Crisis, Right to the City movements and the question of spontaneity: Athens and Mexico City

Abstract

Mexico and Greece comprise typical cases of the so-called semi-periphery where neoliberal policies have been applied but also where social movements tried to resist the implementation of the policies in question. In the past, many Right to the City movements start to emerge, focused particularly on the right to the habitat. Recently, the most important RttC movements concerned the claims to public space and common goods, while at the same time opposing privatisations and big projects. Some authors called these movements spontaneous. Yet the relationship of politico-economic changes with the spontaneous is considerably complicated and related to what, by whom and why would be included in the discursive category of the ‘spontaneity’. This approach I will explore below. Nothing is entirely spontaneous in the world’s so-called spontaneous neighbourhoods and in the so-called spontaneous uprisings. The people participating in acts characterised as ‘spontaneous’ without rules enforced by any superior authorities, simply refuse to define their bodies as machines. The question is if the so-called spontaneous resistances became, or may become, under certain conditions, dangerous cracks. The right to the city is not the right to the impersonal urban space but the right to the polis. In these new movements, the right to the polis is exercised in the everyday life by many different actors and through different ways of action. The motto is: Changing values within spaces of encounters and experimentation. Let us all be rebel poets in the present.

Key words:

• global shifts
• neo-liberalism and Right to the City movements in Mexico and Greece
• urban social movements
• spontaneous uprisings
• spontaneous neighborhood
• Athens
• Mexico City

Notes

1 I would like to thank Antonis Vradis for his contribution to the English presentation of this text.

2 The World Trade Organization (WTO) replacing (1994) the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

3 The North American Free Trade Agreement.

4 The International Monetary Fund.

5 Yet no contemporary social guerrilla movements developed, as happened in Mexico, which had this kind of tradition.

6 On this matter, see Naomi Klein 2007.

7 See the critique by Massey (1994) on the classic linear approach of history, which ignores space and leads to wrong views on the level of development of each country or each place.

8 A discussion on the previous one takes place in the volume by Petropoulou (2011). This research argues that the big cities of the Mediterranean and Latin America present comparable processes of urban development imprinted in their urban landscapes. The concept of the urban eco-landscape enables the analysis and comparison of both cities’ landscapes at different spatial and temporal scales.

9 A typical example is the interpretation of the spontaneous as ‘indigenous’ (between other interpretations) in an English dictionary.

10 On the construction of difference of the popular as an anti-Kantian aesthetic, see Bourdieu 1986, 42.

11 During the period between 1968 and 1988 the RttC movements in Latin American spread and organised in a Latin America wide, strong coordination network that would strongly fight back against mass repression. The decision by the ‘Habitat’ secretary of the UN ‘for the right to habitation’ in 1976, which called for governments to aid, with infrastructures and loans, the residents of these areas, and not to go ahead with destructing them, arguably comprises the most important international U-turn on the matter.

12 The Fordist model never fully reigned over the lives of people. This is not absolutely due to the late industrialization of these regions. In many areas of the so-called semi-periphery and during the first period of capitalist domination, some people who lived in isolated places kept for a long time rebel characteristics (Damianakos 2003) similar to those attributed to the ‘witches’ cited by Federici (2004). In a metaphorical way: further back even when capitalism was being born, not all ‘witches’ were burnt. Some escaped them, and many turned into guerrillas.

13 In this case I accept Graeber's analysis of debt.

14 Also, see Petropoulou 2011, 38–50, 175–314.

15 Examples in Greece: work collectivity in industrial production (Vio.Me occupation), cultural occupy movements (ERT-open movement, occupy Embros theatre collectivity), solidarity economy and urban agricultural collectivities (Social Consumer Cooperative bioscoop of Thessaloniki, Agroselliniko in Athens, etc.), solidarity hospitals, work collectivities in the service sector (Pagaki, Synallois, etc.), the movement against privatisation of Thessaloniki's water and many others (see Petropoulou 2013b).

16 http://desinformemonos.org/

Additional information

Christy (Chryssanthi) Petropoulou is Lecturer of Urban Geography at the Department of Geography at the University of the Aegean.