A sense of absence: Resituating housing vacancy in post-crisis Athens

Ifigeneia Dimitrakou

Housing Studies, 2022, vol. 37, issue 6, 997-1014

Abstract: The article focuses on the everyday making of housing vacancy in Athens and discusses the multiple housing struggles and cross-tenure dispossessions this process entails. The analysis draws on interview material collected during a six-month fieldwork, particularly on the narratives of inhabitants in a neighbourhood of the city experiencing increasing vacancy levels and being represented as ‘declining’ in the public debate. Through a relational reading of vacancy, the often unknowingly related actors involved and affected by this process, their practices and understandings, are analysed. The findings reveal the different, perceived or actualised processes, human and material agencies sustaining vacancy in place, showing how (unequally) affected actors, despite their geographical and social distance, shape this process through their interdependencies. The paper discusses some dichotomies dominating the conceptualization of vacancy, suggesting also that these seemingly inactive spaces are not natural outputs or abstract representations of the market, but spaces constituted through action, embroiled in social antagonisms and conflicts over power and agency.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02673037.2021.1988064 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:chosxx:v:37:y:2022:i:6:p:997-1014

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/chos20

DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2021.1988064

Access Statistics for this article

Housing Studies is currently edited by Chris Leishman, Moira Munro, Ray Forrest, Alex Schwartz, Hal Pawson and John Flint

More articles in Housing Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().