not characterize only the “unfulfilled” vision of this age or the need for getting by more “easily” or a “simpler” mode of classification in children’s efforts to understand the world. The conviction that space is given and that its interpretations are self-evident permeates the usual ways of thinking about space today; it dominates political discourse and is reproduced by the mass media. Children grow up in a world full of contradictions and are determined as much by the opinions of parents or the educational framework imposed by their school as by their multiple identities (based on culture, gender, class, or ethnicity). During our conversations, spatial information was often mentioned: information that they had heard in their surroundings, stereotypes, and behaviors that did not correspond to their needs. Their views then were neither innocent nor pure or all-knowing. However, we must consider children as independent knowledgeable subjects, whose voices have something valuable to add to debates about their lives (Holloway 2014: 382). Dominant theories about the city, as well as educational practices, reflect the ideal of individualism and independence of the Western way of life. We therefore often judge children on their individual achievements, which stimulates competition among them (Ramsey 2004: 28). We also consider our objectives for their future as universal and indisputable even if they do not correspond to our own experiences. This makes it easy to understand how important it is to listen to their opinions so as to encourage them to tell us their own stories. In order for

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children to feel like active social actors and to be encouraged, based on their own experiences, to reconsider their initial assumptions about the meaning and function of the space they live in (Christensen and James 2000: 4), we must reject the habit of correcting each “inappropriate view” or “error” by imposing cognitive modes. We must also get rid of a linear reading of “difference”, which sometimes assesses by placing in a (temporal) line of development (and underdevelopment) anything and any being that differs from a dominant cultural model (Massey 2001: 28), and sometimes classifies children’s abilities according to age criteria (Ramsey 2004: 29). The realities experienced in the city are more complicated (and more interesting) than their media images, their political representations, or even the masterful scientific discourse about them. Through the multiple perspectives of the children, I got to know their neighborhood in a different way. I have learned to read what lies behind the percentages of the statistics about the migrant populations of Athens, and to recognize their diverse individual backgrounds and stories. We have all experienced a particular process of familiarization with difference and otherness. A process that has helped us understand better what is at stake today in the neighborhoods of central Athens to shed light on the different aspects of the crisis and to bring out from the shadows the practices that, on a daily basis, challenge the normative dichotomies of the dominant narrative. 5.4. Conclusion The childhood experience that determines spatial practices later develops its effects, proliferates and floods private and public spaces, undoes their readable surfaces, and creates within the planned city a “metaphorical” or mobile city, like the one Kandinsky dreamed of: “a great city built

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according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation” (de Certeau 1984: 110). Conversations with children do not require linguistic and conceptual simplifications. Flexibility, attention, and observation are needed so that one can espouse their conventions and practices at any given moment in order to address their concerns (Christensen and James 2000: 3). This means, among other things, that we are open to enjoy a conversation about soccer or a band, to enjoy a walk, a silence while looking out the window, or impatience for the simplest everyday pleasures; not to devalue all these, but make them an objective. It is important to realize at all times that it is the process that matters and not the framework or a predetermined result. Discussions on the city with elementary school pupils helped us do exactly that: realize that children were not the only ones who needed motivation for education but also their teachers. In other words, it is only as a researcher of our own work that we can continuously redefine our objectives and methodology, in order to be more effective and satisfied with our intervention (Androusou 2002: 3). As Mark Dudek (2005: 11) explains, we need to differentiate our way of thinking about children and their spaces — a position that requires “a geographical turn of mind”6 that will give them the opportunity to coexist, invent, disagree, and develop different trajectories, and can “become other than what geographic and historical frames suggest” (Aitken et al. 2007: 14). It is about being able to get off the beaten track of knowledge of the city, thus providing children with the opportunity not only to understand the world but to change it.                                         6 As Doreen Massey (2006: 50) argues, “difference has to be acknowledged and negotiated before any meaningful solidarity or collectivity — or even that thing we call ‘society’ — can be built. And a genuine recognition of difference requires a fully spatial and geographical turn of mind”.

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5.5. References Aitken, S.C., Lund, R., and Kjørholt, A.T. (2007). Why Children? Why Now? Children’s Geographies, 5(1), 3—14. André, I., Carno, A., Abreu, A., Estevens, A., and Malheiros, J. (2012). Learning for and from the City: The role of education in urban social cohesion. Belgeo [online]. Available: http://belgeo. revues.org/8587 [Accessed March 10, 2016]. Androusou, A. (2002). Κίνητρο στην εκπαίδευση, Εκπαίδευση Μουσουλμανοπαίδων, σειρά Κλειδιά και Αντικλείδια. ΥΠΕΠΘ, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens. Bada, K. (2016). Σιωπές και μνήμες της πόλης των Ιωαννίνων στη δεκαετία του 1940. In Η μνήμη αφηγείται την πόλη. Προφορική ιστορία και μνήμη του αστικού χώρου, Βαν Μπούσχοτεν, Ρ., Βερβενιώτη, Τ., Λαμπροπούλου Δ., Μούλιου Μ., and Χαντζαρούλα, Π. (eds). Plethron Books, Athens. Brockmann, B. (2016). The story is only the start: Collecting family oral histories in the junior/intermediate elementary classroom. Our Schools/Our Selves, Winter, 25(122). Special Section “Oral History Education”, pp. 150—159, Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, Ottawa. de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, Berkeley and London. Chombart de Lauwe, M.J. (ed.). (1977). Autrement. Special issue “Dans la ville, des enfants”, 10. Chombart de Lauwe, P.H. (1990). Penser le local pour comprendre le global. Espaces Temps, 43—44, 35—37. Christensen, P. and James, A. (eds). (2000). Research with Children: Perspectives and Practices. Falmer Press, London and New York. Christensen, P. and O’Brien, M. (eds). (2002). Children in the City: Home Neighbourhood and Community. Taylor & Francis Ltd., London. Dudek, M. (2005). Children’s Spaces. Architectural Press, Elsevier, Oxford.

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Fägerstam, E. (2012). Space and Place. Perspectives on Outdoor Teaching and Learning. Linköping University Educational Sciences, Linköping, Sweden. Gayet-Viaud, C., Rivière, C., and Simay, P. (2015). Les enfants dans la ville. Métropolitiques [online]. Available: http://www.metropolit iques.eu/Les-enfants-dans-la-ville.html [Accessed May 13, 2016]. Hart, R. (1979). Children’s Experience of Place. Irvington, New York. Holloway, S.L. (2014). Changing children’s geographies. Children’s Geographies, 12(4), 377—392. Holloway, S.L. and Valentine, G. (eds). (2000). Children’s Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning. Routledge, London and New York. Katz, C. (2004). Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children’s Everyday Lives. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Lefebvre, H. (1981). Critique de la vie quotidienne. L’Arche Editeur, Paris. Lehman-Frisch S. and Vivet J. (2011). Géographies des enfants et des jeunes : Introduction, Carnets de géographes, 3, 1—19. Lehman-Frisch, S., Authier, J.Y., and Dufaux, F. (2012). ‘Draw me your neighbourhood’: A gentrified Paris neighbourhood through its children’s eyes. Children’s Geographies, 10(1), 17—34. Lynch, K. (1977). Growing Up in Cities. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Massey, D. (1995). The conceptualization of place. In A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, Jess Pat, M. and Massey, D. (eds). The Open University, Oxford. Massey, D. (2001). Philosophy and Politics of Spatiality. School of Architecture NTUA — Papasotiriou Publications. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage Publications Ltd., London. Massey, D. (2006). The geographical mind. In Secondary Geography Handbook, Balderstone, D. (ed.). Geographical Association, Sheffield.

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McLaren, P. (1998). Revolutionary pedagogy in post-revolutionary times: Rethinking the political economy of critical education. Educational Theory, 48(4), 432—462. Micha, I. (2016). La ville et les enfants dans un processus éducatif. Belgeo. Revue belge de géographie [online]. Available: https://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/19531. Paquot, T. (2005). Les enfants dans la ville. Diversité, 141, 59—63. Parks, J. (2012). Children’s centres as spaces of interethnic encounter in North East England. Social & Cultural Geography, 16(8), 888—908. Preston, L. (2015). The place of place-based education in the Australian primary geography curriculum. Geographical Education, 28, 41—49. Pyyry, N. (2014). Learning with the city via enchantment photowalks as creative encounters. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(1), 102—115. Ramsey, P.G. (2004). Teaching and Learning in a Diverse World. Multicultural Education for Young Children. Teachers College Press, New York and London. Van den Berg, M. (2013). City children and genderfied neighbourhoods: The new generation as urban regeneration strategy. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(2), 523—536. Weller, S. and Bruegel, I. (2009). Children’s ‘place’ in the development of neighbourhood social capital. Urban Studies, 46(3), 629—643.

6 Social Citizenship and Social Movements in Response to Housing Needs

Media coverage on PAH in El País

Number of articles

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- ILP - Escraches - Verdict of European Court of Justice Total number of articles 15M

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Source: De Weerdt and García (2016). Elaboration by the authors with data collected from newspaper articles in El País (from 8/02/2012 onward all articles published online are also taken into consideration)

                                        Chapter written by Marisol GARCÍA.

