The City at a Time of Crisis: Transformations of Public Spaces in Athens, Greece

This project seeks to trace, understand and analyse the relationship between the ongoing financial crisis and urban public spaces. Although Greece might be an extreme example of an ongoing transnational transformation, the consequences of this global financial and political crisis nevertheless extend beyond the debt-ridden state. The Greek experience exemplifies an emergent mode of governance that is suggestive of a generalised state restructuring across substantial sections of the world: as an example, state cut-backs echoing the Greek experiment were quick to follow in a number of EU countries, whether those suffering 'public debt contagion' (e.g. Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Spain) or those now suffering a fiscal uncertainty unimaginable even a few years ago (e.g. the UK and the USA).

As the financial crisis spreads across various regions of the world, then, and as new paradigms of governance emerge, a formidable effect on the material reality of local populations can be witnessed, with entire districts being turned into zones of public unrest and conflict. Major incidents of social unrest are now occurring in cities that had been relatively orderly in the recent past (e.g. London or New York) while the public spatial dynamics of other places that have encountered such phenomena more frequently are now changing beyond recognition (e.g. Athens).

Greece is one of the countries most severely affected by the current financial crisis. Since spring 2010, when the Greek government and IMF/EU/ECB agreed on the largest loan ever received by a single country ($110 billion), Greece has seen sweeping transformations in the character of its polity and state functions. A main element of these transformations is the reconfiguration/privatisation of state assets including infrastructures, utility power and substantial real estate, along with higher education and public health. In this way, the Greek version of the crisis has produced a rupture in the modus operandi of the state in question and in its relationship with its citizenry. The main axis of this rupture is the systemic challenge and reconfiguration of the category 'public' - which of course includes public spaces.

For all these reasons, the research will comprise a holistic, cross-disciplinary study of changing notions of the 'public', with public urban spaces as its main research subject. The idea of studying selected public urban spaces in the capital city of the country most severely affected by the crisis appears as an ideal way in which to study the array of challenges to our conceptualisations of what comprises the public, (whether of the 'public good', 'public provision', 'public interest' and so forth) as a consequence of the financial crisis.

As the 'Greek crisis' is the exemplar of a wider crisis, the research outcome of the project will, in turn, be relevant and useful to international communities of users, offering a rigorous and comprehensive social, material and spatial reading that can be used to understand parallel and ongoing processes elsewhere.

This project sees achieving maximum societal impact as a priority and for this reason, key intended users/beneficiaries have already been identified and approached. These are organisations concerned with the enhancement of the quality of life and with an increase in the effectiveness of public services and policies. Both proposed user-reviewers fit this description: the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), the world leader in its sector, is a NYC-based organisation dedicated to planning, design and education aiming to help create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities across the world. The project includes a 3-month study visit at the CUNY Center for Place, Culture and Politics, during which an opportunity for further knowledge exchange with PPS will be achieved. The Hellenic League of Human Rights (HLHR) is the second proposed user-reviewer and the oldest such NGO in the country. A series of phenomena linked with the current crisis (including impoverishment, increase in homelessness, police brutality, riots, increase in criminality and concentration of refugees without documents in down-town Athens) are closely linked with violation of human rights and are located precisely within the urban public spaces that the project seeks to examine. It is for this reason that the term 'humanitarian crisis' is increasingly used in the discourse describing the emerging situation in the Greek capital city by media and civil society actors alike. A research project on public spaces in Athens would therefore necessarily include human rights-related issues as a crucial parameter.

Both organisations, along with several other third sector and/or international organisations (e.g. UNHCR-Greece that has been contacted already), will be invited to join a response group that will meet three times during the project's duration under the leadership of the PI to discuss questions, methods, research results and to exchange knowledge. At least one of the research outputs, namely the policy report written by the PI and a socio-legal researcher of the project partner (the Institute for Rights Equality and Diversity) will explicitly aim to benefit such users.

The established links with the aforementioned organisations will be used to disseminate the findings to other potential beneficiaries that some of these organisations have access to, including those Greek government departments and city of Athens authorities dealing with public spaces and urban infrastructures in particular. Furthermore, non-academic users will include transnational organisations with an interest in the Greek/Euro crisis, in particular the organisations with a direct financial interest at stake at the current crisis - i.e. the loan-offering institutions: the IMF, EU and ECB.

Furthermore, the research aims to benefit citizen groups and community activists participating in the movements to reclaim public spaces and related anti-austerity movements that have been active in the city of Athens in the wake of, and during the outbreak of, the crisis. The research will provide much-needed knowledge in order for them to develop a well-informed position into the public debates around the crisis. The existing networks of the local research assistants will be instrumental for that knowledge exchange.

The project will include two additional, widely available outputs, besides the policy report and the academic publication. The inclusion of these two additional outputs, a documentary film and an interactive webpage, aims to maximise the project's impact and to ensure a high degree of dissemination of the research findings. It is expected that both outputs will exceed the duration of the project. The mid-term and long term impact of these outputs is to provide the initial evaluation of everyday life under crisis and related applied policies and to contribute to the ongoing debates about the transformations of the notions of "public" across Europe.