Athens as logo, habitat and gym: City branding, makeover politics and Athenians in-deed

Abstract

This article focuses on the atenistas, an Athenian citizens’ group formed in the fall of 2010 at the outset of the Greek debt crisis. The atenistas’ anti-political stance soon revealed itself to be an anti-left position, amenable to the emerging neo-liberal ethics of austerity and the collapse of the post-dictatorship ideologically-oriented party system. Based on ethnographic consideration of the group’s programmatic statements and interventions in public spaces, I parse key features of their ‘actions’ (draseis) online and off (ephemerality, theatricality, repetitiveness, didacticism, nomadism) in connection to new media participatory culture (flash mobs, social media visuality, networked affect, makeover reality television) and contemporary urban practices and processes (city rebranding, gentrification, urban gardening, lifestyle sports, occupy social movements). I highlight the salience of the environment, aesthetics and the everyday lifeworld to the group’s bid to remake the image of Athens (as logo, habitat and gym) and, thus, reformulate civic action as an activism without politics, recasting traditionally public functions as matters of individual responsibility.