The dialectic of formal and informal urban enclosures and the production of the common space in Greece during the ongoing crisis

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The dialectic of formal and informal urban enclosures and the production of
the common space in Greece during the ongoing crisis
1
Kapsali M. & Tsavdaroglou Ch.
Phd Candidates, Department of Urban and Regional Planning,
School of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki
Abstract
In recent years, urban informality has been the subject of renewed attention
in urban studies, sociology and political economy. Following postcolonial theory
(McFarlane, 2008, Robinson, 2002), we seek to surpass modernist dichotomies
such as formal/informal and centre/periphery, as they re-produce a “colonial
paternalism”. Thus, we move beyond binaries between culturally and
economically powerful global cities (of the North) and problematic mega-cities
(of the South) and we challenge understandings of informality as uncontrolled
and dangerous, as the “Other” of the urban development.
Our approach adds to the discussion around the socio-spatial relations and
the power configurations in the production of the urban space, but does so by
linking urban informality to the production of the common space in crisis-
stricken cities. Following autonomous Marxists analysis (Caffentzis, 2010, Hardt
and Negri, 2009), conceptualizing the commons involves three things at the
same time: common pool resource, community and commoning. Urban
commons don’t exist per se but they are making in times of social struggles and
they are constituted through the social process of commoning. So, we
understand informality as a way of urban development and urban politics that
embodies varying degrees of power and exclusion, incorporating the possibility
of challenging the existing power configurations. Hence, our approach calls for a
broad, intersectional analysis of the common space and conceive the latter in a
Lefebvrian (1974) trialectic conceptualization as perceived-conceived-lived
space.
Based on this theoretical background, we seek to advance an aggregate
understanding of the dialect relation between formality/informality in the
production of the emancipatory common space in Greece in the midst of the
ongoing crisis. The neoliberal urban restructuring is justified through a
discourse of formalization of the spontaneous and unorganized development of
Southern Europe’s cities. Nevertheless, the new enclosures does not lie only on
formal practices but also on informal ones, related to the fields of race, class
and gender. Within this context, state plays a crucial role as it has the power to
1
Kapsali, M. & Tsavdaroglou, Ch. (2014): “The dialectic of formal and informal urban
enclosures and the production of the common space in Greece during the ongoing
crisis”, in A. Güngör (eds) Rethink the Informality, CUI '14 Contemporary Urban Issues
Conference Proceedings, organized by DACAM (Eastern Mediterranean Academic
Research center), pp. 373-384, ISBN: 978-605-5120-91-7, Istanbul 13-15 November 2014

determine what is formal and what is informal and overall which kinds of
informality could thrive, for how and where, and which will disappear. In other
words, it has the power to (re-)construct categories of legitimate and
illegitimate citizens, of deserving and undeserving ones.
In particular, formal and informal enclosures emerge as an everyday
experience of the urban inhabitants in Greek cities and include housing
commodification, land grabbing, precarization of labour, various privatizations,
gentrification processes and criminalization of certain population groups (such
as sex workers, immigrants, squatters and homeless). Yet, the neoliberal city is
a highly contested urbanity and the neoliberal urban restructuring does not
remain uncontested. Through this reading, we explore the diverse forms of
formality/informality and their degree and type of legitimacy, elaborating on
these urban practices and processes that challenge the existing power relations
and produce the emancipatory common space.
Keywords: formality, informality, urban enclosures, urban commons, crisis,
Greece
Introduction
The discourse developed around the elections 2012 in Greece constituted
this ballot increasingly significant both as a moment of acceptance or rejection
of the austerity politics of the previous years and as a determinant of the
country’s future. The pre-electoral agenda of the current Prime Minister
Antonis Samaras (2012) was based on the “law and order” dogma and
supported the re-occupation of the cities, the strengthening of the sense of
public order and security, the combatting of illegal migration and the repealing
of the university asylum. These statements signal the incipient emergence of a
new regime of legitimization of formal and informal practices in urban politics.
The so-called “Greek crisis” represents a moment which afford the opportunity
for a critical and extensive debate about actually existing informality. The latter
should be seen not as a condition outside of formal systems of urban
development and politics but as a set of extra-legal practices that in conjunction
with formal practices of regulation, are key mechanisms for the neoliberal
socio-spatial restructuring.
