Transformations of the urban landscape and their relation to immigration: the center of Athens

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Transformations of the urban landscape and their relation to immigration: the center of Athens

I am a child of the center of Athens. I was born in a house that would have been one hundred years old now days, on Epikourou Street – which extends Evripidou Street towards Pireos. Its front was simple, displaying the ornamental forms of neoclassicism. (Figure 1) This wasn’t unusual at all for a turn-of-the-century house, since even the street names do recall ancient Athens. We left there in the 60s for a penthouse on Acharnon Street, between Agios Panteleimonas and Victoria Square.Thirty years later, the Epikourou Street house would become a listed building, [1] following a massive trend of neoclassical preservation in the 80s and 90s; the objective was the mandatory salvation of a commonplace architecture which bore the signs of the past and the traces of its decay: This highlighted the will to make of the living center of Athens a historical center, and of the nostalgia of times past a new collective identity. The folder in the database of the Ministry of Environment shows the house in the state it had been when it was declared listed; practically abandoned, in poor shape and of dubious architectural value. (Figure 2) For government, it is one among the many listed buildings, its image frozen at its condition in the 90s, which is extremely distant from its robust maturity in the 60s I still remember as a child.

Before the century came to a close, the house collapsed during a night of torrential rain. It was all over the press and its picture was captioned with how fortunate it had been for the immigrants who had been squatting there to still be alive. Today it still remains a practical and institutional void. (Figure 3) The large tree which has grown by the garbage is an Ailanthus altissima , commonly known as tree of heaven . It is a tree from the Far East, which grows all over the urban voids and is highly resilient to metropolitan conditions. This is the tree Betty Smith refers to in her book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), which was filmed by Elia Kazan (1945). At the same time with the collapse, in October ’99, a young man called Kazakos, killed or critically injured, within two days, seven immigrants on an impressive trail which begun on that same Epikourou Street and reached Ipirou and Fylis. (Figure 4). The same year I sold the Acharnon penthouse. We had already settled in a home with a garden in Halandri. Burglary had already started to break out in the area, but there was no feeling of insecurity. For most of the neighbors who had the means, the objective of relocation was clearly different: to escape the suffocating center for the suburban euphoria of northeastern and coastal Athens. It hadn’t been easy at all to sell that penthouse at that time. All prospective buyers were immigrants, mostly from the Balkans, and Greek descendants from the dismantled Soviet Union. Its price was already below the fair market value.

The gradual depletion of the center from its old inhabitants, which culminated in a massive migration, was more than just an internal dynamic of economic development, which was leaving behind a void: Decentralization was the official policy for Athens, ideally expressed in the 1985 Master Plan. The city center, from Plaka to Psirri and Metaxourghio, was to be transformed into an urban landscape of its preserved historical self and into a privileged playground of entertainment, pushing homeowners and professionals towards the nine peripheral centers, out of which Glyfada and Kifissia would soon rise to prominence.

It took more than 20 years until we started to perceive, around 2010, the consequences of such choices, but even now, we still seem unable to understand that the transformation of the center of Athens was a lengthy process, put forward by civilians and the Government alike, consciously or unconsciously, at a time which allowed for the future to be imagined without ever including the current crisis.[2] The void left behind by this withdrawal was explosive, both for the population as well as for commerce, business activities and the building stock. According to statistics, the population reduction in the center of Athens reached 20% during the last decade, but the actual reduction of the population is in fact much smaller due to illegal immigration. Most major department stores, Akron-Ilion-Crystal, Athenée, Katrantzos, Minion, shut down before the end of the Twentieth Century and still remain closed. Psirri was emptied of cottage industry only to be overwhelmed by entertainment. The neoclassical buildings, which got listed massively, got just as massively abandoned and begun to collapse along deserted pedestrian streets, like Iasonos, in Metaxourghio – and elsewhere – long before the crisis came to the surface. (Figures 5-6) In the vacancy of buildings in the center large or small, in the void of activities which faded out or moved into the peripheral centers, along new highways or around new underground stations, got established – just as gradually but as well in a completely natural manner – all those who had come from afar; economic or political immigrants, to work as long as our opulence allowed for and live, as cheap as possible, where we didn’t want to live anymore; namely, where supply was granted and prices remained much lower.

