Inhabitation and Otherness: Refugees and Immigrants in the City
Today perhaps, more than ever in the past, if we wish to describe the social
characteristics of an inhabitant of a large city such as Athens, it might suffice to draw
a diagram of the itineraries she chooses to journey on in the city in the course of an
ordinary day or for specific purposes. Undoubtedly, one’s place of residence is
indicative of one’s social identity. But where one goes, where one needs to go, where
one is able to go and how one gets there is probably even more revealing, for it
underscores the boundaries of one’s identity as it takes shape and form, meaning as it
is moulded and reproduced within the space and time of the practice of inhabitation.
Theoretically, a map shows a city as a field of potential itineraries. In practice,
however, some of these itineraries come into existence only occasionally for some
people, whilst for others those itineraries are there on a permanent basis; again, for
other people they might as well not exist at all. Even foreigners, who arrive in a city
always in search of something, will not discover the image of an unexplored field on
the city’s map, but will instead endeavour to locate points of reference, target-areas,
as well as potentially dangerous places. In other words, they will try to read between
the lines of the map for prompts and warnings.
At a fantasy level, however, living in a metropolitan area one has the
impression of absolute, unrestrained freedom of movement in one’s wanderings.
Moreover, the discoveries that accompany that freedom are supposed to delineate a
profile of metropolitan individuality. Naturally, it is this fantastic construct which
fuels a tourist’s attitude to the city. His relationship to the cityscape is supposed to be
a relationship free of limitations, in that it is a relationship that is not governed by
utility. Even so, the practice of tourism is well protected from the unconditional
randomness of wandering. Tourists, too, often move along predefined routes,
participating in “sight-seeing tours” and programmed visits. In reality, the potential
indefiniteness of wandering is not only imbued with the positive mark of individual
discovery but also with the negative side of personal loss. And those lost in the city
are not always the ones who wished to get lost.
A tourist’s nightmare is the wandering “vagrant”. He whose conduct cannot be
pigeonholed into the carefully defined categories of exotic or noteworthy local
particularities that are imposed by tourist guides. He who stands for a potentially
indeterminate otherness, with unclear intentions and vague orbits within the city’s
space and time. If the tourist stands for the fantastic embodiment of a global truth of
mobility, then the vagrant, or he who looks like one, represents the localised
nightmare of an equally global, enforced wandering.
Contemporary metropolises are supposed to be a kind of urban landscape in
constant motion. In the era of globalisation, to inhabit, more than anything else, is
tantamount to be in motion. Places of abode lose their character as homebases and
turn into stations, or itinerary networks. For some people, however, moving is a
matter of choice, whilst for others a necessity; for some it is a prospect, for others a
sentence. For some people, being in motion is accompanied by conquests (whether
travel trophies or business successes), whilst for others it is accompanied by repeated
losses (refugees are uprooted, immigrants are forced to part from their loved ones).
Consequently, certain people live in this city and not somewhere else because they are
taking advantage of the possibilities offered by a globalised market; others have
settled here because this selfsame market has forced them, directly or indirectly, to
leave their own countries. Thus, although the former even in the city of their most
permanent residence can behave as tourists, hunters, and consumers of impressions,
the latter, no matter which city they find themselves, remain exiles, that is potential
“vagrants”.
If wandering is enforced, searching for stable ground under your feet is a
fundamental survival reflex. In spite of the fallacious literature on generalised
nomadism, the hearthless of our age and time cannot be termed as nomads. A
nomadic lifestyle presupposes a certain relationship with space and time, which are
collectively experienced through the age-old tradition of common wandering.
Immigrants and refugees, on the other hand, long for the centre of their lives that they
were forced to give up. That is why, more often than not, they do everything within
their power to recapture it in secret pockets within the body of a city that does not
accept them. They create their own hangouts, their own points of reference, in which
their distant motherland is recaptured or, to be precise, recreated in its absence. These
pockets of “immobility” in a world that urges everyone to be in constant motion,
create a sense of a collective hearth, although in true fact they end up symbolising the
consequences of a common fate.
Those who see these people as “foreigners” perceive their presence in the city
as furtive. The fantasy of free wandering does not apply to these “itinerants”. Quite
the contrary, it is precisely defined in contrast to their image. “A world without
vagrants is the utopia of a society of tourists”, says Z. Bauman. Indeed, in our fantasy,
and with the aid and abetment of the media, these furtive people turn into vagrants. If
being a tourist is the idealised inhabitant of the so-called “global village”, being a
vagrant is the devalued representation of the contemporary refugee-immigrant.
Nevertheless, immigrants no longer go unnoticed in Athens. They do not lead
clandestine lives in their odd ghettos of basement flats, trying to establish their own,
humble hangouts. Immigrants have come out into public space, not only in their
efforts to find places to live, work and play, but also whilst embodying a special,
common life on public squares, playgrounds and parks, or in their own coffee-shops.
Their presence in public spaces is imperceptibly transforming the city.
Ingenious adaptation has always been the “art of the powerless”. Amongst the
collective skills that are developed through this art there is more than just the ability
to disguise oneself, a skill that renders foreigners invisible to the locals’ prying eyes.
