A Border within a Border: The Migrants' Squatter Settlement in Patras as a Heterotopia

Abstract

The routes of migrants without papers towards Western European countries often converge at the city of Patras, a city in the western borders of Greece with a port connecting to Italy. Around 2001, the migrants who lived there temporarily—until they managed to cross the border—built a squatter settlement. Following a period of social and political tensions, the settlement was finally demolished in 2009. In this paper I approach the settlement in Patras as a heterotopia, a place of the “other,” the different, as conceptualized by Michel Foucault and others. Heterotopias are like counter-sites in which all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Reading the migrants' settlement as a heterotopic space helps unpack invisible aspects not only of the settlement but also of the city. Exploring the settlement and the city as interrelated spaces, I discuss the social, economic and spatial relations that operate in each of those spaces and also connect them: how borders and migrant illegality operate in the level of everyday life; how space, time, practices and strategies are renegotiated within several geographic scales, from the body to the global. By approaching the migrants' settlement in Patras as a heterotopia, I propose a reading of borders, migration and urban space as processes where several levels of conflict, power and resistance operate.