The dark fronts of a number of closed buildings got lit again and the ground floors became alive with new shops, beside avant-garde theaters and art galleries or eccentric bars, inscribing their storefronts with the vocabulary of faraway homelands, which their frequent visitors understood well, in the signs and colors of a different civilization grafted upon the neoclassical buildings we had massively listed for preservation, on the same streets we still call by our own ancient names. The void we left behind became alive, but it was not ours anymore because it didn’t carry our own signs only, but as well, the traces of the exoticism we searched for in distant travels and now were beside us, overturning the distance between here and elsewhere. (Figures 7-8) And as time went by, the flight accelerated, the center even got abandoned by civil services, Social Security, Courthouses and Ministries, long before the hotels came to close; and their devastating void was invaded at the same speed by the Other, unconditionally, transforming the homely into unhomely and vice-versa.

The anthropological problem of the other in the European metropolis concerns the role and position of the foreigner, who is more often than not an immigrant, and is defined in terms of location and difference. The anthropological location is defined as “one’s place”, meaning the place of common identity among those who live there, and who distinguish themselves by means of that identity from those who don’t live there. To define themselves, societies and social groupings assign meaning to the space they inhabit through signs and symbols, in order for it to be identifiable and become their place .[3] This attribution of meaning to space extends in various scales, from the home and the way of inhabiting to the community or the neighborhood, to the relation between public and private, but even to the relation between the built and the natural environment. The attribution of space has thresholds, crossroads, borders.

The construction of the identity in which the self is recognized is based upon its difference from that of the other , as projected in space. Projecting relations of difference and identity is a process of attributing meaning undertaken by social groups in order for them to be able to communicate and to organize themselves, meaning to become recognizable, through the vital control of their space, through its codification. The problem of other in the contemporary city involves the relation of a foreigner, which is an immigrant, to his place of residence and work.

To better understand the transformations of the urban landscape in relation to immigration, we should keep in mind that immigration from country to country in search of labor, which typically follows a pattern of movement from a poorer to a wealthier place and from a more precarious environment to a more secure one as well, is an occurrence with a historical beginning and an end, from the moment that it mostly depends on the demand for manual labor generated by high development figures and the institutional framework in the country of reception.[4] The massive population migrations in Europe from the south to the central and northern territories at a time of rapid development first became restricted and then almost ended when this development came to a halt. The deindustrialization of the European center and the disarming of the Rhur Valley don’t just signify recession but also, the redefinition of labor and production on a European and global scale. This change lies behind the pause of Greek immigration to Germany. This same change signals to a very large extent a new phase of development for Greece, which will not only retain its own workforce but will also find itself in need of more, which got provided when the overall redefinition of the European economic geography allowed and at the same time made this mandatory, after ’89.

The negative consequences of immigration upon the social and urban fabric, mostly related with delinquency, immediately projected upon space, are the typical result of unregulated labor, provided on the bounds of legality in any business transaction, from construction to trade, to restauration and services. The restriction of delinquency and, generally, the containment of alienated behavior, could be accomplished through the complete institutional control of immigrant labor, meaning a regulating legal framework involving all financial charges for employers and all social benefits for immigrants.

All during the phase of economic development, or even nowadays, such a regulating intervention, which would have been rather beneficial to the majority of the immigrant population, was deemed undesirable by the native Greek society of all sorts of employers, as well as by their political representatives; first and foremost, because such a move would have repercussions upon their own pursuit of profit, drawn from the abject exploitation of immigrant labor. Withdrawing political support for the employers’ own delinquency would be a mere side-effect in a time of deepening recession, when the cost of labor for the whole workforce gets compressed even further due to unemployment and, at the same time, delinquent behavior is almost the result of coercion. However, such behavior cannot be cured like fever, with aspirins and wiping: Only the institutional regulation of labor, done urgently and generally, meaning for all, will be able to succeed in that direction through a gradual self-regulation. Such an act will first and foremost affect the uncontrolled and lawless exploitation of the “gray” workforce and normalize the professional framework of the ordinary citizen, none of which is now a social or political priority for most Greek communities – rather the opposite.

In our hypermodern times, spaces are non-places, according to the terminology of the anthropologist Marc Augé.[5] In a non-place one is a passer-by, or a consumer, or a user. In that attribute one may rub shoulders with many people and yet remain alone. In a non-place, nobody is at one’s place but neither can one be at anyone else’s. The non-place may be the space of others without the presence of the others, a space that has become a spectacle of itself, described through stereotypes and words which speak the language of folklore, of the picturesque or of erudition. Even the tourist wandering contributes to the constitution of non-places. We become ecstatic in front of the spectacle of illuminated and restored monuments, which are no one’s place. We ourselves, in our relation to the others, become our own spectacle.

