ABSTRACT
This editorial is intended to provide a brief overview of the evolution of a selection of European space economies and policies introduced to mitigate the devastating effects of at least five crises most have faced in the past decade or more. In a time of great fragility in economy, politics and society, concatenations of the five crises and more have challenged planners to come up with new solutions to long-standing urban and regional problems (otherwise ‘opportunities’). The five crises focused on here are: Green Transition; Great Financial Crisis; Euro Crisis; Migration and Refugee Asylum Crisis; COVID-19 Crisis. Occasional papers in the Special Issue that follows refer to other crisis effects such as; Ukraine resistance to its war against the Russian invasion; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of October 2023; Austerity policies and associated urban and regional disparities with inter-regional tensions; and the socio-economic effects of liberalization of Eastern Europe.
‘Blame the words. They prompted things to happen gradually’
Kiki Damoula (1931-2020) Greece’s Leading Female Poet
Introduction
The inspiration for this Special Issue of EPS arises from the acceptance of at least eleven articles by the journal, mostly over the past year recording critical analyses or evaluations of the effects of responses to the five key crises that have affected their political, spatial planning, economic and cultural performance. They vary from impact accounts of the period since the Great Financial Crash of 2008 and, in some cases the Great Recession that followed liberalization in Eastern Europe after 1989. Accordingly, the five crises have a core of common experiences and some variation among those for whom fragility has existed for a longer period. In many readers’ minds five crises in such a relatively short time, especially during the shorter period, will have seemed like five ‘black swans’ (Taleb Citation2012) in succession, as well as seemingly interminable, psychologically testing and, for many, socially disruptive in equal measure. Though the accounts that follow in this Special Issue are remarkable for their sobriety, even stoicism, and in many cases, optimism, they nevertheless register slight bewilderment. Mainly because urban and regional planning policy seems to have suffered more than its fair share of criticism for the fragility experienced and its compliance with a development dogma that is inimical to its long-established principles. These have always promoted ideas of ‘balanced growth’, ‘social inclusion’, ‘safe living conditions’, ‘enhanced mobility’ and ‘opportunity for work’ for all. However, these seem now to have been undermined by the rise of a dogma that favours ‘uneven austerity’, ‘social exclusion’, ‘safety impoverishment’, ‘transport injustice’ and ‘inadequate employment’. This portrayal of life conditions in many European cities and regions has prompted a theoretical question rare in social scientific analysis, which is not: ‘How Does This Work?’ but ‘What Happened?’ (Buchanan Citation2022).
In the process of seeking to answer ‘What Happened’? a deeper question is implied, namely ‘Who Articulated What Happened?’; ‘Why’ and ‘Cui Bono?’ Admittedly, the Latin question is more commonly explored, but not always, in the research literature. Sometimes a deflection occurs that draws attention away from the instigator(s) of action or a dissimulation of official responses to legitimate inquiries occurs. In Thelen’s theoretical analysis of ‘layering’ by which the existence of bamboozling ‘Acts’ of legislation or simply declaration by a (state-sanctioned) ‘Agent’ can be found to be responsible, such are the tactics for obfuscating such knowledge that it remains unreached and unreachable (Streeck and Thelen Citation2005; Thelen and Mahoney Citation2010). In this Thelenesque world, what she refers to as ‘assemblage’ argues that voluntary actions are assembled by specific agents expressing diverse favoured interests (Streeck and Thelen Citation2005). Diversity is the key characteristic of the ‘crooked timber’ of cosmopolitan life which gives rise to contradictions which need to be smoothed, even covertly, to facilitate ‘civilised co-existence’. ‘Layering’ also occurs and recurs with the re-purposing of land through re-use. Thelen also talks of a version of ‘assemblage’ to meet the need for deeper analysis of ‘intention’ and ‘agency’. ‘Layering’ thus explains how institutional change occurs by avoiding debilitating ‘stasis’ without resorting to Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ or what he later called ‘punctuated evolution’. For example, the US court hearings are replete with how the Trump administration welcomed any means of breaking up what they perceived to be static institutions. For such dangerously ‘sudden’ change, Thelen resolved this by highlighting the distinct categories of ‘intention’ and ‘outcome’ of institutional actions. A ‘sudden’ change could be ‘destruction’ (abolition) of an institution or its ‘conversion’ (repurposing). Between these are ‘drift’ (institutional dissonance) or ‘wilful inattention’. In these ways, narratives can be constructed to ‘spin’ a history favouring a preferred dogma.