Alternative Takes to the City, First Edition. Edited by Irini Micha and Dina Vaiou. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The chart in Figure 6.1 shows the media coverage given to the mortgage payment problems and evictions related to the PAH in the national newspaper El País, selected for its widest media impact. Between the spring of 2011 and the end of 2012, the media attention to the PAH movement grew exponentially. The main topic was the People’s Legislative Initiative and the related mobilizations. This period coincides with the mobilizations and reports on the first anniversary of the 15M and the strategy of the PAH to complement its daily action of dealing with specific cases of housing eviction with the collection of signatures to initiate the changes concerning mortgage housing legislation. Historically, class identity and collective action were the major factors in advancing social citizenship. Workers’ movements led the drive for democratization. In later years, diverse social movements emerged claiming recognition, with the feminist movement foremost. By the end of the 1980s, many new social movements in Western Europe and North America, with their different organized interests, appeared socially and politically fragmented. This weakened their effectiveness in advancing citizenship. Their social heterogeneity and their political fragmentation made them vulnerable and made them lack public support (Mayer 1995 in García 1996). This general picture varies according to time and place as the opportunities for the effective social agency of social movements differ according to particular geographical democratization processes and political contingencies. For example, in Eastern European countries, a movement such as Solidarność (Solidarity), in the early 1980s, became a key movement in the democratization of Poland and in the introduction of political citizenship rights. In the Western world and more specifically in European cities, the rise and later the decline of social movements towards 2000 also saw the substitution of discourses about social justice and political participation by discourses on social cohesion. This term — used in European urban

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policy — seemed to give legitimacy to local as well as central governments that had abandoned the language of social rights. As Maloutas and Pantelidou Malouta (2004) noticed, the use of ambiguous notions, such as “social cohesion,” was an attempt at reconciling competition with social cohabitation without addressing increasing social inequalities. Moreover, social cohesion policies encouraged the participation of civic organizations in the governance of welfare provisions and urban services. Civic associations and community groups were seen as relevant actors in the promotion of social capital and thus a key element in social cohesion. The ideologists of the neoliberal turn convinced local policymakers of the virtues of social capital for generating social cohesion through empowering excluded populations. A case in point was the French Politique de Ville, which did not always overcome the strong disparities in opportunities in life and consequent difficulties for social inclusion of many young populations in larger French cities (Lagrange and Oberti 2006). Meanwhile, radical social activists, at the margins of the central policy debate, were not seen as potential actors who could provide social capital as a tool for public policy (Mayer 2003). As a result, the strong historical role played by social movements in democratic progress and social trust was undermined, and the visibility of groups proposing counter-hegemonic objectives faded away (Mayer 2009; Somers 2005). The 2007 financial and economic crisis caused workingand middle-class unemployment and impoverishment through massive job losses, particularly in Southern European societies where austerity policies also destroyed job opportunities. In Spain, the construction industry collapsed as the earlier housing bubble burst. In a matter of months, evictions spread, putting the housing issue at the forefront of daily news. Large numbers of citizens affected by the housing crisis had to rely on family and community solidarity, while social service providers were overloaded with the social needs of newly impoverished

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citizens. To complement the social services, and local welfare in general, bottom-up socially innovative practices emerged in neighborhoods. Family and community solidarity were fairly predictable in a Southern European country where individuals often rely on family members for welfare and where community networks tend to be activated at critical moments. However, the emergence of an insurgent social platform denouncing the eviction crisis in an articulated counter-hegemonic discourse against the property market, and highlighting the financial responsibility for the housing crisis, was less predictable. The Barcelona-based Platform of Mortgage Victims (PAH)1 campaigned hard and publicized the abusive practices of the financial sector, pointing out the sharp social inequalities in access to housing and proclaiming housing as a social right. The high visibility of this social movement that supported the evicted gave it wide recognition and stimulated citizen indignation on seeing the dignity of their fellow citizens undermined (De Weerdt and García 2016). The emergence of the anti-eviction movement in Spain did not happen in a vacuum. In Spain, and in many other European and non-European cities, mobilization of civic society groups, neighborhood associations, and actors from historical social movements appeared in city centers as well as in peripheral neighborhoods. Austerity policies left thousands of citizens unemployed or hit by cuts in public services, with negative consequences for social citizenship. A                                         1 In Spanish: Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca was created in 2009 (with a core group of young activists) as a self-organizing mechanism grouping owners unable to pay their mortgages and being evicted from their homes and low-income renters in danger of eviction. The Platform’s main undertakings have been collective actions to stop evictions, negotiation with banks and city councils to find a place for people being evicted to stay and the promotion of laws against housing evictions and energy poverty (see: http://afectadosporlahipoteca.com/).

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sense of increasing inequality spread in cities (later supported by official statistics, Eurostat, 2016). This sense of grievance, particularly among the young qualified sectors of the population, prompted a revival of social movements in large and medium-size cities. These social movements acquired in Southern European cities a particular significance because they questioned not only top-down neoliberal policies but also local governance structures that were seen as unrepresentative (Brokking et al. 2017; Della Porta 2016; Vaiou and Kalandides 2016). This chapter analyzes the PAH as an urban social movement that emerged in Barcelona and spread to become nation-wide in Spain. More specifically, it focuses on ways in which the housing crises, which left thousands of families without homes, prompted major social and political action. The urban social movement the “Platform of Mortgage Victims” was able to scale up from a local to a national social movement. The analysis considers two turning points since its birth in 2009: (1) its major impact, that occurred around 2011 with the outbreak of the movement 15M, and (2) the new political context when, from 2015, part of the agenda of this movement was integrated into the housing policies of the “new City councils” (Barcelona, Madrid, and other Spanish cities). Two arguments: (1) the innovative capacity of this movement meshed well with the wider social and political action and proved able to move up from the local to the European level and (2) with the changing urban political context, the movement found itself in a more marginal position with City councils putting into practice some of the demands of the movement. The methodology of the research included the use of statistics from Eurostat, the Centre of Sociological Research (CIS), the National Institute of Statistics, and Judiciary statistics. Empirical research was done between April and

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September 2013; it consisted of participant observation, 10 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders and public institutions officials, our own creation of a database on media attention, attendance at PAH meetings, online documents of the PAH, and protocols of and data on eviction cases. In addition, a local stakeholder’s workshop was organized, gathering representatives of various social and institutional initiatives and other housing stakeholders2. We used these sources as well as studies of the Spanish economic crisis to explain the social movement as a case that can be compared to other similar cases by considering opportunity structures, the social base, alliances and social networks, action strategies, discourse and visibility (access to media), outcomes, scaling-up, and institutionalization. This chapter aims to contribute to a more general debate throughout this book because some of the concerns presented in the Spanish case are shared by other Southern European countries. 6.1. Building up an urban social movement and achieving national recognition 2009–2011 In a previous publication, De Weerdt and García (2016) portrayed the emergence and the development of the PAH as a socially innovative organization becoming a social movement. They stressed the correlation between the social extent of a national issue — the evictions and housing crisis — and the success and visibility of the movement. The innovation the PAH brought was threefold: (1) denunciation of the role of financial institutions in the scale of the eviction crisis; (2) change in the discourse from individual consumer                                         2 The stakeholders workshop took place on September 17, 2013 (see: http://www.cost-is1102-cohesion.unirc.it/national-pages/spain/ barcelona-action-unit/). A more detailed analysis of the PAH movement and the Spanish context can we found in De Weerdt and García (2016).

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responsibility to financial corporate responsibility; and (3) challenge to the Spanish legal system that condemned evicted owners to lifelong debt. Here, I present the evolution of the PAH as a social movement from the neighborhood to the national level. The innovative capacity of the Platform has been effective because it incorporated the practices of an urban social movement in a particular city open to the proliferation of insurgent movements. Barcelona offered the opportunity structures and the historically based social networks which lent impact to the well-organized core of activists. More recently, the visibility of the movement has declined as its social claims were partly incorporated into the new governance model of the city. Walter J. Nicholls asked: what roles do cities play in the formation of social movements? Three variables partly address this question. First, in cities, social needs related to daily life create the conditions around which social demands are collectively voiced. Second, proximity and common experiences generate common identities that are powerful motives to join political mobilization. Third, cities create the conditions in which horizontal networks, characterized by a combination of strong and weak ties with common codes, facilitate the organization of social action. The first — strong ties — provide the emotions and trust required to face the uncertainty of results, the second — weak ties — make for fast circulation of information. The bridging between the two creates urban-based interdependences that facilitate social trust and social action. Moreover, urban interrelationships facilitate a common discourse with a shared interpretation of the problematic — one of the difficulties in maintaining socially heterogeneous movements — (Blokland et al. 2015; Della Porta and Diani 2015; Nicholls 2008). The construction of a framework analysis of a specific urban question requires time and, often, a core social group that, over time, has created that particular analysis. A further consideration: the opportunity structures offered by local governance and political ways of integrating social activism make a

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difference, as empirical research has shown (Koopmans 2004). This analysis serves to explain the emergence and the first impact of the Platform for Mortgage Victims. The PAH grew rapidly after 2009, from a small group of citizens, organized around housing and other social issues. The main promoters of the Platform were familiar with housing problems in Spain and had already founded a low-profile locally organized platform operating in three Spanish cities around 2006. The “V por Vivienda” (“H for Housing” in English) platforms focused on the inaccessibility of housing for the low-income population, especially young people. This marginal “movement” voiced arguments against the competitive-city orientation in urban policy which gave ample room for speculative capital investment in real-estate while curtailing social and affordable housing. The impact of this discourse was socially confined to activists and their immediate networks, partly because, at that time, the housing market was in full flow and partly because the members of the movement were still debating their priorities and objectives without trying to establish links with other more transversal organizations (neighborhood associations or trade-unions). The “V por Vivienda” was marginally present in Barcelona, Bilbao, and Madrid; members knew each other and created trans-urban networks (Camargo 2009). Furthermore, these collectives had decided in large assemblies to renounce any link with the local administrations, these, on their part, were not open in their participatory structures to “radical” organizations campaigning against their main policy orientation to make their cities globally competitive. Only when the first signs of the housing crash became obvious in 2008 in Spain did this minority group see the possibility to voice its claims, amid the despair of thousands of families that were losing their homes. The time was then ripe for a counter-hegemonic discourse denouncing the

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greediness of speculative capitalism. By 2009, the PAH started to resemble a social movement dealing with grievances (deprivation of homes), affecting large numbers of families who could not meet their mortgage obligations and were evicted from their homes while still having to pay the accumulated debt. The core group of activists finally found a very fertile soil to plant their previously considered radical discourse on the right to decent housing. First, we look at the social needs and the scale of the problem. The failure of the hyper-financialized Spanish housing market to react adequately after the 2007 crash created a problem of a scale that could not be overlooked. The origin of the problem lay in the housing bubble developed since the beginning of the 21st Century. Supply of housing for ownership had gone out of control, fuelled by the easy access to financing for both producers and consumers in the real-estate market. This market expanded in Spanish cities with the support, on the one hand, of foreign capital, and, on the other, with the municipal policy of attracting investment for the construction sector. Moreover, both conservative and social-democratic national governments consolidated fiscal incentives for housing ownership from the moment of reinstatement of a democratic government in 1976 until late 2012. Tax deduction for homeowners benefited buyers but also and, mainly, real-estate developers, builders, and investors, as this fiscal policy contributed indirectly to housing-price increases. Furthermore, public authorities in charge of housing promoted the purchase of real estate as a safe and good investment (De Weerdt and García 2016). From the start of the crisis, job destruction occurred at a high rate and by the end of 2011, almost 2.5 million jobs were lost, leaving many people unable to pay their mortgage bills. Defaults on payments besides expropriation and eviction, result in lifelong indebtedness. In just a few years, more than 400,000 mortgages were foreclosed on throughout Spain, affecting many thousands of households. Between 2008 and 2012, as

