Crisis and urban space

For many thinkers (Harvey, 2012; Burkhalter and Castells, 2009; Leontidou, 2014), what distinguishes the current crisis from other historical examples of financial shocks and instabilities is its relation to a particular model of urban growth. Globalisation and the concomitant flows of populace to urban areas mean that the biggest proportion of people nowadays live in cities. Yet, as Andy Merrifield (2014) suggests, this incessant expert hype about exploding urban populations is closer to a type of Malthusian fear mongering that obfuscates the class and power questions surrounding our current urban conditions. Historically, this is not the first time we have witnessed the relationship between the increased investment in urban areas and the explosion of financial bubbles able to shake the foundation of the global economy. The difference now is the reference to a particular neoliberal model of urban life. According to Laura Burkhalter and Manuel Castells (2009), the urban crisis has much deeper implications and social effects, such as the deterioration of everyday life, the rise of fear and the concomitant culture of violence and mistrust and, as a result, urban space has been abandoned to the dynamics of real estate. Moreover, cities are the central stages of the expression of civic reactions against the crisis and the resulting austerity policies. As Merrifield suggests these kind of civic reactions are ‘contesting our hyper-exploitative undemocratic system of global urbanism’ (2014: ix). As I have argued elsewhere (Tsilimpounidi, 2012), the city is always related with society in general: its history, main elements, functions and the synthesis thereof. Thus, the city changes whenever society shifts. Yet, perhaps this is a reversible process, since the transformation of the city is not the passive result of social cycles. The city is also dependant on the direct connections between persons and groups that form society (Lefebvre, 1991: 63). A city is a living organism consisting of the ‘hard city’ one can map through roads, buildings, public spaces and the ‘soft city’ of inhabitants, multiple belongings, and imagining desires.2 The process of softening the urban fabric is the extent to which the ‘soft city’ informs, interplays and eventually remaps the ‘hard city’. Iain Chambers has suggested that cities only really exist as doubles – official and hidden versions, real and imagined places, in which material networks and structures parallel the maps of hopes, attitudes and customs that urban subjects navigate daily. He reflects: ‘we discover that urban reality is not single but multiple, that

inside the city there is always another city’ (1986: 183). This chapter intends to explore the doubleness Chambers identifies, so that a city in crisis – in this case Athens – may be seen as a dynamic environment in which space and people mutually create one another, and in which the stories of both can be explored through investigating the narratives laid bare on the city walls. In this light, primary attention is paid to the place and the people, the placing of people, and the spatio-temporal interaction of these elements in order to document and dissect how an urban environment can manifest and be manifested by crisis. Drawing on the work of Tim Ingold (2000) and Merrifield (2014), I use the term ‘urban fabric’ to highlight the direct correlation of urban space and human activities. The urban fabric stretches to cover many aspects of urbanity; from bricks and mortar to the ways people inhabit their place, their trajectories and daily lives. This means that an urban setting does not only consist of buildings, streets, road signs and other objects which define it – the main element of this urban scenery is also the people, whose daily activities give it its metropolitan manner. ‘If we probe this fabric [. . .] we find a strange micro-reality that is in fact a gigantic macro-reality’ (Merrifield, 2014: x). Or, as Ingold puts it, the lives of inhabitants are not ‘inscribed upon the surface of the world but woven into its very fabric’ (2000: 187). In a similar way Lefebvre urges us to think about the urban environment in a way that maintains its ‘conflictual aspects: constraints and possibilities, peacefulness and violence, meetings and solitude, gatherings and separation, the trivial and the poetic, brutal functionalism and surprising improvisation’ (1996: 53). The dialectic and dynamism of the urban can be manifested in the contradictory ways people interact, weave, shape and are shaped by the urban fabric. This chapter focuses on inscriptions on the urban fabric following street art and slogans on Athenian walls in the era of crisis in an attempt to engage with the new landscapes of the aesthetics of crisis. Political street art and slogans appear as visual markers of the shifting, complex discourses of power struggles, marginality and counter-cultures that establish a new reality that must be seen and heard. As an art form, it is largely connected to and inspired by the existing social conditions. In the era of crisis, the central Athens of previous years is now a terrain of conflict and metamorphosis and the city’s walls are screaming a thousand stories. In other words, city walls are the canvas and social conditions the paint in a gallery of untold stories. Redefined symbols, decomposed stereotypes and re-visioned aesthetics are the tools for the transformation of walls into social diaries. In this light, street art is examined as a form of social diary, a visual history of marginalised and minority groups. Street art captures the need for self-expression in a changing environment, and street artists actively participate in the production of culture in the micro-level by consciously contributing to the need for urban re-visions (Tsilimpounidi and Walsh, 2010). This chapter begins by engaging with street art and its ability to redefine the relation of space to individual since, by using public space as a surface for interaction and communication, artists create alternative spaces in the city (Avramidis, 2015; Chafee, 1993; Dickens, 2008; Tsilimpounidi, 2012). By examining

