Building bridges across subjectivities and spaces: reflections on the ‘’Orfanotrofio housing squat for immigrants"

Abstract

The recent refugee crisis in Greece has fuelled a heated debate in media, academic and activist circles. One of its aspects that is not as known and well documented is the common struggles of locals and refugees and their emergence in and through urban space. Through a grounded examination of the “Orfanotrofio-housing squat for immigrants” in Thessaloniki (Greece), we demonstrate that “Orfonotrofio” is at once a unique case and exemplar of more general processes, as it opens up a new space of politics and enables the materialization of radical imaginaries in the here and now. Of course, we do not argue that immigrants’ struggles are new in Greece but that as time passes they become even more connected to other emancipatory struggles; within but also beyond the ongoing crisis, the precarious population -from workers and students to migrants and unemployed- challenges the neoliberal restructuring and negotiates fixed identities. Since the building’s occupation in 2015, local activists and immigrants have been experimenting with new ways of being-in-common, beyond and against humanitarian approaches to the refugee crisis adopted by NGOs and voluntary organizations. The Orfanotrofio’s importance lies at the fact that the participants not only manage everyday problems through horizontal relations and self-organization, but also seek to organize broader political responses to major socio-political issues by building bridges across subjectivities, spaces and overall emancipatory struggles. In other words, the occupiers’ different backgrounds have catalysed a process of negotiating and deconstructing a series of cross-cutting geographies of power.

Full text

Building bridges across
subjectivities and spaces
reflections on the “Orfanotrofio housing squat
for immigrants” in Thessaloniki (Greece)
Matina Kapsali1& Maria Karagianni2
PhD Students, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
1. skapsali@arch.auth.gr; 2. mkaragi@arch.auth.gr
RGS Annual International Conference 2016

Introduction
Crisis and austerity urbanism in European cities
Rethinking of the neoliberal crisis ‘from below’
(Featherstone et al., 2015, Hadjimichalis and Hudson, 2014)
spaces of solidarity & practices of collective action
‘Mediterranean refugee crisis’
Managerial logic
Humanitarian compassion
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 2

Objective of the presentation: to unpack the dimensions of the radical
urban politics that open up in and through spaces of solidarity
fulfilment of
basic rights
alternative ways
of thinking and
inhabiting the city
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 3

Introduction Research
methods Case study
Theoretical debates on
urban squatting and
the production of
radical spaces and
subjectivities within
them
Reflections on the
“Orfanotrofio
housing squat for
immigrants”
Concluding
remarks
The
“Orfanotrofio
housing squat for
immigrants”
Data collection
process and
period
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 4

Squats as spaces of radical
urban politics
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 5

‘[S]pace becomes political in that it becomes an
integral element of the interruption of the
‘natural’ (or, better yet, naturalized) order of
domination through the constitution of a place
of encounter by those that have no part in that
order. The political is signalled by this
encounter as amoment of interruption,
and not by the mere presence of power
relations and competing interests’
(Dikec, 2005:172)
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 6

Key questions
In which way does squatting constitute a form of radical
urban politics?
How is it related to the emergence of radical
subjectivities?
What is the relationship between the praxis of squatting
and the emergence of a new way of inhabiting urban
space?
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 7

Occupation
‘the seizure of an empty place’ (Mitchell, 2012:10)
‘a political process that materializes the social order
which it seeks to enact’ (Vasudevan, 2014)
‘to occupy […] is to insist on building the necessary
conditions for social justice and new autonomous
forms of collective life’ (Vasudevan, 2014)
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 8

Squatting as…
… an alternative urban
infrastructure
Against the enclosure of the urban
space;
challenge the dominant mode of
urban development;
everyday micro-politics: challenging
and conflictual process of being-in-
common
… ‘common spaces for political
action’
as ‘a radical politics of
infrastructure’ (McFarlane and
Vasudevan, 2013)
‘not only inventive ways of
perceiving and acting in urban
space, but new forms of urban
learning and possibility’ (McFarlane,
2011)
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 9

Politics and political subjectivities
A political subjectification is ‘a disidentification, [a]
removal from the naturalness of a place, the
opening up of a subject space where anyone can
be counted since it is the space where those of
no account are counted, where a connection is
made between having a part and having no part.’
(Rancière,1999:36)
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 10

Being a refugee and its
spatial configurations
“the camp has become the
‘hidden matrix’ of the modern
political space and the
technique of government to
exclude, enclose and/or even
eliminate those who threaten
the security of the state”
(Agamben, 1998:170)
Image: Detention centre, Xanthi, Greece (source:
http://noborder2016.espivblogs.net
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 11

Research methods
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 12

Research methods
Data collection: spring and summer of 2016
I. Document analysis
Data on official policy responses (official policy reports, press
releases and minutes from working groups published by the Greek
government, the UNHCR, the European Union and local NGOs) &
Data on solidarity practices
II. Participant observation
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 13

The refugee crisis
an introduction
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 14

Refugee movement in the Mediterranean
Source: UNHCR, 2016
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 15

The Balkan route
“I just want to get out of
here. I want to know when
the borders will open.
What is happening? We
don’t know.”
Yazidi girl from Syria, Ritsona Camp, Greece
Sources: BBC, 2016; UNHCR, 2016
Thessaloniki
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 16

Refugee sites in Greece
Emergency Reception Site, Elliniko, Greece
Source: Kathimerini, 2016
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 17

Solidarity initiatives in Greece
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 18

Occupying Orfanotrofio
a laboratory of urban struggle and radical urban politics
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 19

Orfanotrofio:
Housing Squat
for Immigrants
to “house immigrants and
provide a place for the
concentration of struggles
related to migration
issues”
Assembly of Orfanotrofio Housing
Squat for Immigrants
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 20

Organisation of
everyday life
“The main aim of this
place was to bring together
and unite all human ideas
and practices in order to
serve the weak and the
oppressed and support the
dispossessed.”
Assembly of Orfanotrofio Housing
Squat for Immigrants
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 21

Conflicts over the
building
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 22

1. Everyday
micro-politics
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 23

2. Broader political
issues
“free movement for all;
free access to the health
system for all; and
papers for all immigrants”
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 24

Eviction
“Quickly our dreams disappeared.
[…]
We hope that you're in solidarity with
us so that together, step by step, we
defend every right for every person,
and we will claim everything that was
taken away from us. With the courage
and strength of free people who
believe in fighting for their freedom.”
Assembly of Orfanotrofio Housing Squat for
Immigrants
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 25

Concluding remarks
Reflections on the “Orfanotrofio housing squat for immigrants”
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 26

Orfanotrofio: an intensive political experiment
Re-appropriation of the urban space as
a political space
against the hegemonic ordering of
the urban space;
claiming the right to housing &
the right to movement
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 27

A ‘laboratory of the politics of the commons’
Articulation of an alternative urbanism &
an emancipatory appropriation of the build
environment
‘[A] key site through which the generative
potential of aradical urban commons
[was] […] constructed and explored’
(Vasudevan, 2014:10).
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 28

A process of political subjectification
Question the given order of things;
constructed themselves as political
subjects in space & produced space for
their everyday life in the city
‘Politics is the affair of anyone and no
one in particular’ (Dikec, 2013)
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 29

Thank you!
Matina Kapsali | skapsali@arch.auth.gr
Maria Karagianni . mkaragi@arch.auth.gr
M. Kapsali & M. Karagianni 30