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Commoning Spaces of Social Reproduction

Citizen-led welfare infrastructures in crisis-ridden Athens

The on-going crisis in Greece has brought about extensive transformations of the society and everyday people´s lives. The way in which the crisis is being managed by the European institutions and the successive national governments hallmarks a process of expanding economic liberalisation, which has been unfolding in Europe over the last three decades. Under the premise of austerity as the only possible project for economic recovery, a long-term state of emergency has been set up to legitimise the enforcement of a series of market-driven polices, which devastating impacts on the main long-established institutions of welfare provision of the Greek society. The state welfare structures and the family have been severely hit, resulting in the displacement of great segments of the population to the margins of society and the emergence of new forms of exclusion.

This context of rising precariousness and break down of social rights and welfare is indicative of a crisis of social reproduction. Coming from the Marxist and feminist traditions , the notion of social reproduction refers widely to the material and social maintenance of a group of people and their social bonds on a daily basis, and the regeneration of that society generationally. Throughout the contemporary capitalist world, more and more people are facing growing difficulties to secure their means of living, as the main institutions bearing and organising the set of reproductive functions are today crumbling. Today, the crisis of social reproduction has acquired a global scale expanding along all capitalist societies, and enhancing those forms of organising the material and social sustenance of these societies grounded in gender, class and ethnic inequalities (Comas d´Argemir, 2016).

Cities, as spaces of proximity, constitute the principal settings where the organisation of social reproduction and care needs become materialised. Reproduction functions are articulated differently depending on the urban morphology, which also creates different dynamics in the everyday of urban life (Comas d´Argemir, 2016). The neoliberal drive that has guided urban development in many cities of Southern Europe since the 1990s, has profoundly transformed the cityscape, fragmenting, segregating and polarizing the urban geography both physically and socially. Meanwhile, the current crisis and austerity have stretched the inequalities derived from that model of city-making, leading to more polarization, social distress and spatial degradation. In addition, over the last two years, thousands of displaced people seeking asylum in Europe, have arrived in cities since it is there where reception networks of family, friends or compatriots are first established. This phenomenon has just added new major challenges for cities to provide for urgent needs of refugees as well as strategies to ensure a long-term social integration. The contemporary crisis of social reproduction is therefore specifically urban.

Yet, cities are also the principal scenarios where people are strongly contesting the effects of the multi-faceted crisis. In Greece´s cities, a myriad of citizen-led solidarity initiatives have emerged, seeking to re-organise social reproduction on a self-managed and mutual help basis, outside (or alongside) the official structures of welfare and the family. Social reproduction has become also a central realm of political struggle and reorganisation of economic and social life (Zechner, 2015). Social kitchens, social clinics and pharmacies, networks of care services, and accommodation centres for/with immigrants and refugees, they all compose a growing grassroots urban movement providing practical solutions to meet basic daily needs, as well as local strategies to safeguard the means of living.

Among the extensive variety of solidarity initiatives, this paper draws specific attention to two of them in Athens: the social kitchen O Allos Anthropos (The Other Person) and the accommodation centre for refugees City Plaza.

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2017