The crisis and its discourses: Quasi-Orientalist attacks on Mediterranean urban spontaneity, informality and joie de vivre

Abstract

Mediterranean cities have always followed a path of urban development that diverges significantly from Anglo-American models. Spontaneity and informality have been deeply embedded in the cities' roots since Gramsci's time, but they have been transformed recently, together with urban development dynamics. A major rupture is observed in Southern Europe at the turn of the 21st century and especially the 2010s, when the region has been beaten by the force of the major global financial restructuring labelled the crisis, centralization/privatization and accumulation by dispossession. In anti-austerity social movements, popular spontaneity emerges as the par excellence force undermining neo-liberal hegemony and bringing to the surface niches of creativity of the urban grassroots, with the help of ICT (information and communications technology) dissemination. Focusing on Athens and two instances of massive mobilization in 2011 and 2013, we explore whether spontaneity and informality stamping urban development will manage to seep through structural readjustments, and how they will shape the future character of this and other Mediterranean cities during, but most importantly after, the crisis. Among alternative futures we discuss the darker one of quasi-Orientalist discourses by the European Union power elites, which undermine popular creativity and joie de vivre of the Southern grassroots and create urban dystopias; and the most optimistic one, which will be shaped by the emancipation of the currently vulnerable social movements and the emergent cooperative and solidarity economy, in a future eutopia.

Key words:

• Southern Europe
• social movements
• digital society
• cosmopolitanism
• grassroots creativity
• Athens

Notes

1 A direct analogy can be drawn here with the ‘de-Turkization’ of 19th-century Greece via orthogonal grids in cities to replace the labyrinthine street layout of Ottoman settlements (Leontidou 2013), which was embraced by the population. In the same way, EU ‘rationality’ is generally accepted today, despite its irrationalities during the crisis.

2 Greek governments were shaken and restructured after these mobilizations, but actually hardened themselves against popular discontent. The ‘movement of the piazzas’ in 2011 was followed by the imposition of a technocrat as prime minister, like Italy at the time! The banker Lucas Papadimos was imposed on 11 November 2011 as the Greek prime minister of a coalition government of three parties; and on occasion of the ERT closure in 2013, another coalition government lost one party on the Left of its spectrum, DIMAR, which was also later crushed in the May 2014 elections.

3 The TV blackout was rationalized by the Greek government with a quasi-Orientalist discourse against the ‘corrupt’ employees and a set of hypocritical comments. For example, it accused ERT of ‘withholding’ from every household 4 euros per month (paid with electricity bills). The hypocrisy is exposed now, in 2014, that the same amount is paid by all electricity consumers to NERIT (the substitute ERT) from the beginning of 2014, even before it started its 3 broadcasts instead of 30 offered by ERT before they closed it down! See http://www.dei.gr/el/eksupiretisi-pelatwn/themata-pelatwn/ti-aforoun-oi-xrewseis-uper-tritwn-efk-eidtelos-5/nea-elliniki-radiofwnia-internet-kai-tileorasi-ner (accessed August 2014).

4 Including British, French, German and Cypriot ones, which returned after a few weeks.

5 The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) hosted the broadcasts at http://www3.ebu.ch/cms/en/sites/ebu/contents/news/2013/06/monitor-ert-online.html (last accessed August 2013). Journalists are still broadcasting at www.ertopen.com (last accessed 11 June 2014, that is, during the first ‘anniversary’ of the black screen).

6 Especially German periodicals like Focus and Der Spiegel, with conspicuous offensive covers.

7 Huge dimensions of depopulation are found in the central Athens municipality, which entered the EU with 885,737 people in 1981, but gradually and then suddenly—during the crisis—lost almost half of its inhabitants. According to the 2011 census by ELSTAT, central Athens only had a population of 467,108, almost half the 1981 number. However incomplete the census was, with clandestine migrants frightened of police ‘clearances’ and hiding, this is really a huge population loss.

8 Especially after some success of the ‘Golden Dawn’ neo-Nazis in local elections on 18 May 2014 and EU elections on 25 May 2014, despite the public exposure of their criminal activity before that. Anyway, the extreme Right came stronger elsewhere in the EU.

Additional information

Lila Leontidou is Professor of Geography and European Culture at the Hellenic Open University.