During the last years and especially since the outbreak of the financial crisis,
research oriented on issues of informality in Greece is related mainly to
informal economy (Maroukis, 2013), housing (Polyzos and Minetos, 2007) and
civil society (Pratt and Popplewell, 2013) and is increasingly linked to state’s
corruption/transparency (Pappadà and Zylberberg, 2014) and clientalistic
relations (Bratsis, 2003) or to informal coping strategies of the urban subaltern
(Gialis et al., 2014). Here, we aim to move a step forward from such positivist
and restrictive approaches and examine the urban formal and informal
practices through a dialectic and intersectional approach. In developing a
dialectic argument, we do not mean that formality and informality constitute a
kind of totality or that they necessarily define one another. In our analysis, what
matters is the way in which they become entwined and contested. Moreover,

the intersectional analysis employed allows us to think about the multiple
different ways in which enclosures and commons are spatialized and move from
macro- to micro- geographies of the issues under scrutiny.
The premise of this paper is the understanding of informality as a mode of
urbanization (Roy, 2005) and urban politics that embodies varying degrees of
power and exclusion. So, informality is used as a heuristic device to unpack the
complex and contingent socio-spatial relations of encounter and conflict in the
urban space and could serve as a basis to deconstruct the often unquestionable
basis of state legitimacy and authority (Roy, 2011). Here, we argue that
informality is not linked to the “spontaneous” urban development but to
deeply-rooted uneven urban relations and antagonisms, anchored at class,
gender, race and ethnic characteristics. Our aim is not to provide a thorough
analysis of all the different possible ways of interaction between formal and
informal practices of enclosing and commoning in Greece. Rather, we aim to
point out key processes, that if examined in parallel, could provide answers to
why some instances of informality are designated as illegal and their inhabitants
criminalized while other appear not only to be protected and formalized but
also be endorsed as legitimate practices?
The paper emerges in three sections. The first section unpacks the complex
conceptual framework of formality and informality, elaborating mainly on
informality as a performative practice. The second section explores the
concepts of urban enclosures and common space, based mainly on the
conceptualization of autonomous Marxists. The following section explores the
dialectic relation between formal and informal urban enclosures and
commoning in Greece during the crisis-driven neoliberal restructuring. Finally,
we argue that the context-specific manifestation of formal and informal
practices help us to understand the new socio-spatial dynamics that emerge in
Greece.
Surpassing dichotomies and avoiding homogenization: Formal and informal
urban practices and politics
Theoretical and empirical approaches to formality and informality are far
from constituting a univocal and homogenous framework. For the purposes of
this paper, they could be organized in two categories: (i) approaches where
informality is treated as a separate sector to formality and (ii) approaches that
attempt to surpass binary distinctions and recognize formality and informality
as modes of metropolitan urbanization. As we are closely related to the second
strand of literature, engaging in a thorough analysis of all these aspects move
beyond the purposes and the length of this paper. Yet, it is important to
highlight the basic shortcomings of the first category, in order to elaborate on
our conceptualization.
The binary between formal and informal –housing, economy, settlements-
often carry with it implicit positive connotations of formality, positioned as the
desired goal of urban development and a devaluation of informality, as an
aberration in the urban context. In a nutshell, such an approach attains two
significant shortcomings. First, informality is linked with the development of

mega-cities of the Global South, which rarely, if ever, appears in cities of the
Global North (Roy, 2005). So, on the one hand, informality appears as the
ungovernable and uncontrollable dark aspect of the cities, which have their
own rules and values. On the other hand, informality in cities of the Global
South involves a kind of heroism, resistance and spontaneity, where poor
people manage to find successful alternative ways of living. Second, informality
is often equated with poverty and it is viewed as an urbanism that “transgresses
across the ‘property lines’” (Cruz, 2007), the “grassroots rebellion of the poor”
(De Soto, 2000) or “a world of economic activities outside the organised labour
force’ carried out by an urban sub-proletariat” (Hart, 1973). Such a
conceptualization depicts informality as a “state of exception” from the formal
processes of urban development (Roy, 2005).