Ingenious adaptation sometimes leads immigrants to form their own practices of
inhabiting public space – an impromptu barbecue grill put up in the open air or a park
bench often turn into encounter points. In August, for instance, when Athens is
deserted en masse by anyone able to leave, immigrants develop unexpected practices
of claiming public space. Young children are seen again playing in the streets of
certain neighbourhoods, grown-ups sometimes sit and play cards on the sparse lawn
of municipal parks, young men and women stroll up and down their own open-air
hangouts, recreating the all too familiar “monkey-parade” of the Greek countryside.
By asserting their presence in public space through specific actions,
immigrants are redefining their relationship to the here and now. They do not merely
escape into a fantastic “there”, discreetly enduring the impermanence of their
residence in the euphemistically called “reception country”. They elaborate a modus
vivendi that turns them into agents of inhabitation; in other words, they create the
space of the city in their own unique way. If inhabitation is essentially an act of
creation, meaning that inhabitation does not simply take place in space but brings
space into existence as a social construct and occurrence, then the immigrants’
manner of inhabitation is literally producing part of the space of contemporary
Athens. What proves to be of decisive importance, moreover, is a form of inhabitation
that does not merely internalise the rule of boundaries into the practices of whichever
immigrant community; an introverted, invisible hangout would only confirm the
boundaries that separate “locals” and “foreigners”. Defending an identity, that is even
temporarily and with whatever meagre resources are available established, by
explicitly emphasising the boundaries that separate it from its surroundings only leads
to the entrapment of immigrant communities in the very ghettos allotted to them. On
the contrary, by asserting their presence in public space and developing life networks
in the city that criss-cross with networks of other social or cultural groups, immigrants
essentially create a prospect of a city governed not by boundaries but by front-door
steps, i.e. encounter points.
In its recent history, Athens was forced to provide housing for a massive
influx of displaced people after the infamous catastrophe in Minor-Asia. Although the
state took steps to ensure their housing mostly in the periphery of the city, the
refugees were often met with mistrust, if not with outright hostility, by the local
population. But can we imagine Athens without the momentous enrichment that the
presence of those displaced people brought to Athenian culture? Can we imagine
Athens without the formative effect that the refugees’ customs had on its own body?
In Kesariani, for instance, the sociability of the refugees brought life to the odd
communal public spaces in the interior of identical housing blocks. But even in the
housing estates that were built later, the memories that the refugees brought with them
metamorphosed those extremely austere and unadorned buildings into hives of
communal life, as on the refugee estates on Alexandras Avenue, in Drapetsona, and
Dourgouti. Furthermore, the ingenious skill of adaptation often gave rise to
interventions on the shells of buildings, combining individual and collective goals.
The refugees, oftentimes in conditions of extreme space shortage, “illegally”
constructed an entire language of additions, extensions and remodellings of interior
and exterior spaces. Naturally, all this did not just spring from memories and customs,
nor was it solely fuelled by need. More often than not, it was moulded by dreams –
dreams turned into reality by struggles big and small, individual and collective.
Should we then perhaps look at the contemporary mega-city of Athens as
situated on a potential crossroads, as it indirectly and stealthily becomes a
multicultural city? Should we not be glad for the formative effect of those who have
been temporarily cast ashore on the neighbourhoods of this city by globalisation? And
should we not imagine a city where exclusions will be cancelled as soon as they arise,
thanks to the multifariousness of heterogeneous inhabitation practices, diverse
encounter points, doorsteps between communities, between hangouts, between the
private and the public, but also between the “here” and “there” of one’s place of
origin.
Maybe that is how the critical dimension inherent in inhabitation can be
highlighted. Inhabitation is not solely a condition of adaptation to the environment of
a city, where space is emphasised as a regulatory vessel of social life; undoubtedly,
space is created in order to regulate. The city is, above all else, a system of spatial and
temporal distinctions that recreate other distinctions, of a social order. Thus, the
space-time of itineraries reflect how the city regulates the “orbits” of each of us.
Space is created in the course of leading one’s social life. It comes into existence
through social life, it is constructed by matter and social meaning both parallelly and
concurrently. In the last analysis, inhabitation as a practice is a matrix of space. Just
like inhabiting a traditional Cycladic neighbourhood as a holiday spot creates a
different space than that created by its inhabitants some years ago, the inhabitation of
Koumoundourou Square by the displaced Kurds or the inhabitation of the small parks
on the flanks of Alexandras Avenue or the squares in Pangrati, Kypseli and elsewhere
by the Albanian immigrants, creates a different public space. In this context,
inhabitation determines the city. Inhabitation is a corporeal, creative determination of
space. Moreover, the determination of inhabitation, which is closely tied with the
physiognomy of a large city such as Athens, can always be transmuted into an
inhabitation of determination. Somewhere between the figure of the fancy-free tourist
who lives in the imaginings of the city’s inhabitants and the immigrant-cum-“vagrant”
who haunts their nightmares, another figure may surface as a paradigm of a new
public culture: The figure of an inhabitant who lives her life on doorsteps,
passageways, areas where orbits criss-cross and itineraries run parallel. In her
inhabitation, otherness and identity cease to be irreconcilable poles but, conversely,
become a prerequisite for a culture that can encompass many other cultures, a culture
in which motion is not a sentence or a dream of superiority but merely a precondition
for encounters.
Stavros Stavrides
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------T. Koubis, Th. Moutsopoulos, R. Scoffier , 2002, Athens 2002: Absolute Realism, 8th
International Exhibition of Architecture, Venice Biennale, Hellenic Ministry of
Culture and Association of Greek Architects