Abstract
The article focuses on trends that redefine the public nature of public spaces in Thessaloniki by departing from publicly owned and managed spaces and introducing new agents to their management. The first trend is characterised by official urban policies that introduce the private and voluntary sector into the management and maintenance of public space. While forming part of the dominant neoliberal paradigm, privatisation processes materialise through a local mix of mechanisms in crisis-stricken Thessaloniki. The second trend originates from citizen-led initiatives and seeks to reassert ‘publicness’, foregrounding collective activity and participation. A case of urban farming of an abandoned military camp is reviewed as an example of this trend. The article argues that the two trends contribute to the creation of a hybrid landscape of public space in which the commonly perceived binary of private and public is redefined towards two divergent directions, representing different imaginaries of ‘publicness’.
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