Beyond these interpretations, we examine informality as a mode of knowing
the city, recognising that “people *…+ move between formal and informal
activities and arrangements, not just over the course of their lives but also over
a single day” (McFarlane, 2012:101). While people perform their everyday lives,
they employ certain formal or informal urban practices and consequently they
perform a certain kind of subjectivity. Besides, identities are not fixed and given
but they emerge in the act of acting in and through the urban space (Dikeç,
2013).Based on this, we cannot assume that cities of the Global South attain a
higher degree of informality compared to cities of the Global North. On the
contrary, we support that informality should be examined relationally and
based on the specific political, economic and social characteristics of each
context, without losing sight of the broader image and the global interactions.
In fact, “informality is performed: it names a way of doing things” (McFarlane,
2012:104). Overall, dispensing the idea that formality and informality belong
necessarily to different kind of urban spaces -i.e. formality does not belong to
offices of state and companies and informality in poor neighbourhoods- or to
different social categorization of population assist us to think of formality and
informality as practices rather than as pre-existing urban geographies. It is
exactly at this point that the notion of space becomes important to our
framework.
The urban enclosures and the common space through formal and informal
practices during the ongoing crisis
In order to understand the role and the function of spatial formal and
informal practices we build on the recent discussion on urban commons and
enclosures. Following autonomous Marxists (DeAngelis, 2009, Kaffentzis, 2010,
Hardt and Negri, 2009), conceptualizing the commons involves three things at
the same time: common pool resource, community and commoning; that is the
social process, which creates and reproduces the commons. The people who
through commoning form emancipatory communities that self-organize non-
commercial ways of sharing common pool resources are called commoners.
Furthermore, commons don’t exist per se but they are making in times of social
struggles and they are constituted through the social process of commoning.
The approach of autonomous Marxists on the relationship between capitalism

and commons includes two basic concepts: the enclosures and the distorted
commons, which will be successively examined in the following part.
Enclosures are initially mentioned in Marx’s analysis in Capital and concern
the procedures of expropriation, dispossession and usurpation of English
communal lands through the so-called primitive accumulation during the
transition of feudalism to capitalism. By the 17th century, the vast majority of
England’s land had been enclosed without the requirement of Parliamentary
sanction (Wordie, 1983, Hodkinson, 2012). As Marx demonstrates the methods
of the so-called primitive accumulation took place both in formal and informal
practices:
“The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the
state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal (…)
property and its transformation into modern private property under
circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic
methods of primitive accumulation” (Marx, 1976:895).
Nevertheless, primitive accumulation is “an ongoing feature of capitalism
rather than simply a precapitalist phenomenon” (Prudham, 2007) and formal
and informal enclosures are constantly expanding in time and space. In the last
decades of the twentieth century, especially after the crises of the ‘70s and the
emergence of postfordism and neoliberalism, various scholars, mostly from the
perspective of autonomous Marxism, have reconsidered the concept of
primitive accumulation. Both autonomist Marxists and other geographers such
as David Harvey argue that contemporary forms of globalization are
characterised by ‘‘wholly new mechanisms of dispossession” (Harvey, 2003:147)
producing the “new enclosures” through formal and informal practices, such as
gendered oppression (i.e. human trafficking), biometrics, informational
accumulation, land grabbing and dispossession, the accumulation of population
in urban slums, the Structural Adjustment Programs of IMF and WB,
immigration, wars for raw materials, the debt crisis and environmental pollution
and climate change (Midnight Notes Collective and Friends, 2009, Vasudevan et
al., 2008). In this process, state has a crucial role “with its monopoly of violence
and definitions of legality" (Harvey, 2005:159).
The above analysis highlights the crucial and permanent character of the so-
called primitive accumulation that is the process of the continuous expansion of
the capital on new material and immaterial spheres and the reproduction of the
separation of producers from the means of production, reproduction and
existence. This directed autonomous Marxists to concentrate on those
emancipatory social struggles that undermine the separation and reunite
people with the means of (re)production and existence. In this vein, the idea
and the theoretical framework of commons, which are constituted through the
process of commoning, is created.
