https://toarcheio.org To Archeio project site Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:05 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1 https://toarcheio.org/items/posterscapes-encountering-solidarityies-in-the-streets-of-exarcheia/ Mon, 04 May 2020 23:24:05 +0000 https://toarcheio.org/items/posterscapes-encountering-solidarityies-in-the-streets-of-exarcheia/ https://toarcheio.org/items/the-golden-salto-mortale-in-the-era-of-crisis-primitive-accumulation-and-local-and-urban-struggle-in-the-case-of-skouries-gold-mining-in-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:52 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-golden-salto-mortale-in-the-era-of-crisis-primitive-accumulation-and-local-and-urban-struggle-in-the-case-of-skouries-gold-mining-in-greece/ Continued]]> As formulated by Marx ([1867] 1990. Capital. Vol. I. London: Penguin, 200), ‘the leap taken by value from the body of the commodity into the body of the gold is the commodity’s salto mortale’. Following autonomous Marxist literature (De Angelis 2007. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. London: Pluto Press; Federici 2011. ‘Feminism and the Politics of the Commons.’ The Commoner, other articles. Accessed January 28, 2017, http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=113; Hardt and Negri 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), the circulation of capital could be interrupted by social, class, gender or ecological struggles. In order to unsettle this view, we build on recent critical scholarship on new enclosures, land-grabbing and the permanence of primitive accumulation and we explore the inter-articulation of gold mining projects and neoliberal policies in the era of crisis. In this effort, we examine the case of Greece, a country at the epicenter of the recent financial and social crisis. During the last decade, the Canadian company Eldorado has undertaken a gold mining investment in the environmentally sensitive area of Skouries. A fruitful social struggle has emerged against this project, both in the rural site and in the urban Greek metropolis. Through this examination we investigate how the financial crisis provides an opportunity for multinational mining corporations to expand their zones of exploitation and how social resistance can reclaim common resources.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/europes-last-frontier-the-spatialities-of-the-refugee-crisis/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:40 +0000 http://arc.local/items/europes-last-frontier-the-spatialities-of-the-refugee-crisis/ Continued]]> The Post-Cold War period has brought forth new conditions for the dominant European spatialities. First, that period signified a new condition for real estate and land ownership, second a radical transformation and increase of the built environment and third the securitization of a privileged European territory. As the European economy slows and the construction and real estate sectors are further deregulated, together with the promises that the post-Cold War period brought, what we observe coming to the surface in the context of the current refugee crisis is the manifestation of Europe’s most ugly and discriminatory spatiality—the preservation at all costs of its border security.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/socio-spatial-stigmatization-and-its-incorporation-in-the-centre-of-athens-greece/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:34 +0000 http://arc.local/items/socio-spatial-stigmatization-and-its-incorporation-in-the-centre-of-athens-greece/ Continued]]> Considering stigmatization as a process ingrained into power relations, difference and contexts, this paper focuses on how socio-spatial stigmatization is deployed by specific social actors within a broader context of multiple stigmatization of social groups in the city of Athens, Greece. As such, it discusses imposed stigmatization, whereby stigma is attributed to a group and/or a place by external (to the group) actors and further explores what can be termed as ‘incorporated’ stigmatization whereby socio-spatial stigma becomes the central feature around which a group is formed and/or mobilized. Furthermore, in both cases, it explores the consequences of stigmatization, while raising further questions about (de)legitimization.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/is-the-crisis-in-athens-also-gendered-facets-of-access-and-invisibility-in-everyday-public-spaces/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:30 +0000 http://arc.local/items/is-the-crisis-in-athens-also-gendered-facets-of-access-and-invisibility-in-everyday-public-spaces/ Continued]]> As the Greek crisis deepens and ‘recovery’ is constantly postponed to an unknown future, a dominant discourse seems to consolidate which focuses almost exclusively on macro-economic arguments and concerns. Other aspects of the crisis, among which are its gendered facets and unequal effects on women and men, rarely permeate the allegedly ‘central’ understandings. With the possible exception of unemployment which fares high among left-wing analysts, gender is thought to pertain to a ‘special’, that is, less important, matter which may detract from the ‘main problem’. The paper draws together a series of stories of ordinary women who have experienced deep changes in their everyday lives as a result of austerity policies (unemployment, precarity, salary and pension cuts, shrinking social rights, mounting everyday violence). It argues that emphasis on this scale ‘closest in’, linked in multiple ways to many other scales (local, national, European, international), reveals areas of knowledge that would otherwise remain in the dark; and that connecting concrete bodies with global processes enriches our understandings with more complex and more flexible variables and informs the ‘big pictures’ (in this case about the Greek crisis)—and not only the reverse.