ABSTRACT
The crisis in Greece that followed the 2008 international banking crash and the ensuing austerity regime have seriously undermined people’s lives and livelihoods, deepening a long-underway crisis of social reproduction. Austerity has especially targeted urban populations and areas. Athens became a city in an enduring state of exception, where multiple processes of exclusion and dispossession have radically transformed it. However, these destructive processes have been fiercely contested. The occupation of Syntagma Square in 2011 left a legacy of grassroots initiatives resisting crisis while specifically striving to provide alternative forms of organizing everyday social reproduction in the city. Drawing on an ethnographic research in a social kitchen, an accommodation center for/with refugees, and a community center, this chapter will provide an account on how these groups (re)compose urban infrastructures of care and struggle, and a reflection on their impact on the everyday life of Athens in crisis and beyond.
