The research project ‘Gentrification of Activism, Autonomous Collective Politics and the Right to the City in Exarchia, Athens (GAPRIA) aims to examine the gentrification and eviction of activism, which entails the ways in which activist city spaces and radical neighbourhoods become gentrified through processes of urban regeneration that lead to the eviction of activists and emancipatory ideas about city life. Although gentrification and eviction studies have so far thoroughly documented the social and material costs of gentrification policies on the urban poor, they have failed to document the political costs of such policies relating to the eviction of communities of activists that produce more emancipatory, alternative visions about city life. The recent upheaval of attacks on autonomous radical neighbourhoods and the simultaneous rise of the far right on a European level with the detrimental effects it brings for democratic life, makes it more urgent than ever to address this research gap and document and analyze the processes that make such eviction possible.
GAPRIA will fill this research gap by investigating the gentrification of activism in the radical neighbourhood of Exarchia in central Athens, Greece. Exarchia constitutes an urban area with a long history of radical anti-authoritarian organizing and politics. In recent years it has formed the main ground of innovative solidarity initiatives where activists and migrants co-created living spaces that hosted hundreds of people seeking refuge from nearby war-torn areas. These activist experiments have recently faced brutal eviction processes by the state , which makes the investigation of such processes, as well as more subtle processes of displacement such as through gentrification, more timely than ever. Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated this condition with even more restrictive and violent measures towards the right of assembly and protest in public spaces.
The project will examine the gentrification of activism along four levels that represent the project’s research objectives (obj): (1) The conceptual level, that will explore the ideas about city life that are enacted by communities of youth and activists that use public space as a resource for sustaining their initiatives; (2) The discursive level of producing evictable subjects, that will explore, though policy and media analysis, how youth and activists are produced as such through gentrification policies, often in tandem with racializing and securitizing discourses about public space; (3) The level of praxis, that will explore, through ethnographic fieldwork, resistance to such gentrification processes enacted by autonomous activists in the context of current struggles against austerity, evictability and the privatization of public space; (4) The comparative level, whereby the gentrification of activism in different European contexts will be explored collaboratively and in an inter-disciplinary manner. This will be achieved through the organization of an International Conference bringing together scholars from Anthropology, Politics, Human Geography and Urban studies. Beyond the above research-oriented objectives, the project aims to: (5) enhance the researcher’s career development through a program of training activities tailored to her specific needs for professional maturity; (6) disseminate research results widely to academic and non-academic audiences.