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/crisis-right-to-the-city-movements-and-the-question-of-spontaneity-athens-and-mexico-city/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:29 +0000 http://arc.local/items/crisis-right-to-the-city-movements-and-the-question-of-spontaneity-athens-and-mexico-city/ Continued]]> Mexico and Greece comprise typical cases of the so-called semi-periphery where neoliberal policies have been applied but also where social movements tried to resist the implementation of the policies in question. In the past, many Right to the City movements start to emerge, focused particularly on the right to the habitat. Recently, the most important RttC movements concerned the claims to public space and common goods, while at the same time opposing privatisations and big projects. Some authors called these movements spontaneous. Yet the relationship of politico-economic changes with the spontaneous is considerably complicated and related to what, by whom and why would be included in the discursive category of the ‘spontaneity’. This approach I will explore below. Nothing is entirely spontaneous in the world’s so-called spontaneous neighbourhoods and in the so-called spontaneous uprisings. The people participating in acts characterised as ‘spontaneous’ without rules enforced by any superior authorities, simply refuse to define their bodies as machines. The question is if the so-called spontaneous resistances became, or may become, under certain conditions, dangerous cracks. The right to the city is not the right to the impersonal urban space but the right to the polis. In these new movements, the right to the polis is exercised in the everyday life by many different actors and through different ways of action. The motto is: Changing values within spaces of encounters and experimentation. Let us all be rebel poets in the present.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/the-crisis-and-its-discourses-quasi-orientalist-attacks-on-mediterranean-urban-spontaneity-informality-and-joie-de-vivre/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:27 +0000 http://arc.local/items/the-crisis-and-its-discourses-quasi-orientalist-attacks-on-mediterranean-urban-spontaneity-informality-and-joie-de-vivre/ Continued]]> Mediterranean cities have always followed a path of urban development that diverges significantly from Anglo-American models. Spontaneity and informality have been deeply embedded in the cities’ roots since Gramsci’s time, but they have been transformed recently, together with urban development dynamics. A major rupture is observed in Southern Europe at the turn of the 21st century and especially the 2010s, when the region has been beaten by the force of the major global financial restructuring labelled the crisis, centralization/privatization and accumulation by dispossession. In anti-austerity social movements, popular spontaneity emerges as the par excellence force undermining neo-liberal hegemony and bringing to the surface niches of creativity of the urban grassroots, with the help of ICT (information and communications technology) dissemination. Focusing on Athens and two instances of massive mobilization in 2011 and 2013, we explore whether spontaneity and informality stamping urban development will manage to seep through structural readjustments, and how they will shape the future character of this and other Mediterranean cities during, but most importantly after, the crisis. Among alternative futures we discuss the darker one of quasi-Orientalist discourses by the European Union power elites, which undermine popular creativity and joie de vivre of the Southern grassroots and create urban dystopias; and the most optimistic one, which will be shaped by the emancipation of the currently vulnerable social movements and the emergent cooperative and solidarity economy, in a future eutopia.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/crisis-and-land-dispossession-in-greece-as-part-of-the-global-land-fever/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:25 +0000 http://arc.local/items/crisis-and-land-dispossession-in-greece-as-part-of-the-global-land-fever/ Continued]]> The exploitation of land, but also of natural elements linked to it―such as water, forests, landscape, the subsurface and biodiversity―nowadays comprise investment targets for local and international speculative capital at some unprecedented extent, intensity and geographical spread. From 2009 on, Greece became a target country due to the current crisis which has decisively contributed to the de-valorisation/depreciation of the exchange-value of land, decreasing monetary values by 15–30%―depending on the area―when compared to 2005 prices. The special legal status imposed by the Troika as of 2010, forms a lucrative environment for speculators–investors, dramatically altering the legal, constitutional order and imposing something of a semi-protectorate status upon the country. This short paper explains how the crisis in Greece made public land via privatisations a major target for dispossession by global and local capital.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/strange-encounters/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:24 +0000 http://arc.local/items/strange-encounters/ Continued]]> Debates about migration tend to force a representation of migrants into two categories: criminal or victim. Both of these categories feed each other and form the basis for discourses that substantiate the need for detention prisons and the incarceration of migrants. Map.crisis-scape.net is an online map of racist attacks with a focus on Athens, Greece. One aim of the map has been to attempt a different type of representation of the issues surrounding migration that does not place the migrant at the centre of attention, but instead focuses on the violent conditions that affect their lives.

]]> https://toarcheio.org/items/infrastructural-flows-interruptions-and-stasis-in-athens-of-the-crisis/ Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:24 +0000 http://arc.local/items/infrastructural-flows-interruptions-and-stasis-in-athens-of-the-crisis/ Continued]]> The paper discusses infrastructural flows enacted/activated in the context of the crisis in Athens, focusing on waste flows and treatment. The argument is that disorder and deregulation, which are reflected in the disruption of patterns and flows, are endemic characteristics of the neo-liberal governance, but also of the wider infrastructural existence. Considering such activations of flows as working parallel with de-activations and the crisis-related arrhythmia of social, economic and political processes, the paper attempts to offer a re-reading of the crisis via some of the key urban infrastructural processes. In this regard, the diverse codifications of waste flows at play are explored anthropologically as infrastructural processes that reflect both an institutional and an informal social shift in the urban scale.

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