Abstract
During the recent refugee crisis, numerous solidarity initiatives emerged in Greece and especially in Mytilene, Athens and Thessaloniki. Mytilene is the capital of Lesvos Island and the main entry point in the East Aegean Sea, Athens is the main refugee transit city and Thessaloniki is the biggest city close to the northern borders. After the EU–Turkey Common Statement, the Balkan countries sealed their borders and thousands of refugees found themselves stranded in Greece. The State accommodation policy provides the majority of the refugee population with residency in inappropriate camps which are mainly located in isolated old military bases and abandoned factories. The article contrasts the State-run services to the solidarity acts of “care-tizenship” and commoning practices such as self-organised refugee housing projects, which claim the right to the city and to spatial justice. Specifically, the article is inspired by the Lefebvrian “right to the city,” which embraces the right to housing, education, work, health and challenges the concept of citizen. Echoing Lefebvrian analysis, citizenship is not demarcated by membership in a nation-state, rather, it concerns all the residents of the city. The article discusses the academic literature on critical citizenship studies and especially the so-called “care-tizenship,” meaning the grassroots commoning practices that are based on caring relationships and mutual help for social rights. Following participatory ethnographic research, the main findings highlight that the acts of care-tizenship have opened up new possibilities to challenge State migration policies while reinventing a culture of togetherness and negotiating locals’ and refugees’ multiple class, gender, and religious identities.
Highlights
Over the past four years, Greece has been at the epicentre of the so-called “refugee crisis.” More than one million refugees (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2019a) have crossed the country in their effort to reach Northern Europe
In Athens, the Refugee Accommodation and Solidarity Space City Plaza was initiated by the Economic and Political Refugee Solidarity Initiative, together with 250 refugees, and, as they highlighted, ‘thanks to the generosity of thousands of people from Greece and abroad, we proved that self-organised cooperation can be productive, but it can be more effective than hierarchical commercialised procedures’ (Refugee Accommodation and Solidarity Space City Plaza, 2017) Spirou Trikoupi 17 (2019) emphasised that ‘the residents and solidarians working in ST17 organise themselves through assemblies based on the principles of equality, solidarity and horizontality.’
Focusing more on the self-organised practices of commoning, togetherness, and caring, beyond the NGOs humanitarianism and the state authorities’ control, worth mentioning are the words of Afaf, a woman from Afghanistan who lives in the Refugee Accommodation and Solidarity Space City Plaza in Athens, and she describes her experience on selforganised care practices as follows: I had never had a similar experience as the City Plaza
Summary
Over the past four years, Greece has been at the epicentre of the so-called “refugee crisis.” More than one million refugees (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR], 2019a) have crossed the country in their effort to reach Northern Europe. One-third of refugees are accommodated in NGO-rented apartments in city centres (funded through UNHCR); refugees that received their status two years ago and until recently have been losing the right to accommodation and financial support (Greek Ministry of Migration Policy, 2019) During this period and in contrast to the State immigration policies of exclusion and marginalisation, a multitude of refugee solidarity initiatives emerged. This article seeks to problematise and research the formal concept of citizenship by focusing on a) refugees’ lack of access to the city and b) the potentialities of selforganised practices and acts of caring, commoning and struggle. For this reason, we analyse both the top-down immigration policies and the non-institutionalised forms of citizenship. The article closes with some concluding remarks on the importance of care-tizenship common spaces for the refugees’ right to the city
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.