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many as 79,699 foreclosures were initiated in Catalonia alone (De Weerdt and García 2016). Second, the common experience of housing evictions in many neighborhoods — mainly in low-income and middleincome households in Barcelona (as in many other cities) — created the need for social action. Local institutions were slow to react to the consequences of the housing market failure. City councils in Barcelona and elsewhere did not have the institutional mechanisms to stop the legal actions taken by banks or the instruments to respond to a situation of social emergency in the first years of the eviction crisis while the daily news in the press and social media fuelled public concern. The presence of activists in some of these neighborhoods favoured the organization of assemblies to discuss the conditions in which the process of eviction unfolded. Neighborhoods emerged (Brokking et al. 2017; Vaiou and Kalandides 2016) — particularly in Southern European cities — as places where acts of reciprocity and mutual support reinforced each other, especially in times of crisis. Solidarity initiatives, informally developed, complemented the actions of institutions. In some instances, innovative practices led by local residents addressed basic social needs. In some of these initiatives, well-informed activists became the leaders of the assemblies. Third, one strength of the Platform for Mortgage Victims in Barcelona was being locally based with a strong core of activists. Once in action, the Platform also established alliances with the leading members of the Federation of Neighbourhood Associations. The Federation constitutes an institutionalized network of neighborhood associations built in the 1970s whose original members had been very influential in the democratization of city planning in the 1980s and early 1990s in Barcelona (Degen and García 2012). As a result of such networking, the Platform movement achieved local recognition. This networking was facilitated through the use of new means of communication:

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smartphones, social media, and a web platform, in marked contrast to the devices used in previous decades. The combination of social networking with new technological instruments made the Platform a visible presence in the public realm. 6.2. The PAH innovative strategies and objectives The Platform of Mortgage Victims developed several strategies of social action. One action was giving families and individuals facing eviction the means to respond to the threats from financial, judiciary, and governmental institutions. In the assemblies organized in neighborhoods, members of PAH provided legal advice. They also, by asking each person under the threat of eviction to tell their story, made the individual experience shared. These stories provided the material for case descriptions of conduct by banks that were then used to force financial institutions into debt renegotiation, communication with the debtors, and even debt settlement. Moreover, by thoroughly investigating the judicial eviction process and the mortgage law, the PAH created documents and ready-to-use forms to oblige targeted institutions into debt mediation. By organizing collectively, they could exert pressure on the multiple actors involved in the eviction process, such as legislative bodies, and other institutions at local, regional, and even international levels. Parallel to actions directed at the financial institutions, the PAH developed innovative strategies and actions to respond to the housing crisis in a practical way. It organized services and produced documents to meet the newly arisen social needs: providing knowledge on the eviction process, tools for debt negotiation, and mutual support in situations of distress. When someone was evicted, for example, the adherents of the local platform would block the entrance of the home to be repossessed in order to stop or postpone the

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eviction and to gain time for negotiation with the financial institution. Through sharing knowledge and experience of the eviction process during the weekly collective-advice assemblies, people were supported through information exchange and guidance during the eviction process. Furthermore, accessible documents to enforce a revision of the mortgage contract were provided and, most importantly, victims would find recognition from people experiencing similar debt issues. Both neighborhood support and collective pressure on financial institutions benefitted the evicted families. The pressure on the renegotiation of mortgage contracts, to enforce payment in kind or, on occasion, a social rent, proved successful. If eviction could not be prevented and the victims could not find alternative housing through social services or with relatives, they could be lodged in one of the blocks occupied by the PAH. The occupation of empty building blocks accompanied a well-thought-out campaign pressuring the government to meet the enormous need for social housing and oblige financial institutions to offer their empty buildings for rent. The occupation of these buildings was, in addition to its housing function, used as a pressure instrument in negotiations with the financial institution (owner of the building) to obtain legal contracts of social rent for families needing housing. In this way, the PAH tried to secure its ultimate goal: satisfaction of the human need for housing. One PAH objective was to bring the problem of evictions to public attention. They wanted to create awareness among Spanish citizens and institutions that the debt problems experienced in Spanish households were not the result of individual failure, but a consequence of decades of housing policies and financial and economic decisions. Their actions in the public sphere comprised mass protests against government institutions at local, regional, and national

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levels. Financial institutions were also targeted with demonstrations and actions. Another PAH objective, complementing the aforementioned social action, was to change practices through a temporary suspension of evictions. Beyond this, the Platform initiated a campaign to change the law regulating payment in kind (by returning the house to the bank). PAH also exercised pressure on private and public institutions to augment the rental social-housing stock by, for example, transforming evicted apartments repossessed by banks or empty building blocks into social housing. Less than 2% of the total housing stock was intended for social rents in Spain (CECODHAS et al. 2012). The PAH started cooperating with lawyers elaborating a proposal to modify the mortgage law and the code on civil procedure seeking to redress the imbalance between individual debtors and financial institutions. In 2010, the local platform in Barcelona presented, with the support of the Defence Committee of the College of Lawyers of Barcelona and other civil society actors, this motion to the city council. Some left-wing political parties expressed their interest3, and gradually more local platforms started presenting these motions to their municipalities. 6.3. Public visibility in the media: amplifying social action Cities are fertile terrain for social and political organization. They are also places where the dynamic character of citizenship associated with the idea of progress clashes with the reality of increasing social inequalities, fragmentation of political participation, and discrimination. As a locus for social action in recent years, cities also benefit from the technological revolution. The linkage between                                         3 El País, 30/03/2010 (see: http://economia.elpais.com/economia/ 2010/03/30/actualidad/1269934384_850215.html.)

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electronic space and physical places reinforces the capacity to organize local resistance. Even so, the traditional media, press, radio, and TV continue to influence public opinion. Leaders of social movements are aware that to achieve the movement’s objectives, they need the support of journalists, in order to be present in the official press (Castells 1983). As the social movement saw it, the housing eviction problem affected thousands of citizens (and residents) and required changes in legislation and concerted action with institutions in order to respond to this social emergency. Therefore, it is not surprising that activists chose a strategy of reaching out to the media in order to influence the public debate and to achieve the recognition of the need for housing as a social right. The PAH was formed in February 2009, but it took 2 years to gain media notice. The emergence of the 15M movement and the simultaneous demonstrations in 50 Spanish cities on May 15, 2011 was the turning point for the PAH. They were regularly mentioned in the news and caught the attention of the wider population. The newly achieved visibility was partly the outcome of journalists visiting the social concentrations in Barcelona, Madrid, and other Spanish cities, where information was shared and public debates included proposals to defend social rights to counteract austerity policies and where the issue of housing was recurrent. The emerging Indignados movement (2011) incorporated, in their proposals, the housing agenda of the PAH with its emphasis on the social right to housing. Conscious that social rights required state support to be fully effective, the PAH’s next step was to move beyond the local public sphere to reach national parliament, and attempt to modify the legal system with the objective to make the “right to decent housing” effective.

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6.4. Achieving policy results 2012–2015 To reshape national legislation, the PAH started the People’s Legislative Initiative (ILP). Mobilizations started in February 2012, and, 1 year later, it had collected almost triple the officially required number of signatures (1,402,854) to propose legislation, reflecting the wide support and visibility the PAH gained during the ILP campaign. This coincided with the ruling of the European Court of Justice on the legitimacy of the Spanish mortgage legislation. Also in this period — February and April 2013 — the charismatic leader of the PAH was invited to give presentations to both the Spanish Chamber of Deputies and the European Commission. These events yielded extensive media attention on the precarious situation of the Spanish mortgage debtors and the impossibility for individuals to plead their case in court, even though the contracts often contained abusive clauses. In her forceful addresses, Ms. Colau accused financial institutions of abusive practices, denounced the unjust Spanish legal system that perpetuated the housing debt of the evicted, and challenged the political parties to transform the debt and housing legislation. The ILP demanded a halt to people’s forced evictions as long as authorities did not provide alternative housing for them. Second, it requested a change in legislation to make possible payment of the remaining mortgage debt in kind (by handing over the title to the house) and then allowing the former homeowners to stay in the property paying a social rent. During the ILP campaign, two law amendments were implemented. The first one, in November 2012, prescribing the temporary suspension of evictions of families considered as particularly vulnerable. The second one, in May 2013, under the pressure of the ILP and the judgment of the European Court of Justice, allowing debtors to defend their case in court in the case of abusive clauses in the mortgage contract. It limited the maximum interest on arrears and extended the period for starting the mortgage eviction from

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1 to 3 months of delayed payment. These law amendments remain minimal, and only under very strict and extreme conditions is debt settlement allowed. However, this legal change and the internationalization (up-scaling) of the problem led to a change in power relations between mortgage debtors and creditors. With time, the PAH movement realized that their confrontational discourse toward public institutions, as “partners in crime” with financial institutions, required compromises. The actions of public institutions and institutionalized organizations in Barcelona in the housing crisis, although insufficient, were not negligible. Members of the PAH organization met in round tables and commissions dealing with new programs to help the dispossessed. Barcelona municipality created a Mixed Commission on Housing Evictions in February 2011, acknowledging the existence of a structural problem of housing eviction, both rental and property-related, and of social-exclusion dynamics due to the financial crisis. The PAH became an official member of this Mixed Commission. The municipality also introduced governance changes, creating a new coordination function involving different departments (social services and housing). Some kind of social rent was created through financial support in the private rental market. Moreover, other civic and religious organizations, acting in neighborhoods, developed initiatives through which the PAH organization felt reinforced. Achieving durable results is one of the most challenging questions for a social movement. The PAH organization was conflicted about the extent to which their collaboration with institutions would undermine the members’ radical discourse. To gain victories, they employed two strategies simultaneously. In one, they were ready to infringe on the law by occupying flats and buildings to lodge families in urgent need of a home, to mention one of their actions. In the other, they established communication with representatives