several examples of street art in particular urban spaces, the chapter explores how a politics of austerity impacts the daily lives of people in the city. The images of political street art are considered alongside detailed analysis of the urban subcultural practices based on testimony from long-standing informants. Finally, the chapter offers an analysis of street art as a barometer of crisis. As a point of clarification, in this chapter I refer to political street art in order to maintain distance from graffiti or superficial ‘tagging’,3 often seen as the result of disaffected youth. Rather by political street art I refer to art forms that incorporate a conceptual engagement with social issues (Tsilimpounidi, 2013; Tsilimpounidi and Walsh, 2010). Before proceeding with the analysis, some methodological considerations are in order as street art is an illegal practice and as such it poses ethical questions. The street artist’s identity is largely centred on anonymity; as such, there is a subversive dynamic between authorship and ‘anonymity’. The main obstacle in my attempt to approach the artists was the fact that the practice’s subversive and (often) nocturnal nature means that issues of trust and the need for assurances of anonymity came to the fore. In addition to artists’ personal mistrust of strangers, and a natural suspicion of ‘experts’ attempting to decode the subculture, the mystery of code names and tags is itself an important element in the street art scene as it removes personal ‘liability’, marking itself as written by ‘an Other’. As the street artist Bleeps.gr explains ‘the pseudonym Bleeps.gr is a depersonalisation of the artist as an individual thus identified as a website’ (interview with Bleeps.gr, 2010). Aside from the obvious issues related to personal security, anonymity symbolises the faceless majority excluded from social visibility and decision making. Many of the artists claim they work without names and faces because they represent many unseen faces and invisible names that are now, through their work, emerging as new subjects. For almost a decade I have followed visual markers on city walls and engaged with street artists in an attempt to grasp and analyse this new street-level language.4 As a social researcher, documenting street art through photography was a relatively simple yet ongoing task, as new works emerged continuously, erasing even ‘old favourites’. However, the opportunity to interact with artists and establish creative connections was much more difficult to ‘tag’ to the wall, and requires a longer-term engagement with both place and subcultural practices. Since street art is illegal, and since there is a necessary (and somewhat constructed) aura of mystery around this subculture, I found that I needed to allow trust to develop, and a network of contacts to emerge through creative conversations. As such, one of the key negotiations became access to artists who were willing to participate in research. Initial access was granted through key contacts that indicated their willingness to approach other artists and crews of artists about the potential to be interviewed. The artists chose to be interviewed as individuals or in crews, depending on how they worked and are identified by their ‘tag’ names. The sample of the participants already dislocates some of the well-known stereotypes attributed to street artists. For example, most of the

participants were between twenty-five and thirty-five years old and educated – which goes against the mainstream interpretation of street art as the result of disaffected and rebellious youths fighting against the system. Pigeonholing street art as merely the reaction of angry youths is a misinterpretation that deliberately exoticises and depoliticises certain practices. It is important to note that the street artists who choose to locate themselves in the spectrum of political street art see their work as directly challenging the status quo. The use of photography to construct visual diaries of street artworks added another dimension to the data sources. Documenting an ephemeral event such as street art can reduce its components to disconnected parts. Yet, photography can capture ‘moments’, helping to locate a lived experience through visual means. Despite the apparent realism of photography as a medium, the visual materials are not designed to provide a uniquely authentic account of the street artworks, Rather, the evocation of city spaces through photographic documentation of ‘crisis’ and its effects generates a (subjective) view of how the city went soft. The argument is supported by Sontag’s view that the visual is also a space for resistance (1973). I consider the fundamental tenets of the visual methodology used in this paper not as ‘representation’ but commentary, which demands selfreflection. This mode of engaging with the city does not attempt to define it, but rather to evoke it through a range of approaches. The use of photographs alongside the text encourages a double reflection on the stories told, in an act of witnessing (Sontag, 1973).