It is almost an insult to say why this perspective is important in planning research but it offers a way to understanding the way ‘Social Proof’ (Cialdini Citation1984) leads to the pandemic-type spread of wide acceptance of ideological ‘common-sense’. Simply put, if it seems that most persons are believing, acting or practising in socially hitherto unacceptable ways, further persons will imitate those beliefs or practices for ‘fear of missing out’ (FOMO) reasons, one of the achievements of contemporary social media. ‘Stealing stored museum exhibits’ is one practice that echoes Cialdini’s (Citation1984) research findings on attendees at Arizona’s ‘Painted Desert’ national park. Another might be ‘blaming the planners’, like ex-UK Justice Minister Buckland was seen doing in a TV interview, for resistance by local protesters to allowing the government, or its ‘outsourced’ contractual suppliers, to plan building new prisons in rural villages, rather than blaming his own previous failure to devise a better prisons policy. This is how the belief, acts and practices in support of ‘the market knows best’ penetrated the consciousness of so many and offered huge incentives to purchase publicly owned housing as part of UK Prime Minister Thatcher’s privatization policy. Her ministers also hoodwinked employees to accept right-wing employment law which, in small lettering, disallowed a lawyer to be present for the trade union side but allowed the employer to be so represented in an industrial dispute. ‘Social Proof’ has always to be critiqued and countered by Negative Social Proof when laws are changed by such undemocratic ‘tricks’ or ‘articulations’.
What happened in selected European cities, regions and ruralities?
A further inspiration for this Special Issue was some visits I made to some cities, regions and ruralities in Europe for editorial business and other pleasures in 2023. In each place, I exercised the privilege of talking to people in the following mixture: hotel staff, such as managers, staff - including maintenance, catering, cleaning and service suppliers; rental house managers, shopkeepers, checkout staff in supermarkets, garage attendants, taxi drivers, airline functionaries, fellow travellers; restaurant managers and staff; museum and library staff, pistachio nut farmers; and vine growers. Without a formal semi-structured questionnaire, respondents were nevertheless queried about their experience and assessment of impacts upon them and their countries of crises such as: Green Transition; Great Financial Crisis; Euro Crisis; Migration and Refugee Asylum Crisis; and the COVID-19 Crisis. With War Crises, which make six, to which were sometimes added Austerity Crisis, and Liberalization from Soviet influence crisis there were usually plenty of impacts to report. These were, as appropriate, nuanced to respondents in Spain (Las Canarias; Valencia region), France (Provence and Nice); Scotland (Isle of Skye); Greece, (Attica region) and Italy (Piemonte and Tuscany). First, noticeable was how relatively little response was elicited by Green Transition or climate change in general, except for complaints about the hugely increased cost of energy. Even the TV pictures of the many ‘pyroscapes’ displayed by wildfires in these countries elicited relatively little outrage – equally the floods and earthquakes in the Mediterranean area (Turkey’s was said to have diverted attention away from oil tensions in the Aegean Sea). Hardly any electric vehicles were owned by respondents or visible on the roads, with the exception of a few in the luxury hotels and apartments of Vouliagmeni, near Sounion in Attica, Greece. None were owned or rented in the areas visited in Spain, France, Scotland or Italy. However, many more owned and utilized solar energy but there were few incidences of wind turbines, except elsewhere, as in Portugal or Scotland’s North Sea. However, there was visibility of water conservation for farms and public gardens. An example is semi-desert planting; e.g. at the National Library of Greece and the National Opera House in the new Cultural Centre (SNFCC) complex funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation) in Athens. Further, activity by fishers at the sea bass farms in Sounion Bay and farmers of almond, walnut and pistachio nuts and vines among food suppliers in Aegina for conserving and maintaining water supplies, also in Spain, notably in the César Manriques museum and wineries in Lanzarote. This was also evident in the regenerated Bay area of Valencia.