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of institutions at all regional levels. With these public bodies, the PAH cooperated in “bottom-linked” innovation, meaning involvement with institutions that enables and sustains citizens’ practices and guarantees citizen rights (Pradel Miquel et al. 2013). The “bottom-linked” concept is different from either bottom-up or top-down, in which the actors involved on either side of the divide arrive at stable arrangements to solve problems. Beyond Barcelona, the remarkable success of the PAH social movement was to be present throughout Spain. From 2009 to 2014, the local platforms increased to 205, reaching 236 by 2016. More than half of these platforms are located in the Mediterranean regions, demonstrating the close relationship between the speculative housing boom of the early 2000s and the mortgage crisis. By the same year, as much as 2,500 flats were squatted in by the members of the PAH to house families otherwise homeless. In recent years, the majority of evictions are, however, affecting tenants rather than housing owners. This has involved different actions. The Platform members are called upon to collaborate more with institutions, especially social services, in order to provide housing support to people in need. They also push legislation and force public intervention in order to widen the supply of accessible housing rents. The description of the various institutional and legal changes that have resulted would require more space than is available in the framework of this chapter. It is worth mentioning that two important elements made this social movement particularly innovative. One is “horizontal”: the wide social base created by the PAH through the incorporation of new actors from among citizens and immigrants who attended the local platforms’ assemblies in search of information and advice, a well-known strategy in social movements (Castells 1983). As many of them had lost their jobs, they had time available to join the platform and become activists themselves in different ways. Some became

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more active in the street protests, other in providing emotional support to evicted families. The second element can be seen as “vertical”: the successful scaling up of the issue at stake from the local level to higher levels: regional, national, and even international. 6.5. Institutionalizing policy from bottom-up claims: a fading away of the Platform’s presence from 2015 The PAH movement was one among many actors becoming prominent in the public sphere as a result of the economic crisis. Since the 15M (Indignados) social gatherings in public squares (plazas) of cities, more coherent claims have been voiced, particularly by the young, in defense of social rights in the public sphere, both in urban spaces and in the media. The horizontal assembly method of the anti-austerity Indignados introduced some interesting changes, such as giving voice to the non-activists in the plazas. In Barcelona, Madrid, and other large and mediumsize cities, the debates of citizens and activists in the following years led to the conclusion that, to influence policy, the movements had to reach local administrations. In Barcelona, Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) became the leading organization in the 2015 local elections. Barcelona en Comú exemplifies the transformation of a locally based social platform in defense of social rights and of participatory democracy into a governing coalition. The coalition of social movements and parties won the election and formed the new local government under the leadership of the new city mayor, Ms. Colau, the leader of the PAH movement. Similar coalitions have emerged in the larger cities of Spain. Like Barcelona en Comú, other coalitions have taken over city governments, often in alliance with Podemos. Has the new local political context changed the opportunity structures to institutionalize the aims of the

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PAH movement? How has the change in the status of the previous leader — becoming mayor of the city — affected the social movement? The political demands of the PAH for political parties competing for the new national government elected in 2015 were: (1) to make “nonrecourse debt” for principal homes legally mandatory; (2) to create the legal conditions for the provision of affordable rental housing; (3) to suspend home evictions; and (4) to implement a social rent to support vulnerable households. Barcelona en Comú adopted these claims and created horizontal mechanisms of decision-making inspired by the 15M movement, especially regarding the elaboration of a program for the local government (Eizaguirre et al. 2017). The citizens’ agenda that won the local elections in 2015 had Ms. Colau as leader. This political success by a grass-roots movement gave rise to high expectations concerning the city’s housing policy changes. However, the new local minority government faced the limitations resulting from the multi-level governance involved in housing issues. Changes in housing legislation are introduced mainly at the national level, and the financial resources to provide affordable housing come from the regional government. Moreover, in Spain, the production of housing has always involved the private sector. This multilevel governance frame has tested the mayor’s capacity to negotiate with public and private actors with very different political and ideological affiliations. The difficulties encountered in drastically changing local housing policy have muted the housing program within her first 3 years of office. Urgent measures were taken to help the neediest families; the new government created a mediation service for residents menaced by losing their homes, stopping hundreds of evictions, and offering solutions to half of them. The city government has created a line of finance to support rents. However, the housing market of Barcelona, where housing investors compete with residents, has seen rent increases and gentrification. The numbers of evicted people unable to

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pay the rent continue to be high. This is where the PAH platform maintains its advocacy role. It produces new reports documenting current housing needs directed to the administration and keeps up the work of neighborhood support for the newly evicted, but the presence of the Platform in the public sphere is diminished. However, other platforms and organizations have emerged, working in socially innovative projects in Barcelona and in other large cities, that use the same methodology. One example is the Alliance Against Energy Poverty (Alianza contra la Pobreza Energética-APE) which deserves another chapter. 6.6. Conclusion The financial crisis prompted the bursting of the housing bubble in Spain, which generated an increase in arrears on mortgage payments, in mortgage defaults, in the numbers of housing repossessions and in evictions for failing to pay mortgages and monthly rent. This profoundly affected social citizenship: families lost their jobs and homes and also the social rights associated with them. Capitalism’s internal contradictions emerged once more in cities: while creating new spaces of growth, it also generated new conditions of vulnerability. In a context of state austerity, public resources to support the newly increased vulnerable population were insufficient. Citizens reacted through family and community solidarity re-enacting mutual support. At the same time, activists found fertile soil to legitimize their critical discourse toward the hegemonic competitive-city drive of previous years. Their discourse served also to denounce the complicity of public institutions in assuming the neoliberal ideology. The PAH platform emerged to support those affected by the eviction crisis and became a social movement centered on housing. In a recent publication, Body-Gendrot (2018) reminds us that “by its nature, the city is a frontier space between worlds that ignore each other.” The PAH

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social movement has made the urban space more porous and thereby facilitates the practice of citizenship. One important challenge for the consolidation of contemporary progressive social movements is forming constituencies with a common agenda. The PAH housing exemplifies how a widely shared social need can lead to the formation of that constituency. The PAH social movement highlighted the incapacity of the market and state institutions to respond adequately. In Spain, the shock of the financial crisis spurred the reorientation of a deeply entrenched culture of housing ownership. By articulating a meaningful discourse on the social need for housing in a context of a massive eviction crisis, the Platform was able to gain public attention and legitimacy. At the same time, the introduction of a discourse on the “right to housing” constitutes a reinforcement of the historical importance of a citizenship agenda discredited by the neoliberal ideology. The right to housing has acquired a new meaning in people’s imagination. The implementation of this right required public action. The ample collective repertoire of action by the PAH platform prompted the incorporation of housing in public action. This was later amplified by the local administrations formed after the 2015 local elections with the formation of political parties that emerged from the Indignados movement. Housing policy, abandoned for years, is back on the national, regional, and local political agendas. The case presented here belongs to those urban studies that focus on “the right to the city” and on urban social justice. This perspective sees cities as the locus of human development, of individual and collective creativity. The city is an agora for active citizens who have claims, but it also offers possibilities for innovative responses to social needs. An alternative view sees the city as a money-making machine. Cities provide the perfect context for social action because it creates spaces for civitas, for organized interests, for new forms of horizontal social solidarity, and for urban

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citizenship. In particular historical moments, some cities offer more open opportunity structures for social movements and urban citizenship. 6.7. References Blokland, T., Hentschel, C., Holm, A., Lebuhn, H., and Margalit, T. (2015). Urban Citizenship and Right to the City: The Fragmentation of Claims. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(4), 655—665. Body-Gendrot, S. (2018). Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Global Governance. In Western Capitalism in Transition: Global Processes, Local Challenges, Andreotti, A., Benassi, D., and Kazepov Y. (eds). Manchester University Press, Manchester, 200—216. Brokking, P., García, M., Vaiou, D., and Vicari, S. (2017). Housing and Neighbourhood: Basic Needs, Governance and Social Innovation. In Social Services Disrupted: Changes, Challenges and Policy Implications for Europe in Times of Austerity, Martinelli, F., Anttonen, A., and Mätzke, M. (eds). Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 342—362. Camargo, S. (2009). La crítica al modelo de ciudad competitiva: movimientos urbanos por la vivienda. Master’s thesis. Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona. Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Edward Arnold, London. CEDODHAS, Pittini, A., and Laino, E. (2012). Housing Europe Review 2012: The Nuts and Bolts of European Social Housing Systems. CEDODHAS Housing Europe’s Observatory, Brussels. De Weerdt, J. and García, M. (2016). Housing Crisis: The Platform of Mortgage Victims (PAH) Movement in Barcelona and Innovations in Governance. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 31(3), 471—493. Degen, M. and García, M. (2012). The Transformation of the “Barcelona Model”: An Analysis of Culture, Urban Regeneration and Governance. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 36(5), 1022—1038.

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Della Porta, D. (2016). Social Movements in Times of Austerity: Bringing Capitalism Back Into Protest Analysis. Polity Press, Cambridge. Della Porta, D. and Diani, M. (2015). Introduction: The Field of Social Movements. In The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, Della Porta, D. and Diani M. (eds). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1—25. Eizaguirre, S., García, M., and Pradel-Miquel, M. (2017). Citizenship Practices and Democratic Governance: “Barcelona enComú” as an Urban Citizenship Confluence Promoting a New Policy Agenda. Citizenship Studies, 21(4), 425—439. García, S. (1996). Cities and Citizenship [Special Issue]. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 20(1), 7—21. Koopmans, R. (2004). Migrant Mobilisation and Political Opportunities: Variation Among German Cities and a Comparison with the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30(3), 449—470. Lagrange, H. and Oberti, M. (eds). (2006). La rivolta delle periferie: precarietà urbana e protesta giovanile: il caso francese. Bruno Mondadori, Milano. Maloutas, T. and Pantelidou Malouta, M. (2004). The Glass Menagerie of Urban Governance and Social Cohesion: Concepts and Stakes/Concepts as Stakes. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28(2), 449—465. Mayer, M. (2003). The Onward Sweep of Social Capital: Causes and Consequences for Understanding Cities, Communities and Urban Movements. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(1), 110—132. Mayer, M. (2009). The ‘Right to the City’ in the Context of Shifting Mottos of Urban Social Movements. City, 13(2—3), 362—374. Nicholls, W.J. (2008). The Urban Question Revisited: The Importance of Cities for Social Movements. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(4), 841—859.