Following autonomous Marxists, capitalism accepts commons both in the
form of non-commodified common pool resources and in the form of social
cooperation and non-commodified social reproduction. The “distorted”,
“corrupted” or “pro-capitalist” commons represent that types of common pool
resources, communities and commoning, which are used, exploited and which

are essential for capital’s viability and sustainability. De Angelis (2009) specifies
the relationship of capitalism with commons and calls “distorted commons”,
those commons “that are tied to capitalist growth (…) where capital has
successfully subordinated non-monetary values to its primary goal of
accumulation”. Furthermore, according to Hardt and Negri (2009:160), the
three most significant social institutions of capitalist society where the common
appears in corrupt form are the family, the corporation and the nation. “All
three mobilize and provide access to the common, but at the same time restrict,
distort, and deform it.” Moreover Caffentzis (2010:25) calls “pro-capitalist
commons” those commons “that are compatible with and potentiate capitalist
accumulation”. Needless to say that the previous distorted commons exist both
in formal and informal ways.
In order to conceptualize the spatial dimension of commons and enclosures,
we draw particular inspiration from Lefebvre’s three-part dialectic analysis.
Lefebvre (1990:7) argues that space is not a dead vacuum or an empty
container that is filled with actions, images, relationships and ideologies, but
that is a social product or a complex social construction (based on values and
the social production of meanings) which affects spatial practices and
perceptions. Through this reading, space is understood as perceived-conceived-
lived. Bringing the Lefebvrian analysis in dialogue with the autonomous Marxist
framework, we argue that common space is the interaction among the space of
common pool resources, the commoning and the space of community. The
perceived space of common pool resources is created through emancipatory
commoning, that is to say the spatial practice of collective sharing of the means
of (re)production. Meanwhile, commoning takes place in the lived-social space,
in the setting up of the communities. Yet, capitalism, nationalism and patriarchy
seek to enclose the common space with both in formal and informal ways.
Hence, crisis can be understood as the critical time of circulation of capital,
nation, patriarchy vis a vis the circulation of social struggles for the control over
the commons.
Formal and informal enclosing and commoning in Greek cities: how, where
and from whom?
Ever since the beginning of the crisis, Greece has entered an era of rapid
transformations. The ongoing crisis does not only mark continuous and
devastating economic measures but a “wholeshare radical restructuring of life”
(Douzinas, 2013:11). While “a new type of neoliberal governance” (Dalakoglou,
2012:541) is established, initiatives of solidarity challenge the requests for
national unity and required sacrifices for an ambiguous “common good”.
Within this context, there is a growing development of material and
immaterial informal networks, based on family, friend or solidarity connections.
Although informal poverty survival strategies may function as key factors for
the everyday survival, if they rest only on abjection they entail the danger of
leading to the individualization of the responsibility and reconstructing a de-
politicized context of poverty and inequalities. In this way, they are reduced in
an “informal poverty politics in the shadow of the welfare state” (Fairbanks,

2011). Yet, if they move to a politics of subjectification and collective struggle,
informality could serve as a fruitful ground for resistance at the dominant order
and at the neoliberal restructuring, producing new ways of performing the
everyday life based on solidarity and presupposed equality.
The uprising of December 2008 and the Indignant movement during the
summer of 2011 mark only some nodal points for the emergence of more fixed,
socially and materially political conjunctions which struggle against multiple
sovereignties. During the last years, several new solidarity assemblies, social
centres and squats, neighbourhood assemblies, worker unions and squatted
factories emerged, through anti-hierarchical and anti-commercial struggles.
Furthermore, social structures, such as social self-organized health centres, self-
organized theatres, guerrilla gardens, social kindergartens and social groceries
were created. All these processes can irrefutable be seen as structures of
networking common space in Greek cities. The commoners through commoning
emancipatory and solidarity social relations reclaim, struggle and reunite
themselves with their means of (re)production.
Within this context of generalized social and political transformations, the
neoliberal urban restructuring aims to re-arrange late capitalism and to
rationalize any “irrationality” (Douzinas, 2013). In 2009, the then Prime
Minister, George Papandreou (2009) pointed out that the crisis constitutes an
opportunity “to address and resolve, once and for all, deep-rooted problems
that are holding the nation back”. The state during the crisis period tries to
determine what is formal and what is informal, for how and where. In this part,
we commence with a brief account of the formal and informal state enclosures
and then elaborate on the practices of the neo-Nazi organization of Golden
Dawn (henceforth GD).