The procedure of “refurbishment” in the center of Athens, which begun by the end of the 1970s with the mass listing of buildings, the total protection of Plaka and the pedestrianization in the commercial triangle, combined with the master plan and the programmatic decentralization of business activities, was the starting point of its transformation into an urban landscape, meaning a spectacle of place for passers-by, tourists, consumers and users. (Figure 9) With very few exceptions and only a number of enclaves of resistance, the center of Athens gradually lost the social bond which made of it a place for commerce, manufacturers and inhabitants; it became devoid of its social meaning which got replaced with a meaning of spectacle of a place, which is constituent of the non-place, and at the same time, it got voided in the literal sense, leaving behind many hundreds of empty buildings.

Migrating, you abandon your place but you try to reestablish a social relationship with the space elsewhere. By contrast to the temporal or the transitional character of its compulsory use, the identity of space gets inscribed with this installation. Immigrants wish to rebuild a place in places closing in upon their sight and attempting to exclude them. They live through the loss of the social connection bonding them to one place and in spite of the temporary or the compulsory of their habitation, they make every possible effort to regain the lost relationship, inscribing their space with meaning. Inhabiting the void of non-place, in which consumers and users wander in abandon, they even attribute meaning to the ephemeral of their residence and their commerce in order to regain the identity of their difference, to become those who are in a world which is other .

What frightens us today in the city center and we often call ghetto, is the void of non-place which we left behind abandoning our place, inscribed with the signs of its symbolic appropriation by others. (Figure 10) We don’t recognize ourselves upon it, in an identity crisis which leaves us outside. But while we speak of a crisis of social identity, this crisis is a difference visible in the urban space because it became the place of others and it bears inscribed all over their own symbols. Being unable to perceive the meaning of other, we construct the stranger. We even miss out on the process of reconstruction of the social meaning which can allow the re-appropriation of the place lost through the collective reestablishment of its constituent relations of habitation and labor.

The encounter with the others and their difference in civilization always had an air of exoticism, ever since trade routes were established in search of new markets and mainly, from the moment that travel and observation of other cultures became a discipline in the human sciences, anthropology and ethnology, and almost simultaneously – tourism. Relating the self to the other was charming, attractive and picturesque, albeit a little dangerous, as long as the geographic distance was kept; and not just that, because we shouldn’t forget there once had been colonies. What happens still when geographic distances are shifted and exoticism pays us a “home” visit, while our products keep being sold everywhere? Our relation to the other is then transformed into a globalization of trade and exoticism: Chinese inscriptions everywhere, Russian, Albanian, Urdu and Arabic on storefronts, on houses, on construction sites – all civilizations where Coca Cola gets exported are here.

Today, a stroll through the “rough” neighborhoods of the center makes one confront exotic landscapes which are, however, his own. The change is in the words, the signs: what is at work here is the semiology of metaphor, which is a semiology of difference. The same or the other , together or apart, can be encountered on the squares and on the streets of our childhood. Still, the urban landscape is always man-made; it bears the signs of human activity and while it remains the same as built, it keeps changing through the difference in the physical presence of people. (Figure11)

The exact same built environment, the exact same buildings, the same streets, the same place names, after a lengthy process of losing their social meaning and their subsequent transformation into an urban landscape – by means of alienation – begun to receive, inside the porosity of their material and conceptual universe, the establishment of a different meaning, and the visible signs of the life of others. The place was transformed into an urban landscape, but the gray areas of that landscape begun to become a place again – not a non-place, but an other place. Through the transformations of signs, the same becomes other, and potentially, something else. In that something else , that seems to me like a new metropolitan dimension of the center, resides, or could reside, a contemporary urbanity, claiming the right to the city as a political and cross-cultural condition. And that right will only be meaningful if it encompasses all city dwellers, and will only be fulfilled if work can meet with residence and with the enjoyment of the city, both inside the metropolitan center as well as in the suburbs.

Footnotes

Note 1
The decision was published on the Government Gazette 102D of March 6th, 1990 and included 50 buildings in the surrounding streets, among which those on Epikourou 26, 28 and 32.

Note 2
See Mutating Characters and Policies in the City Centers of Athens and Piraeus , scientific coordinator Panayotis Tournikiotis, 3 volumes, Athens, NTUA-Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change, 2010-2012.

Note 3
Cf. Marc Augé, Le sens des autres : Actualité de l’anthropologie , Paris, Fayard, 1994.

Note 4
Cf. Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens , New York, New Press, 1999.

Note 5
Cf. Marc Augé, Non-lieux : Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité , Paris, Seuil, 1992.