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Pradel Miquel, M., García, M., and Eizaguirre, S. (2013). Theorizing Multi-Level Governance in Social Innovation Dynamics. In The International Handbook on Social Innovation: Collective Action, Social Learning and Transdisciplinary Research, Moulaert, F., MacCallum, D., Mehmood, A., and Hamdouch A. (eds). Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 155—168. Somers, M.R. (2005). Let Them Eat Social Capital: Socializing the Market versus Marketizing the Social. Thesis Eleven, 81(1), 5—19. Vaiou, D. and Kalandides, A. (2016). Practices of Collective Action and Solidarity: Reconfigurations of the Public Space in CrisisRidden Athens, Greece. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 31(3), 457—470.

7 Reading Perceptions of the “Other” Through the Debates and Public Discourses about Islamic Religious Practices and the Presence of Mosques in Athens

“Holy wars” and claims for recognition In 2009, during a stop-and-search operation in the Agios Panteleimonas neighborhood1, a police officer (as was alleged) tore apart a copy of the Qur’an. For some Muslim residents of Athens, this was considered a major insult to their faith and it triggered violent demonstrations in the center of Athens — though not all Muslim residents and organizations agreed to this (Salvanou 2014). Some media were quick to portray the event as “holy rage” or even as a sign                                         Chapter written by Penny KOUTROLIKOU. 1 The specific neighborhood became infamous for its associations with the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party but also with a police department that was accused of torturing migrants and harassing supporters and lawyers.

Alternative Takes to the City, First Edition. Edited by Irini Micha and Dina Vaiou. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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of a “looming holy war” (Vradelis 2009), while others acknowledged the fact that these events occurred after several attacks on migrants and a history of discriminations (Nikolopoulos 2009). It was a period of time when “Otherness”, associated mostly with migration, was targeted verbally as well as bodily in Greek society, since migration was primarily blamed for what was then described as “the crisis of the center of Athens” and far-right discourse and actions started gaining prominence in politics as well as on the streets. Yet a little bit later, demands for recognition (or at least tolerance) were also made by some of the city’s Muslim residents through the organization of public prayers in the central squares of the city as well as in neighborhoods of Athens. In a very turbulent time, in the midst of economic, political, and ideological crises, the issue of the construction of a mosque in Athens re-emerged (after years long legal and public debates resulting in yet another legal arrangement — concerning the designation of its location — in 2011)2. The issue of religion and its practices, and specifically of Islam, has often become a highly contested topic in public discourses unfolding in different European cities during the past twenty years (Fekete 2009). It has often been perceived as a mark of difference, of tensions between secular liberal values and religious identities, and as a signifier of integration troubles in multicultural cities. Equally often, it has become a signifier of threat (when associated with men and implicitly with possible terrorist acts) as well as of oppression (when associated with women). The recent movement of refugees toward Europe has further re-kindled                                         2 Law 4014/2011, article 29, para. 5.

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such discourses, amplified by the re-emergence of a “clash of civilization” line of argumentation. Yet, cities are characterized and constantly shaped by the presence of diverse cultural groups. This diversity is manifested in smaller or grander places, through everyday practices as well as by the mundane presence of groups cohabiting in urban neighborhoods. This coexistence oscillates between multiple identities and belonging to a broader society, and between acts of visibility and recognition and practices of invisibility — all of them often shaped by how the arenas of the public and the private are defined in given contexts. The existence of group-specific places, and particularly of religious places, denotes this ambiguity since it simultaneously becomes the signifier of both recognition (given or claimed) and difference — spatially and symbolically — as well as of multicultural cohabitation. This ambiguity among recognition and difference in its public articulations will be explored in this chapter by focusing on Islamic religious practices in the center of Athens. 7.1. Spatialities of integration (of faith groups) Almost a decade ago, several ex- and current heads of state (such as the ex-UK Prime Minister D. Cameron and the then German Chancellor A. Merkel) were quick to denounce “multiculturalism” and to declare the failure of integration policies and initiatives. As they stated, in their cities, some groups of citizens were living separate and parallel lives which were also spatially manifested by the existence of segregated or culturally differentiated areas. Notwithstanding counter-arguments by geographers who challenged the increasing segregation/ghettoization discourse, the dominant public discourses — relying on insinuations within political discourses — were quick to

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identify the “problem social groups”: Muslim residents (migrants and non-migrants alike). It was not the first time that specific social groups have been accused for the rupture of society’s (perceived) cohesion. It was, though, an argument expressed with surprising simultaneity in different European countries. For almost twenty years now, Europe’s “Other” has come to be exemplified by generalizing representations of its Muslim population; representations of either strong cultural differences that are “difficult to integrate” or of potential threats (Benton and Nielsen 2013; Fekete 2004, 2009). At present, it has become evident that such discourses have been mainstreamed, reflecting an already existing and growing Islamophobia in many European states. This Islamophobia has become a popular political argumentation (especially from populist parties whose appeal has also been growing) and a process that stigmatizes a significant percentage of Europe’s population (ENAR 2017; Open Society Institute 2010). In such a context, a supposed “lack of” or “unwillingness for” integration has often been adversely linked with Muslim European residents. However, bearing in mind the dangers of rising nationalism and xenophobia in Europe, many leaders are now (in light of the refugee arrivals in Europe) declaring the significance of integrating the new residents of Europe within their respective societies, something that was already observed by the Council of Europe many years ago (2011). Nevertheless, what integration means, for whom and how it is implemented, has been a contested issue and dependent on different traditions and imaginaries of European polities (Favell 2003; Trimikliniotis 2014). As described by Penninx (2004), in order for integration to work and for migrants and minorities to become full members of the polity, it is necessary to ensure their inclusion in the legal/political, socioeconomic, and

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cultural/religious domains. Besides these rather institutional domains, others have also pointed out the significance of their spatial accommodation and inclusion as well as the significance of “everyday integration” (Cherti and McNeil 2012). Yet, at the heart of integration debates are the questions about who is required to integrate and how (or in other words who is required to change in order for such a social contract to be achieved) and, mostly, who is defined as the Other that “needs” to integrate. Thus, Otherness, the recognition of different social and cultural identities within a given society and their perceived proximity or distance (or even threat) to the dominant political imaginary, shapes the playing field of integration. As Soysal (1994) points out, these debates on integration concern conflicting definitions of sociopolitical membership in a given society, or of what is defined as private and as public (Rex and Singh 2003). From another perspective, rather than discussing integration (in any form), Safier’s (2001) work on cosmopolitan development and co-operation highlights what he defines as five “collective identity needs” that need to be fulfilled in order for groups to be able to participate fully in a society: recognition, respect, resourcing, representation, and territorial realization. Transferring these observations from the legal-political domain to that of the urban may shed further light on their material, symbolic, and everyday aspects. The urban landscape is shaped (and constantly being reshaped) by a great variety of material and immaterial symbols, reflecting its past and present, its affirmed, as well as its contested or even hidden, cultural heritage. The urban fabric is whittled by the histories, politics, and lives of those who lived and are living there, and by grand national narratives, neoliberal symbols of wealth and financial domination, symbols of struggle and resistance, and local landmarks that act as anchors in the landscape of the city. From the city to the neighborhood scale, these symbols can

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also be perceived as affirmations of recognition and/or dominance of particular groups and ideologies — or as claims for such recognition and visibility. On the other hand, their absence may sometimes be considered as a symbol of non-existence, erasure, or non-recognition. Thus, it comes as a little surprise, in a secular, multicultural yet still predominantly Christian (as still defined by some) Europe, that the debates about the visibility of its Muslim residents and their material symbols have been so intense in many places. Central in these debates — further underlining “Otherness” — has been not only the clothing of the female body in public spaces (Baldi 2017; Hancock and Srinivas 2008) but also the debates surrounding the construction of mosques. Despite declining numbers of believers and adherence to secular values (at least in declaration), Christianity still has a stronghold in the European imagination. Materially, as well as symbolically, churches are found in most neighborhoods in European cities and, even if they are sometimes privatized and sold off, their material significations leave their mark in the urban landscape. Similar marks, of varying levels of visibility, are also left by other formal or informal religious places, reflecting the diverse pasts and presents of cities in Europe. As Hatziprokopiou and Evergeti (2014: 606) write, the “changing religious landscapes often relate to the construction of mosques, which become the most visible architectural manifestation of religiosity, difference or multiculture”. For as long as such religious places remain “hidden”, non-descript, and without a visible presence, the reactions against them tend to be limited (with exceptions). Yet, the moment when “the Mosque” becomes a claim — simultaneously a legal, political, spatial, and symbolic claim — then it immediately becomes a challenge, a threat even, to the symbolic as well as to the political imaginary of a city, causing tensions or conflicts (see Fetzer and Soper 2005;

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Gale 2008; Hatziprokopiou and Evergeti 2014; Maussen 2005 for analyses of these debates). The existence or not of minarets often becomes the fundamental signifier of this conflict (as, for example, in the Swiss referendum of 2009). As Maussen (2005: 4) writes, “both in the Netherlands and in France, Muslim organizations are nowadays called upon to develop more modern and contemporary mosque buildings. The ‘modern mosques’ would symbolically embody the willingness of Muslim communities to genuinely integrate in host societies.” Thus, while, on the one hand, people’s rights for a place to practice their religion are broadly acknowledged, the issue simultaneously becomes more complicated when it involves the visible existence of mosques, in a way further reinforcing the symbolic but also social and spatial Otherness associated with European Muslims en masse. However, reactions to mosques vary and, apart from the dominant discourses mentioned earlier, these reactions are also associated with particular historical and political trajectories and ideas of national identity in the respective places. Such a particular trajectory will be explored through the case of Athens3. 7.2. Religion and national identity in Greece The discussion about religions in Greece, particularly minority ones, sooner or later leads to discussions about national identity. Often, common ancestry, the Christian Orthodox religion, and the continuity of the Greek language are presented as the foundations of the (dominant) national identity of the modern Greek state (Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2009; Tsoukalas 1999). This emphasis on religion                                         3 The material upon which this chapter is based was collected as part of a project on discourses about migration and the city center (2008—2014) and complemented by an analysis of discourses about the construction of the main mosque in Athens, as well as by personal experience of certain inner-city neighborhoods.