Moving on to the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, striking is the invention of the ‘Athenian Riviera’ the strapline of the intensive resort schemes of the coastal stretch from west of Piraeus to Sounion at the south-eastern end of the Attica peninsula. Opposite the SNFCC, are the former Olympic Facilities of Handball and Tae Kwon Do, now used for events. The facilities are further complemented by a commercial area with retail malls and offices as well as the Air Force History Museum. Further along the coastal highway is the Flisvos Marina recipient of the ‘5 Gold Anchors Platinum’ excellence award with high-status mooring facilities for small boats, yachts and mega-yachts. The newly reinvented Alimos Marina is also a place for entertainment, hosting various bars, cafes and restaurants such as the Ark, featuring Greek celebrity chef, Yannis Baxevanis. The former Athens airport site to the east is the subject of a giga-project at the Elliniko (otherwise known as the Hellinicon Project) and the most high-profile project taking place in the Athenian Riviera and Greece itself. At a total investment for the project of €8bn., estimated eventually to contribute over €14bn.to the economy in taxes, the development is complemented by infrastructure works amounting to €1.5bn. This was announced in a Presidential declaration to the Greek people after minimal consultation. Construction will employ some 10,000 and future permanent employment of 75,000, adding 2.4% to Greek GDP. Other redeveloped tourist resorts include Asteria in Glyfada, Astir Palace centred on Vouliagmeni and Eden Beach near Sounion.
This compares with the earlier Salvador Calatrava-designed cultural megaproject realized in Valencia but which suffered a debt of €350 million for the Valencian regional government in 2018. It has since been re-purposed and privatized to some extent. This was a comparable outcome of the Euro Crisis in Portugal where huge investments in Algarve tourism and condominium real estate, much of it financed by Arab oil profits, led similarly to national indebtedness of over €200 million.
Since 2008, and throughout the Euro Crisis, real estate prices in Athens had declined significantly, except in its southern, coastal suburbs, which recorded a mild increase. With EIB soft loans and member state aids supplementing massive private property trust investments, the Greek model represents an extreme version of turbo-charged ‘smart over-specialisation’ in luxury tourism. Meanwhile, at a lesser scale, the leading hotelier in southern Europe, Hotel Investment Partners (HIP) announced in 2022 the opening of one of the most significant repositioning projects it had undertaken in Spain, the Barceló Fuerteventura Beach Resort, the largest resort in the Canary Islands, in which it had invested over €38 million. Located at the foot of Caleta de Fuste beach, the Barceló Fuerteventura Beach Resort complex integrated four hotels (Barceló Fuerteventura Mar, Barceló Fuerteventura Castillo, Royal Level Adult Only and Royal Level Family Club), with a total of 964 bedrooms and an area of 150,000 square metres.
The Migration and Refugee Crisis affects most European space economies particularly those in Greek and Italian islands. Recently, in the latest Israel-Palestine war, Greece (especially Athens) and Cyprus were the main destinations for middle-class Israelis escaping from the dangers of the associated terrorist attacks. Sunday, October 8th saw dozens of TV cameras and interviewers awaiting celebrities and other late arrivals on El Al planes, in the last flights out of Tel Aviv alongside many Israelis who had already arrived. Cyprus and Greece are the nearest safe destinations for Israelis and many have been regular visitors and property-owners, especially in Athens. Their arrival overshadowed the hitherto mostly desperately poor Africans, Indians, Pakistanis and other Asians from Iran and Afghanistan. However, I talked to a group of Ethiopians in a hubble-bubble bar in Aegina who were far from poor, but rather partying in a normal, convivial way. They were quite integrated in Greek society, had quite well-paid jobs and were simply having fun and able to be served exactly what they had been used to at home. Nevertheless, islands like Lesvos in Greece, Gran Canaria in Spain and Lampedusa in Italy had experienced large numbers of refugees and asylum-seekers. Refugee camps were overflowing accordingly, with 15,000 people arriving in a few days in September 2003 on an island with only 6,000 inhabitants, inevitably inadequately coastguarded by the Italian coastguard and the EU’s closed border policy. In 2011, Silvio Berlusconi’s government, which had made a deal with Libya to halt migrant departures, threatened to repatriate all Tunisians directly from Lampedusa (Nicolini Citation2023). The failure of the state led the community, the church and NGOs to replace it. Today Tunisia