Research Seminar (6) 12 DEC 23

Seminari de Geografia Humana, Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona (Montalegre 6, 08001 Barcelona, 3rd floor)

Exercising Locality: Inhabiting Perspectives of the center of Athens

In Athens, the pandemic crisis followed a decade-long period of economic crisis, during which the broad framework of neoliberal restructuring policies was reflected in local urban policies and forms of urban governance. In this context, local government and state initiatives, along with the introduction of (pseudo)sharing economy and short-term renting, as well as the recent rise and massification of ‘alternative’ urban tourism, highlighted the possibility of a more intensive exploitation of the city center. Public spaces of key importance in the city, as well as the so called ‘authentic’ neighbourhoods have repeatedly been at the core of discussions and actions directly or indirectly linked to the release of the center’s tourism development potential.

At the same time, the last decade has highlighted public space as the privileged field for the formation of non-hegemonic or elastic resistances and actions to challenge the above proposals, but also a field of encounter and interchange between subjectivities, the emergence of innovative practices and forms of assertion, the constitution of individual and collective subjects, and a field of social experimentation that seeks and dreams of the possible alternatives of another world that is gestating within this one.

Dimitris Loupetis is an architect, graduate from the School of Architecture of the National and Technical University of Athens (NTUA). In 2020 he completed his postgraduate studies in the interdepartmental programme «Research in Architecture: Design – Space – Culture» of NTUA, with his thesis “From Urban Safari to Becoming-Local: Mythologies of AirBnB”. Since 2021 he is working on his doctoral thesis entitled «Exercising Locality: Representations of the center of Athens as a field of spatial justice claims» in the Department III of Architecture of NTUA. He is a member of the Stubborn Spaces (Πείσμονες Χώροι) research collective and of the JUST: Redefining Spatial Justice in Athens as a City of Crisis research team. Moreover, he is a part of the teaching group for the postgraduate class “Stubborn Spaces: On Inhabitation, Representations and Performative Practices”. His research interests include the experience and representation of urban everyday life, urban tourism and touristification, urban movements, housing, inhabitation, public space and spatial justice. He lives and works in Athens.