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was further entrenched by the state’s relations with its neighbors (assumed “friends” and “enemies”) in the broader geopolitical terrain of the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as by its effort to construct a coherent (and mostly homogenous) post-Ottoman nation state via Hellenization (Hirschon 2010; Mackridge 2009). During this process, various religious and ethnic communities were suppressed (physically and culturally) with their cultural and religious practices often eradicated or at least hidden from the public gaze. One could argue that, to a great extent, Greek national identity has been constructed in opposition to its Ottoman past and to the people of Muslim faith as they were deemed either as Turkish or at least as Turkey’s allies (Heraclides 2011; Millas 2004). For a great part of the 20th century, wars (and opposing war alliances), conflicts and post-conflict traumas, and (more recently) practices of “enemy designation” for political manipulation purposes have shaped the relations between Greece and Turkey. All these historical-political situations have also embedded the enemy Other in the imaginary of Greek national identity, often resulting (at least in terms of stereotypes) in a merging of Turkish with Muslim identities (Heraclides 2011). The existence of a minority Muslim population in Thrace (recognized by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923) has also played a part in forming this perception. In present-day Greece, the Orthodox Church is not separated from the State in the Constitution and it enjoys a rather privileged status “which includes legal prerogatives that do not apply to other religious groups” (Halikiopoulou and Vasilopoulou 2013: 3). Besides its other privileges, it also holds significant political power and social influence, despite its declining number of actual active followers (Halikiopoulou and Vasilopoulou 2013). This influence becomes even more visible at times when “matters of national interest” are debated (such as the recent agreement

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over Macedonia’s name4) or when reforms concerning religious affairs are attempted (in relation to, for example, religious courses at schools, civil partnership, or the debate about the mosque in Athens that we will explore further). Up until 2014, the “only religious groups formally recognized until now as having legal personality as a faith community, are Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam in Thrace” (Fokas 2015: 58). In October 2014, a new law was passed, whereby other religious groups can be legally recognized as religious communities after a certain procedure (Fokas 2015). A poll conducted by Kαπα Research5 in 2015 estimated that 81.4% of the population self-identifies as Greek Orthodox, 2.9% identifies with other religious groups, and 14.7% is atheist. Yet this very high percentage of selfidentification as Greek Orthodox may possibly resonate more with established traditions and national identity associations rather than with actual religious practices. This would correlate with the findings from the Pew Research Centre whose research showed that, in the case of Greece, “54% believe it is very important to be Christian to be considered a true national” (Stokes 2017) — although the gap between younger and older respondents was +26%. With regard to the perceptions of Islam, a 2010 poll by Public Issue (2010) found that although a significant percentage do not know a lot about the Muslim religion and its customs, they consider it as more violent than other religions and distant from Greek culture, and in a 2016 attitudes poll, 65% of respondents hold unfavorable views of Muslims in Greece                                         4 The dispute concerning the agreement over FYROM/Macedonia’s name (and associated ethno-cultural and linguistic issues) is an international dispute dating back to 1991—1992 and bars the country’s incorporation to NATO (among other international bodies in which Greece is a member state). 5 Both Καπα Research and Public Issue are market and public opinion research companies (among other activities), frequently employed by the media, political parties, and the state.

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(Lipka 2017). Despite this, about 70% do not believe that Greece is in danger from Islam, and one would assume that in a country where the national identity card still wins the “hearts and minds” of many, this strong interrelation between religion and national identity would subsequently turn religious Others into the Others par excellence. Notwithstanding the assaults on religious establishments and people which have taken place in the past decade, it seems that Otherness — particularly as expressed through violent attacks — has been primarily constructed on the basis of an inter-relation of racialized ethnicity and religion rather than religion per se, at least until recently. In order to further substantiate this, a small detour through the recent history of migration in Athens is useful. 7.3. Migration and violence in Athens Over the past 30 years, the population profile of Greece — and particularly of its major urban centers — has been vividly transformed. Throughout the 20th century, Greece was considered as a place from where people migrated mostly for economic and/or political reasons. However, geopolitical conflicts and wars, along with the economic growth of the country and its location at the periphery of, but within, the European Union, have transformed it into a place where migrants and refugees were arriving in order to find a better future. As such, the relatively small number of migrant groups that existed until the 1980s multiplied by the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st (Marvakis et al. 2001). Up to the late 1990s, most of the migrant population came from the Balkans and Eastern European countries — the majority from Albania. The wars and conflicts of the beginning of the 2000s changed migration patterns toward Greece and increased the numbers of people from Southeast Asian, African, and Middle Eastern countries who settled in

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Greece. According to the 2011 Census, the largest non-EU migrant communities include persons from Albania, Moldavia, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Armenia, the Philippines, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and China. To these ethnic groups are added refugees and asylum-seekers who are at present in the country and who mostly come from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Albania, with the majority of them residing in Athens. From the perspective of the Greek state, migration was considered primarily as an issue for the Ministry of Public Order6 and secondarily as an issue of labor. Thus, it was mostly dealt with through repression and control (deportations, sweep operations, stop-and-search, etc.) with very limited concerns for integration and ad hoc initiatives toward employment and housing. As a result, migrants were initially inserted into the housing and labor markets through diverse and often informal channels which increasingly became more institutionalized (Christopoulos 2014). Due to the vertical segregation that characterizes the urban centers (Maloutas and Karadimitriou 2001), the overall picture was that of limited ethnic spatial segregation. This has led to rather mixed neighborhoods in the city center, characterized by everyday encounters (Vaiou et al. 2007). With the 2004 Olympic Games underway, the need for cheap and flexible labor facilitated the acceptance of a migrant labor force. At the same time, some people started celebrating the newfound “exotic” multicultural character of the city; a character that — in their eyes — made Athens more metropolitan. However, exploitation and discrimination abounded, because migrants’ rights were not safeguarded and there were many instances of abuse of migrants (Pavlou and Christopoulos 2004). In both media and political discourses, portraying migrants as a “social problem” was common,                                         6 Now Ministry for Citizen Protection.

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stereotyping them and often linking them to criminality (Lafazani 2004; Tsigkanou 2009). Migrant groups were haphazardly categorized as “good” and “criminal,” whereas by the end of the 1990s, the number of violent attacks toward migrants increased dramatically (Lafazani 2004). The situation started to improve by the turn of the millennium, only to deteriorate again rapidly with the beginning of the economic crisis and the rise of the far right — particularly of the Golden Dawn party and its street violence. From 2008 until 2013 — the latter signified by the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, the last murder by Golden Dawn members and the trigger for initiating the still ongoing court case against the party — the situation was bleak. Xenophobia and racism were mainstreamed in political and media discourses (Koutrolikou 2015), while, in the streets, abusive police operations (such as the infamous stop-and-search operation Xenios Zeus with evidently racist targeting; see Human Rights Watch 2013) and violence from far-right supporters were frequent (Christopoulos et al. 2014). At the same time, a significant number of people were left trapped in Greece in a vulnerable situation regarding their survival. While violence seemed to be mostly inflicted on the basis of ethnicity/race and migration, attacks also targeted community and religious places and particularly some informal mosques in Athens. As the reports from the Racist Violence Research Network (RVRN 2015—2018) state, racism is the primary reason for the attacks, although religion is also mentioned and, in reality, the two are often interrelated. Clearly identified religious attacks concern both individuals and places and affect mostly the Jewish and then the Muslim religion. Fortunately, with the prosecution of Golden Dawn and the visibility their crimes received, backed by international criticisms, the dominant discourses started to change and the violence in the streets to wither. The refugees who

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arrived from 2015 onward faced a very different, mostly welcoming, attitude. However, at the time of writing (in late 2018), with the trial of Golden Dawn reaching an end and within a reinforced nationalist climate due to the Prespes agreement regarding (North) Macedonia, a new wave of violence is re-emerging on the streets of Athens (and Thessaloniki) — violence against leftist/autonomous individuals, against politicians deemed non-Hellenic, and against migrants. 7.4. The (almost) “invisible” mosques in Athens The existing diversity of ethnicities and national origins of migrants is also accompanied by a plurality of religions and faiths, although not per se as a direct outcome of migration. According to the 2011 Census data, the majority of the non-EU migrant residents of Greece (and of Athens) come from predominantly Muslim countries7. Despite them forming 8% of the total population (or higher in different neighborhoods of Athens), their religious presence in the urban fabric, not in terms of bodily presence but in the form of religious establishments, is small and it largely goes unnoticed by most of the population. The dominance of the Greek Orthodox Church is evident in most parts of the city. The Catholic Church in Greece has also been recognized almost from the foundation of the modern State and its followers consist of both migrant (mostly of Polish, Filipino, Ukrainian, and Albanian origin) and non-migrant persons8. Numerous other Christian churches of different denominations are also operating in                                         7 The description as predominantly Muslim countries refers either to the country’s official religion or to the religion that the majority of its population declares at the Census. However, this description does not denote the religious beliefs and practices of people of the respective nationalities. 8 http://www.cathecclesia.gr/hellas/index.php/catholic-church-in-greece.

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Athens. Some of them have been recognized post-2014 as legal religious bodies, others are recognized as faith-based associations (pre-2014 legislation), and others operate informally throughout the city, often in the neighborhoods where the related population resides (Ministry of Education, Research and Religions 2015a). In addition, currently, there are two synagogues operating in Athens as well as a limited number of other (Baha’i, Buddhist, Hindu) religious establishments. Muslim religious places have been a highly contested issue, based on the arguments about their supposed incompatibility with and/or threat to Greek national identity, their danger to “hellenism,” and due to historical-political enmities with Turkey. However, “the first public space in the Municipality of Athens which was used in the 70s by Muslim migrants for performing their religious duties was a room in the Medical School of Athens” (Dourida 2011: 1). She further mentions (Dourida 2011) that for public prayers during major religious celebrations, often, a park in the Municipality of Athens was provided. The first mosque (licensed as an educational and cultural center) was established in 1986 by Muslims of mostly Arab origin (Dourida 2011). In 2015, three houses of prayer9 received a permit (two in the city center and one in the broader Piraeus area), and another (not in Attica) in 2016, bringing the total number of licensed houses of prayer (outside Thrace and Dodecanese) up to 4 (Ministry of Education, Research and Religions 2016). However, there are many other informal mosques/worship places dispersed throughout the Athens metropolitan area. Despite their legal status, these mosques are distinguished not only on the basis of their affiliation with particular branches of Islam (Sunni, Shia) but also in terms of the ethnic origins of their users.                                         9 As mentioned (Ministry of Education, Research and Religions 2016: 13), a “house of prayer” is different from a “temple” since it “is a place of worship of relatively small size in a private property designed to operate as a worship place for a limited number of people”.