The dialectic of state formal and informal practices
Our point of departure is that informality does not lie only on the side of
urban movements or the impoverished population but can also be centrally
traced on legal, material and biopolitical state practices, such as the speculation
of the capital via accumulation by dispossession, exploitation of migrants and
gender oppression.
During the crisis period, the main method of law production is with the so-
called “Extraordinary Legislative Acts” which are introduced urgently, favouring
the interests of the authorities and other powerful groups. In the short-term
quest for stability, a long-term social and political change is accelerating.
Besides, “law has always been a privileged domain for recogni[z]ing and
establishing control over the common” (Hardt and Negri, 2004:202).
Indicatively, since 2010, a series of new legislative acts and laws was introduced
aiming to enhance the state revenues. Characteristic is the case of a new direct
vast tax (L. 4021/2011), called “haratsi” (ottoman word for a poll tax), which
was not related to the power being consumed by each household but it
represented another austerity measure. This was initially informally added to
the household’s bill for power supply and in case of non-payment the
household had its electricity directly cut. This “temporal” law was formalized

and fixed (L.4223/2013) in 2013, aiming to increase the governmental revenues
by 6 billion per year. Furthermore, state informality is expressed through the
reactivation of informal laws from the Junta period, such as the so-called “civil
mobilizations” against labour strikes. Based on them, the state achieved to
suppress the struggles of tracks drivers (2010), of municipal clean workers
(2011), of metro workers (2013), of dockers (2013), of high school teachers
(2013) and of workers in the public electricity company (2014).
Moreover, state informality is inscribed on the materiality of the urban
fabric, through new urban policies such as gentrification and fast track policies,
commodification and privatization of public infrastructures as motorways,
ports, airports, train network, hospitals, universities, and institutionalized
special economic zones (the cases of Cosco in Pireus Port or of the TAP natural
gas pipeline). These enclosure practices produce “gray spaces ‘from above’”
(Yiftachel, 2009:91) as they move between formality and informality but they
are directly “caught between the logics of capital, governance and identity”
(Yiftachel, 2009:93). Yet, we have to notice that the Supreme Court canceled
many of these projects as illegal.
Finally, biopolitical neoliberalism targets the existence of certain bodies and
their appearance or not in the public space, stigmatizing them or directly
criminalizing them. For instance, the “operation of purity and integrity” of the
Greek government in 2012 functioned as the basis for the castigation of the
HIV-positive women and drug users and their stigmatization as “hygienic
threats” for the totality of the society (Athanasiou, 2012). At the same time, the
deregulation of labour relations is tested and expressed firstly in migrants’
bodies. One example among many others is the area of Manolanda, where
dozens of migrants work informally under conditions of modern slavery. The
working conditions were established without formal recognition in order to
maximize the profit of the Greek employees and when, in 2013, the migrants
asked to be paid for the past 6 months their employees shoot them, wounding
34 of them.
The neo-Nazis Golden Dawn informal urban enclosures and the distorted
commons
In May 2009, members of the GD started to visible organize at an Athenian
neighbourhood, Agios Panteleimonas, under the label of a “local residents
committee”, claiming the “re-occupation of their neighbourhood from
clandestine migrants” and their desire to “make the neighbourhood Greek
again” (Dalakoglou and Vradis, 2011). While in 2009 GD polled a mere 0.46%, in
the elections of 2012 it acquired 6.94% of the vote and after its entrance to the
parliament rose up to 11.35%. Its racist and xenophobic discourse coupled with
racist attacks constitute the cornerstone of GD’s practices. Here, we draw on
two nodal practices, namely the informal gang-style violence and the informal
network of support, examining the degree and the process of their
(il)legitimization,.
