The City at a Time of Crisis is a collective project that traces and researches the effects of the financial, sovereign and social crisis on public spaces in Athens, Greece. With its four interconnected research strands, the project looks at emergent socialities and shifting interaction in public spaces – from the Athenian metro to decaying Olympic infrastructure, from the forceful eviction of social spaces to the ever-shrinking spaces available to migrants in the city, and beyond.

The website is updated weekly: stay tuned as we prepare and publish work in progress ahead of our final documentary, our collectively written research volume and our end-of-project conference to take place here in Athens in May 2014.

The project consists of Blogs,Conferences,Maps,Resources,Videos and Timeline about crisis.

Timeline

Timeline that gives an overview of events related to the crisis in Greece on a local, national and global scale from 2008 until now. Updated on a quarterly basis. 

Click on the [Timeline]

Videos

Future Suspended - full documentary release

How does a global financial crisis permeate the spaces of the everyday in a city? This documentary film traces the multiple transformations of crisis-ridden Athenian public space and those who traverse it.

In three parts, Future Suspended navigates its way through the past and the present of the crisis as it gets inscribed in Athens dwellers' minds, and as it plays out in their everyday lives. The first section, Privatised, explores the legacy of mass privatisation projects that preceded the 2004 Olympics, placing them in the context of present-day privatisation schemes.

Part two, Devalued, examines the ever-shrinking spaces of migrants in the city and the violent devaluation that comes as a result. The final third, Militarised, explains how, at the exact moment when the state recedes from its welfare functions, this devaluation of Athenian lives becomes a generalised condition.

Combining geography, anthropology, urban theory and research with visual research methods and digital design, the project has attempted to read the enormous (and often devastating) social and political change playing out before our eyes through the marks it leaves on spaces of the everyday.

The rise of racism and xenophobia and the establishment of unprecedented policing are viewed through supposedly prosaic urban sites: the Athenian metro, the city's old and new airports, its highways, squares and streets.

Watch the Video

Map

While the rise of neo-nazism in Greece has been reported widely, the extent of the violence and the spread of everyday racism is not very well understood in the rest of Europe. The aim of this map is to act as a constantly updated public record of these attacks and as a tool for organising and communicating amongst anti-fascist/ anti-racist initiatives. 

Methodologically this map is based on crowdsourcing, this means that everyone can submit information about an incident. Every effort is made for the information to be verified, but this is not always possible. In that case incidents are not published or if they are published are flagged as unverified. If you have evidence that any of the incidents are unverified or false please contact us. 

Click on the [Map]

Crisis-scapes: Athens and Beyond

May 9&10. Athens Polytechnic (NTUA), Averof Building, Patission Campus

**The conference is free and open to all, with no registration required.

The crisis-scape research team is delighted to announce its end-of-project conference, to take place in central Athens on May 9-10, 2014.

The conference will be free and open to all, with no registration required. It will span over two days and will be divided in sessions that explore facets of the crisis and the ways in which this plays out both on the Athenian landscape and on a more theoretical, as much as a global context.

For the purpose of the conference that will take place in Athens we asked our guests to develop some thoughts based on an idea or a question that we posed them. In collecting their answers, we would like to create a framework for the preparation of the conference itself, which will help in the outlining of those aspects of urban everydayness that we consider to be the most important ones in helping us understand the questions set to us by the city itself, at this moment of crisis. From now on and until the opening of the conference we will use this section to publish these brief interventions, offering opportunities for further reflections on the city, the crisis and the importance of one residing at the intersection of the two today.

Confirmed speakers so far include:

• Giorgos Aggelopoulos (University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki)
• Rania Astrinaki (Panteion University, Athens)
• Athena Athanasiou (Panteion University, Athens)
• Klara Jaya Brekke (crisis-scape.net)
• Andreas Chatzidakis (Royal Holloway University of London, London)
• Dimitris Christopoulos (Panteion University, Athens, Hellenic League of Human Rights) 
• Dimitris Dalakoglou (Sussex University, crisis-scape.net)
• Akis Gavriilidis (Author, Indepedent Scholar)
• Sarah Green (University of Helsinki, Manchester University)
• Costis Hadjimichalis (Charokopeio University, Athens)
• David Harvey (CUNY, NYC)
• Yannis Kallianos (Manchester University, Manchester)
• Lila Leontidou (Hellenic Open University, Athens)
• Dimitra Gefou-Madianou (Panteion University, Athens)
• Elena Madison (Project for Public Spaces, NYC)
• Andy Merrifield (Cambridge University, Cambridge)
• Leonidas Oikonomou (Panteion University, Athens)
• Filippo Osella (Sussex University)
• Christy Petropoulou (University of the Agean, Mytilene)
• Hyun Bang Shin (LSE, London)
• Tom Slater (University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh)
• Stavros Stavrides (NTUA, Athens)
• Giorgos Tsimouris (Panteion University, Athens)
• Dina Vaiou (NTUA, Athens)
• Lia Yoka (Aristotle University, Thessaloniki)

> via crisis-scape.net