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One of the main distinctions within Sunni mosques specifically (which comprise the majority) is between Arab mosques (as they are referred to) on the one hand, and Asian ones (mainly Bangladeshi and Pakistani) on the other (Dourida 2011; Triantis 2017). Nevertheless, these distinctions along ethnicity lines do not necessarily mean that only people of the specific ethnicity use a particular mosque. As mentioned earlier, mosques are dispersed throughout the Attica region and are often located in neighborhoods where significant numbers of people from the respective community reside. The price of renting a property is also an influencing factor for the choice of an area (as are the surrounding attitudes toward the mosque). Some mosques have a much more local character, while others function as points of reference for a given community. In terms of spaces, mosques tend to be located in spaces previously used for manufacturing/repair, warehousing, and/or offices, often in basements and also on higher floors (Kourou and Sakka 2017). Apart from prayers, they also host a number of other activities (educational as well as cultural). With the exception of the few larger ones, the majority of mosques thus remain hidden from the eyes of many. This invisibility might be the result of practical reasons (mentioned earlier). However, it may also be related to a need for attracting less attention to religious practices, in order to avoid frictions within the neighborhood or attacks (Leghari 2009). This “desire” for invisibility cannot be considered as unfounded given the attacks that have taken place against individuals of Muslim faith and against their religious and social gathering places, and given the political discourses that often reproduce a fear of Islam (Sakellariou 2017) or at least perceptions of significant cultural differences.

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7.5. Claims to recognition and acts of citizenship10 As described by Dourida (2011), her 2007 research on mapping places of worship of Muslim migrants and prejudices toward them in Athens highlighted three main demands from her interviewees: legalization of existing mosques, construction of a new mosque, and construction of a Muslim cemetery in Athens. Further reports and research also support these findings, although each of these demands is of different significance to respondents. It is important to note that while there seems to be a consensus about having legalized houses of prayers and a mosque in Athens, opinions diverge on the issue of having one main mosque or many smaller ones. In any case, many highlighted the significance of continuing to have smaller informal mosques (houses of prayer), even if a large formal one is established. In contrast to the invisibility of the smaller mosques, Muslim residents have been more vocal regarding their demands for having a recognized mosque. This was evident throughout the very lengthy debate about the construction of a main mosque in Athens, but it became much more visible (and pressing) through their public prayers during major religious celebrations (Salvanou 2014). Demonstrations and public prayers As mentioned, the use of public spaces for Muslim public prayers in major religious events dates back to the 1980s (when the religious community was still small numerically). As stated by the Ministry of Education, Research and Religions (2015a), for the past few years (since 2011 probably), the State has offered the Olympic Sport Center and the Stadium of Peace and Friendship to Muslim communities for them to fulfill their religious duties during the major Islamic celebrations. However, before this                                         10 Isin and Nielsen 2008.

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“settlement”, in 2010, public prayers were arranged and conducted in various squares in Athens to celebrate the major Islamic holidays (in September and November that year). Although the majority of the press was relatively “tolerant” (Triandafyllidou and Kouki 2013), far right and some conservative voices strongly opposed them and in one occasion violent attacks did occur. Although public prayers have taken place in public spaces before, the centrality of some of the public spaces used this time (in front of the City Hall or in front of Propylaia) granted them great visibility and thus triggered debates about the public image of the city. One could assume that the later provision of the stadium to hold public prayers was somehow influenced by these public actions. As was also mentioned, these public prayers were also a form of peaceful yet public pressure toward resolving the mosque issue. The Athens’ Mosque debate The Athens’ Mosque debate, and particularly its geography, has occupied significant space in the public discourse as well as, more recently, in research. This debate dates back to the late 19th century, since the establishment of a mosque was already provided in a law of 1890 (for a Turkish mosque), and again in a law of 1934 (for an Egyptian mosque) (Sakellariou 2017), although neither were enforced. Other legal provisions were also made over time, but none were actually implemented. Among other things, the mosque’s geography kept changing from Pireaus to Zografou, Marousi, Alimos, Xalandri, Koropi, Paiania, and Votanikos (Ministry of Education, Research and Religions 2015b). However, the 2004 Olympic Games again brought the issue to the forefront, since a mosque was needed to serve those coming to Athens for the Games (Triandafyllidou and Gropas 2009), as did the strong international criticism that Greece received (Ministry of Education, Research and

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Religions 2015b). Therefore, another law was passed in 2000 to establish a mosque in the area of Paiania near Athens’ airport. The establishment of the mosque there triggered various discussions both in the media and in political spheres (local and national). One key issue that was raised had to do with the authority that would be the guiding principle for the mosque and the potential influence it may have from Turkey (2015b). However, despite a general agreement on the need for a mosque, its exact location was the other key issue that was debated. It was contested on the grounds of the prospects of attracting Muslim migrants to the area, and of adversely impacting the culture and life of the broader area and its residents whose quality of life would deteriorate (Anagnostou et al. 2008; Antoniou 2003; Sakellariou 2017). It was also criticized because it would be one of the first images that one would see when landing in Athens and would thus give visitors the impression of “landing in a Muslim country” (Anagnostou et al. 2008; Sakellariou 2017). In a more recent public opinion poll (Public Issue 2010), respondents were split over the proposition of constructing a mosque in Athens11. The 2004 Games came and went, but the mosque was never constructed. A new law concerning the construction of a mosque was passed in 2006 and proposed to locate it in a different area: Elaionas. Amid reactions and counterarguments over different issues, three more laws and/or amendments had to be passed in order for the mosque to get permission to be built and to operate (in 2011, 2016, and 201712). Despite this legal marathon, and a relatively small mobilization of mostly far right and nationalist individuals                                         11 Totally agree 28%, probably agree 13%, probably disagree 6%, totally disagree 39%, and neither 11%. 12 Law 4014/2011 (ΦΕΚ vol. 209) and Law 4414/2016 (ΦΕΚ vol. 149).

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who occupied its plot of land, the mosque is currently being constructed at a former site of the Navy. Located at the western border of the Municipality of Athens, Elaionas is a light industrial manufacturing and logistics area which has been in the midst of redevelopment plans for more than a decade (and still is). As already stated in 2006 by the then Minister for Education, “Elaionas lies at the borders of the municipality of Athens and we will thus have more tolerance [...] it’s the only area that ensures discreetness and decency” (Ministry of Education, Research and Religions 2015b). Thus, constructing the mosque there seems to relate less to the broader development plans for the area and more to the fact that Elaionas has been considered as Athens’ “backyard”, where several of the activities and people deemed “undesirable” have been located. At present, apart from the mosque, Elaionas hosts the refugee camp of Athens, the rag-pickers’ market, and Athens’ crematorium is also planned to be located there. Thus, on the one hand, symbolically the need for legalization and institutional recognition is fulfilled through the construction of the mosque in Elaionas. Yet, on the other hand, one might argue that this is done so in hindsight, at the borders of the Municipality and in a non-residential area with reduced visibility; somewhere where Athens disposes of the strange and uncanny. 7.6. In the end... As mentioned earlier, integration processes are interlinked with definitions of otherness and who is required to transform “more” to be accepted in a given polity. Notwithstanding the importance of legal-political aspects of integration, living together in multicultural cities also involves formal and informal practices of recognition and belonging: practices that are political, symbolic, and also material and spatial. The debates about the usefulness or

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dangers of “places of identity” (including religious places) have been going on for several decades, emphasizing support, recognition, and socialization on the one hand, and the dangers of insularism, seclusion, and oppression on the other. They also signify places of Otherness and how such Otherness is treated depends on how it is perceived in a given society. Reflecting on the city of Athens and its relationship with religious practices reveals some particularities rooted in the specific historical-political trajectory of the city/country. Since Orthodox Christianity and national identity are so closely linked in the case of Greece, one could assume that religious others would be the more “singled-out” form of difference. For a whole range of reasons, through the lens of national identity, the Muslim Other has been traditionally fused with a Turkish Other (enemy formation) and not necessarily with a Middle Eastern (or Arab) Other. At the same time, as reports show, violence against migrants or perceived others is infected on the basis of a combination of racialized ethnicity and religion rather than religion per se. When we look at the materialities of religious practices and of the discourses about them, then the above-mentioned issues of migration, integration, and national identity are also projected upon the urban space of the city. This dialogue among practices of invisibility and claims of visibility clearly supports Rex and Singh’s (2003) observation that integration is deeply rooted in definitions of public and private spheres, spaces, and practices and in struggles over them. In Athens, this visibility—invisibility (or even selective visibility) nexus is also ingrained into attitudes and practices of formal and informal religious uses and their in-between gray areas. Informality (often implying reduced or no visibility) is tolerated, even accepted, but it can easily be threatened. Formality, on the other hand, triggers debates and tensions, and implies institutional recognition and —

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perhaps — acceptance in the future, yet it does not necessarily mean present-day conviviality. The decision to ultimately construct the mosque but in a peripheral and obscured area further illustrates these ambiguities between institutional recognition and the marginalization of the unfamiliar/uncanny. Possibly it is in the gray zones of (in)formality, at the in-betweens of public and private, where struggles over and practices of living together occur (Koutrolikou 2018). 7.7. References Anagnostou, D., Gropas, R., and Antoniou, D. (2008). Domesticating Islam and Muslim Immigrants: Political and Church Responses to Constructing a Central Mosque in Athens. In The Orthodox Church of Greece in the 21st Century: Religion, State and Society in an Era of Transitions, Prodromou, E., Macrides, V., and Roudometof, V. (eds). University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame. Antoniou, D. (2003). Muslim Immigrants in Greece: Religious Organization and Local Responses. Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora, 22(2—3), 155—174. Baldi, G. (2017). ‘Visible Others’: A Reading of the European Obsession with the Female Veil. Sociology and Anthropology, 5(8), 677—687. Benton, M. and Nielsen, A. (2013). Integrating Europe’s Muslim Minorities: Public Anxieties, Policy Responses. Migration Policy Institute, May 10. Available: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/ article/integrating-europes-muslim-minorities-public-anxieties-po licy-responses [Accessed October 25, 2018]. Cherti, M. and McNeil, C. (2012). Rethinking Integration. Institute for Public Policy Research, London. Christopoulos, D. (2014) Greek Migration Policy: “Non-Policy” or Just Class Policy? Initiative Deport Racism.