is again in economic crisis, while Morocco has been devastated by a large earthquake and Libya by disastrous floods. The French Riviera has had its tragedies associated with Islamic terrorism with the death of 86 persons at the hands of a Tunisian truck driver on the Promenade Anglais in Nice. There, I talked with a number of Tunisian hotel ‘handlers’, a hotel manager and two up-market taxi drivers who agreed Tunisians were large, long-established and settled migrants. As French, as well as Arabic speakers, they had found it possible to integrate, access housing and work for, or establish businesses in the city. Some of my informants were second and even third-generation natives of Nice, their forebears having arrived even before the Arab Spring that had succeeded the economic troubles of Tunisia with its local food riots and uprising in December 2010, following Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation in protest at police corruption and ill treatment. A new, better organized closed reception centre for refugees and asylum seekers was approved to be built by the Greek government with EU approval after a fire destroyed the Moria camp. It was to be located in the Vastria area (near the village of Nees Kydonies) in north-east Lesvos and was to be completed by summer 2022. Still, 1,300 refugees and asylum seekers arrived in Lesvos and 2,000 in Gran Canaria per month in 2023.
Finally, the COVID-19 Crisis has been experienced with fortitude, but many premature deaths, particularly of older, vulnerable, poorer and ethnic minority citizens. Among the after-effects in Athens were ‘long Covid’ symptoms of fatigue and debilitation, mental health problems and depression plus a worrying rise in domestic abuse cases. My taxi-driver informant taking me to Athens airport spoke clearly about these problems and their effects on employment as revealed in staff shortages in most service sectors, some empty downtown retail outlets but otherwise new ‘designer’ coffee shops and stores having replaced some of the previous occupants. However, with certain ‘anti-vaxxer’ overtones he criticized Pfizer vaccinations, which he claimed many believed caused myocardial heart attack symptoms and fatalities, and was concerned about the conspiracy of silence practised by the Greek government in withholding information from the people, including its over-long eight-month lock-down which devastated business, in his case causing him to move to London to open a business serving the London (Croydon) tram service. It was also actually noticeable that the number of Pet Shops in central Athens and Piraeus was both pronounced and to have risen in number as people sought to deal with post-COVID-19 psychological issues. All the regions visited reported staff shortages in the services sector. In Skye, Scotland, the labour force and origins of visitors had created a dualistic, globalized community. The meaning of this was that unusual recruitment patterns had characterized both tourism employees and less surprisingly, visitors. The former might include Uruguayan bar staff while the latter represented a huge influx of American and South American cruise ship passengers also taking in day trips or short tours from Portree, Skye’s small port, to Edinburgh, Glasgow and the Highlands. This was just as well, because there was a massive mismatch in restaurant and bar staff on premises that typically could only open at tea-time (4 o’clock) while thousands of cruise ship occupants sought unavailable sustenance, or even a place to park cars or coaches, during the day. Thus ‘little’ Skye could be said to have adopted the Post-Covid over-tourism mantra also displayed in Greece, Spain and elsewhere but was in danger of losing that custom from want of accommodation or hospitality to satisfy its globalized market. Needless to say, the tourist seeking a chance to exchange a few words in the native Gaelic was best advised to visit the excellent Sabhal Mòr Ostaig or National Centre for Gaelic Language and Culture in Slèat, Isle of Skye.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
References
- Buchanan, I. 2022. Assemblage Theory and Method. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
- Cialdini, R. 1984. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. New York: Harper.
- Nicolini, G. 2023. “Here on Lampedusa, the Crisis We Face Alone Is a Humanitarian One – Not a Migrant Invasion.” The Guardian. Accessed September 23. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree.
- Streeck, W., and K. Thelen. 2005. “Institutional Changes in Advanced Political Economies.” In Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, edited by W. Streeck, and K. Thelen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Taleb, N. 2012. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House Penguin.
- Thelen, K., and J. Mahoney. 2010. Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.