First, the penal state in the austerity period in Greece is not only formally
operated by police forces but it is also informally practiced by GD. When the

Mayor of Athens, Giorgos Kaminis (2010), stated that key aim of this period is to
“take the city centre back”, it centrally targeted certain population groups as
“unwanted”, such as the squatters, the migrants and the homeless. This kind of
exclusionary urban politics are employed by GD and are re-produced through
the xenophobic discourse and urban practices. The support of police violent
forces in strikes, the attacks at the theatre Chytirion and other radical cultural
spaces, the kill of the anti-fascist P. Fyssas, the murderous attacks on the
houses of Egyptian fishermen in Perama and on migrants on the streets, in their
houses or in their working spaces (Psarras, 2012) are only some of the violent
attacks on migrants, homosexuals and everyone not fitting into the ideological
frame of its national purity. Through its exclusionary urban politics, GD occupy
the urban space in many Athenian (and not only) neighbourhoods and exclude
(through violence) the targeted groups. Yet, its violence goes almost always
unchecked, as it informally acts as the long-arm of the police and vice versa.
Second, GD works as an informal and distorted commoning network for
support. Blood donations only for Greeks, soup kitchens only for Greek
households, security provision for Greek elderly are some of its actions.
Recently, GD added a new area of intervention in the labour sector, supporting
jobs for Greek only as they visit factories and other workshops, count the
foreign workers there and encourage employees to hire Greeks instead.
Although GD is supported by a core of Nazi followers, the creation of this
network of support create a vague and ambiguous situation that attracts many
conservative or indignant people (Kompatsiaris and Mylonas, 2015). During the
first soup kitchen, Ilias Kasidiaris, the spokesperson of GD, argued that “our
‘terrorist organi*z+ation’ is organizing food distributions instead of having fun in
villas”(Kalmouki, 2014), while Kaminis characterized their soup kitchens “soup
kitchen[s] of hatred” that are “arbitrary, racist and illegal” (The Guardian, 2013).
Until recently, GD members enjoyed parliamentary immunities, which their
fellow Members of Parliament (MPs) were reluctant to remove and which
worked as a further sign of legitimization. Yet, in September 2013, the leader of
GD and other leading members were arrested. Here, we do not mean that the
arrest of GD members has anything to do with the recognition of the grassroots
anti-fascist movement or with the direct condemnation of fascism. Through this
move, the neoliberal three-party government aimed to show at the
international society that the state is organised and a stable social and political
environment is created. All in all, state manipulates GD’s practices either as
practices that go unnoticed, supporting the neoliberal restructuring (and its
penality) or as practices that deserve its condemnation because it threats the
law and order of the society. This characteristically signifies the power of the
state for determining what kind of informality could thrive, for how and where.
Concluding Remarks
In this paper, we argued that informality and formality are performative and
power-laden practices. In other words, they represent a mode of producing
space, through performing everyday life and thus produce, re-produce or
challenge inequalities and relations of domination and oppresion. Moreover,

we demonstrated that the context-specific manifestations of these practices
could provide important addenda to the deepening of the analysis, as they
depend highly on the social, political and economic context. Such a flexible and
dynamic conceptualization, we argued, helps to explore the contemporary
urban politics in crisis-stricken Greece.
During the last years, Greek governments have enganged in extensive
“corrective” measures to support the country’s development and growth,
affirming Wacquant’s argument (2012:74) that actually existing neoliberalism
operates in a double way, being “uplifting and ‘liberating’” for the hegemonic
order and “castigatory and restrictive” at the urban precariat. As it became
clear through the exploration of the way that GD was treated by the state,
contemporary forms of exclusion and enclosures does not only come from the
state. On the one hand, GD’s informality is closely linked to the glorification of
the penal state, which is an integral part of the neoliberal restructuring and
disproportionately target the poor, the migrants, the homeless and other
socially constructed categories of “unwanted” citizens. On the other, GD’s
informal practices lies on the production of distorted commons, which should
be recognized as commons despite their conection to hierarchical relations of
power and exclusion. This recognition is the first step based on which the
emancipatory movement could not only claim the commons on the base of
solidarity and social justice but “construct them in struggle” (DeAngelis, 2009).
Nevertheless, the dialectic relation between formal and informal spatialilties
plays a key role towards the prodution of the common emancipatory space.
Further, periods of crisis, like the one experienced nowadays in Greece, are
moments of intensification of social antagonism and moments where “radical
imaginaries [should] stop being an abstract theoretical excericise” (Kaika, 2012).
Indeed, although the common space in Greek cities is informally produced, it
constitutes a permanent antagonistic daily reality for the struggling inhabitants
in their perceived-conceived-lived urban space.
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