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Christopoulos, D., Kousouris, D., Papadatos-Anagnostopoulos, D., Papapantoleon, C., and Sakelariou A. (2014) Mapping UltraRight Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism within the Greek State Apparatus. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Brussels. Dourida, E. (2011). Seeking Places of Co-existence. Islam in Greece. Religious Identity and Practice between Autochthonous and Migrant Muslims. Available: http://www.ecclesia.gr/ greek/holysynod/commitees/metanastes/parousiasi_11062011. pdf [Accessed October 25, 2018]. ENAR (2017). Islamophobia in Europe. Recent Trends. Report, European Network Against Racism, Brussels. Favell, A. (2003). Integration Nations: The Nation-State and Research on Immigrants in Western Europe. In Multicultural Challenge (Comparative Social Research), Brochmann, G. (ed). Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Bingley. Fekete, L. (2004). Anti-Muslim Racism and the European Security State. Race & Class, 46(1), 3—29. Fekete, L. (2009). A Suitable Enemy. Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe. Pluto Press, London. Fetzer, J.S. and Soper, J.C. (2005) Muslims and the State in Britain, France and Germany. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Fokas, E. (2015). Banal, Benign or Pernicious? Religion and National Identity from the Perspective of Religious Minorities in Greece. New Diversities, 17(1), 47—62. Gale, R. (2008). Locating Religion in Urban Planning: Beyond ‘Race’ and Ethnicity? Planning Practice and Research, 23(1), 19—39. Gale, R. and Naylor, S. (2002) Religion, Planning and the City: The Spatial Politics of Ethnic Minority Expression in British Cities and Towns. Ethnicities, 2(3), 387—409. Halikiopoulou, D. and Vasilopoulou S. (2013). Political Instability and the Persistence of Religion in Greece: The Policy Implications of the Cultural Defence Paradigm. RECODE Working Paper 18.

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Hancock, M. and Srinivas, S. (2008). Spaces of Modernity: Religion and the Urban in Asia and Africa. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(3), 617—630. Hatziprokopiou, P. and Evergeti, V. (2014). Negotiating Muslim Identity and Diversity in Greek Urban Spaces. Social and Cultural Geography, 15(6), 603—626. Heraclides, A. (2011). The Essence of the Greek-Turkish Rivalry: National Narrative and Identity. GreeSE Paper No.51. Hellenic Observatory, LSE, London. Herzfeld, M. (1982). Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of MODERN GREECE. University of Texas Press, Austin. Hirschon, R. (2010). Dismantling the Millet: Religion and National Identity in Contemporary Greece. In Nationalism in the Troubled Triangle: Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Aktar, A., Kizilyürek, N., and Özkirimli, U. (eds). Palgrave MacMillan, London. Human Rights Watch (2013). Unwelcome Guests. Greek Police Abuses of Migrants in Athens. Human Rights Watch, Athens. Isin, E. and Nielsen, G. (eds). (2008). Acts of Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. Koutrolikou, P. (2015). Socio-Spatial Stigmatization and its “Incorporation” in the Centre of Athens, Greece. City, 19(4), 510—521. Koutrolikou, P. (2018). Reflections on Public, Private and “In-between” Socialscapes of Inter-Group Relations and Living Together. The Urbanization of Injustice Conference Proceedings, AESOP/PSUC, Nicosia. Kourou, K. and Sakka, N. (2017). Geopolitics of Sacred Space in Contemporary Athens. The Case of Muslim Mosques. Undergraduate Thesis, NTUA, Athens. Kαπα Research (2015). Greek Wide Opinion Poll about Easter and Religion. Vima Newspaper, Athens.

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Lafazani, D. (2004). New Migrations Towards Greece during the Past Twenty Years: Aspect of a First Evaluation. Social Change in Greece from 1980 to 2001 Conference Proceedings, 698—720, Sakis Karagiorgas Foundation, Athens. Leghari, I.U. (2009). Pakistani Immigrants in Greece: From Changing Pattern of Migration to Diaspora Politics and Transnationalism. 4th LSE PhD Symposium on Contemporary Greece, LSE-Hellenic Observatory, 25—26 June. Lipka, M. (2017). Muslims and Islam: Key Findings in the U.S. and around the World. Report, Pew Research Center. Available: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/muslims-an d-islam-key-findings-in-the-u-s-and-around-the-world/. Mackridge, P. (2009). Language and National Identity in Greece 1766—1976. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Maloutas, T. and Karadimitriou, N. (2001). Vertical Social Differentiation in Athens: Alternative or Complement to Community Segregation? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(4), 699—716. Marvakis, A., Parsanoglou, D, and Pavlou, M. (eds). (2001). Migrants in Greece. Ellinika Grammata, Athens. Maussen, M. (2005). Making Muslim Presence Meaningful: Studies on Islam and Mosques in Western Europe. ASSR Working Paper 05/03. Amsterdam School for Social Research, Amsterdam. Millas, H. (2004). The National Perception of the ‘Other’ and the Persistence of Some Images. In Turkish-Greek Relations — The Security Dilemma in the Aegean, Aydın, M. and Ifandis, K. (eds). Routledge, London and New York. Ministry of Education, Research and Religions (2015a). Acts against Religious Sites in Greece. Report, Ministry of Education, Research and Religions, Athens. Ministry of Education, Research and Religions (2015b). Response to [Parliamentary] Question no. 2642/18-05-2015. Department of Parliamentary Control, Athens. Ministry of Education, Research and Religions (2016). Acts Against Religious Sites in Greece. Report, Ministry of Education, Research and Religions, Athens.

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Triandafyllidou, A. and Gropas, R. (2009). Constructing Difference: The Mosque Debates in Greece. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 35(6), 957—975. Triandafyllidou, A. and Kouki, H. (2013). Muslim Immigrants and the Greek Nation: The Emergence of Nationalist Intolerance. Ethnicities, 13(6), 709—728. Triantis, B. (2017) The ‘Tribes’ of Muslims in Athens, Documentono 43, September 14. Available: https://www.docum entonews.gr/article/oi-fyles-twn-moysoylmanwn-ths-athhnas [Accessed October 25, 2018]. Trimikliniotis, N. (2014). The Only Thing I Like Integrated Is My Coffee: Dissensus and Migrant Integration in the Era of EuroCrisis. In Contesting Integration, Engendering Migration, Anthias, F. and Pajnik M. (eds). Palgrave Macmillan, London. Tsoukalas, C. (1999). European Modernity and Greek National Identity. Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans Online, 1(1), 7—14. Vaiou, D., Varouchaki, E., Gkoutidi, A., Kalantidis, A., Kalatzi, S., Karali, M., Kefalea, R., Lafazani, O., Lykogianni, R., Marnelakis, G., Monemvasitou, A., Mpalafouta, D., Mpacharopoulou, A., Panagouli, E., Papaioannou, A., Papasimaki K., Tounta, F., Fotiou, T., and Xatzivasileiou, S. (2007). Intersecting Patterns of Everyday Life and Socio-Spatial Transformations in the City. Migrant and Local Women in the Neighbourhoods of Athens. L-Press & NTUA, Athens (in Greek). Vradelis, S. (2009). Ask forgiveness in order not to have holy war. Ta Nea, May 25. Available: https://www.tanea.gr/2009/ 05/25/greece/na-zitisoyn-syggnwmi-gia-na-mi-ginei-ieros-polemos/ [Accessed October 25, 2018].

List of Authors

Marisol GARCÍA University of Barcelona Spain

Gabriella PAOLUCCI University of Florence Italy

Penny KOUTROLIKOU National Technical University of Athens Greece

Camille SCHMOLL Paris Diderot University France

Irini MICHA National Technical University of Athens Greece

Dina VAIOU National Technical University of Athens Greece

Adelina MIRANDA University of Poitiers France

Alternative Takes to the City, First Edition. Edited by Irini Micha and Dina Vaiou. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Index

A, B, C Athens, 125–127, 131, 133–138, 140–144 austerity, 103, 104, 114, 118, 120 bodies, 13, 14 care, 64, 65, 71–73, 75, 76 childhood, 85, 95, 96 children’s geographies, 83, 85, 94 coexistence, 60, 69, 74, 75, 127 of migratory forms, 27 contemporary cities, 50, 86 D, E, F discursive production, 56, 57 everyday encounters, 65, 69, 75 flows, 81, 83, 87 practices, 62–65, 69, 71, 72, 74, 85, 90, 96 evictions, 102–106, 110–120 familism, 23

financial crisis, 103, 116, 120, 121 free time, 49 G, H, I gender, 3 gendered perspectives, 62, 65 heteronormativity, 23, 34, 35 housing crisis, 103–106, 108, 111, 116 integration, 126–129, 135, 143, 144 interstices, 11–13, 16 invisibility, 127, 139, 140, 144 invisible borders, 74 Islam, 125–128, 133, 134, 138–141 L, M lack of time, 49, 51, 52 localized and gendered approach, 22–24, 37, 38

Alternative Takes to the City, First Edition. Edited by Irini Micha and Dina Vaiou. © ISTE Ltd 2019. Published by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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migrant settlement, 61, 62, 64–67, 73, 74, 76 women, 2, 4, 5, 7–15 migration, 3–8, 10, 13, 14 studies, 24 moral geographies, 2, 5, 9, 13 mosques, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 136–143, 145 N, O, P neighborhood, 59–63, 64, 65–76, 81–84, 86–92, 94, 96 associations, 104, 108, 110 neoliberalism, 103, 105, 120, 121 ordinary cosmopolitanism, 7 otherness, 126, 129, 130, 131, 134, 143, 144 post-Fordism, 45, 47, 48 productivity increase, 51 public and private, 119, 144, 145 space, 2, 5–15 R, S recognition, 126, 127, 129, 130, 140, 143, 144, 145 religious practices, 125–127, 131–133, 137, 139, 144

research at home, 23, 27 right to the city, 121 school, 81–95, 97 slowness, 43, 44, 55 social citizenship, 101, 102, 104, 113, 120 cohesion, 102, 103 inequality, 103–105, 113 innovation, 106, 117 justice, 102, 121 life acceleration, 44, 46 reproduction, 50, 56 sociospatial networks, 83, 87 practices, 23, 34, 35, 38 Southern Europe, 103, 104, 105, 106, 110 spatialized approach, 23, 38 speed, 43, 44, 46, 51–56 strangers, 60, 61, 64, 68, 71, 74 T, U, V time-consuming, 52–54 time–space compression, 44–47, 50, 53, 55 urban change, 61, 67, 74 governance, 103, 105, 107, 116, 119 visibility, 2, 8, 9, 12, 13

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