Community gardening in Hellinikon as a resistance struggle against neoliberal urbanism: spatial autogestion and the right to the city in post-crisis Athens, Greece

Apostolopoulou, Evangelia and Kotsila, Panagiota (2021) Community gardening in Hellinikon as a resistance struggle against neoliberal urbanism: spatial autogestion and the right to the city in post-crisis Athens, Greece. Urban Geography, 43 (2), 293-319. (doi:10.1080/02723638.2020.1863621).

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to explore how community gardening can embed and foment grassroots resistance to the privatization of urban space in the current configuration of a prolonged socio-economic and ecological crisis in European cities. We focus on the emblematic case of the Hellinikon self-organized garden; a case of guerrilla gardening that emerged as part of a social movement against the real estate development of the former International Airport of Athens. Community gardening in Hellinikon emerged as a resistance struggle against a controversial urban regeneration plan that combined green gentrification with unsustainable development and as a prefigurative politics of radically different sociospatial and socionatural relationships. We argue that community gardening initiatives that are part of broader urban struggles and grassroots activism denote a radical practice that has the potential to challenge crisis-driven dispossessions and claim the right to the city through spatial autogestion. This theorization of community gardening can shed light on the emergence of a new era of urban politics where demands for the re-appropriation of urban space by its inhabitants coalesce with demands for radically different urban socionatures in crisis-ridden megacities linking struggles for the right to the city to struggles for the right to urban nature.

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