RE-HOUSING examined forms and modes of refugee led solidarity housing commons, and compared and contrasted these with State-run refugee camps in Istanbul, Athens and Belgrade.
These cities are at the epicenter of the current refugee crisis. Since, March 2016, when the borders of Balkan countries were closed for all third-country migrants and the EU-Turkey common statement was signed, thousands of refugees were trapped in Turkey, Greece and Serbia.
The states of Serbia, Greece and Turkey accommodated the majority of refugees in State-run camps. However, the refugee camps are overcrowded dilapidated factories or old military bases, where lack of amenities prevails. They are located at the city’s outskirts in extremely polluted and dangerous environments, close to, or inside industrial zones. Refugees have no or limited access to social infrastructures and schools, while most of the camps have low levels of public transport access. Consequently, the refugees have to survive in appalling and precarious housing conditions.
Parallel to the state efforts to provide housing for refugees, novel connections between the newly arrived refugees and local social movements in Istanbul, Athens and Belgrade led to an unprecedented production of alternative self-organized housing schemes. These new and alternative refugee shelters are managed as commons through participatory processes; locals and refugees take decisions together and recognize each other’s culture and customs towards overcoming preconceptions and stereotypes. These solidarity initiatives attempt to create a common language and produce common spaces for locals and refugees, against the enforced segregation corresponding to the state-run camps. Thus it can be argued that a network of “common spaces” emerges, in which the refugees with the support of solidarity people not solely organize access to food, health care, education and employment, but also shape a sense of belonging, security and wellbeing.
The research addressed the pressing academic and social need to 1) enhance qualitative and quantitative data availability in order to compare and contrast refugee housing conditions and rights in different geographical locations, 2) assess the impact and importance of alternative housing, 3) compare and contrast existing strengths and weaknesses in institutional frameworks at national and EU levels.
Responding to this need, the project studied the refugees’ right to housing as it is expressed by the Turkish, Greek and Serbian States’ housing policies and the way these policies relate to the solidarity housing practices examined in each country.
In conclusion, RE-HOUSING considers the following two key aspects: i) State policies in Istanbul, Athens and Belgrade tend to criminalize and stigmatize refugees’ alternative housing spaces and legitimatize eviction operations and the enclosure of refugees in isolated state-run camps outside of the city. Such policies interlinked with processes of gentrification, city branding, entrepreneurial projects, politics of fear and xenophobic rhetoric. ii) Refugees’ common spaces demonstrate a remarkable inventiveness for new transnational modalities of being-in-common. The inventiveness emerges as locals and refugees from different countries participate in the evolving communities-in-the-making that establish the experiments of housing common spaces. Subsequently, the commoning experiences of solidarity, togetherness and cohabitation between different nationalities nurture a fertile ground for transnational struggles for the right to the city.
