Crisis, Right to the City movements and the question of spontaneity: Athens and Mexico City

Christy (Chryssanthi) Petropoulou

City, 2014, vol. 18, issue 4-5, 563-572

Abstract: Mexico and Greece comprise typical cases of the so-called semi-periphery where neoliberal policies have been applied but also where social movements tried to resist the implementation of the policies in question. In the past, many Right to the City movements start to emerge, focused particularly on the right to the habitat. Recently, the most important RttC movements concerned the claims to public space and common goods, while at the same time opposing privatisations and big projects. Some authors called these movements spontaneous. Yet the relationship of politico-economic changes with the spontaneous is considerably complicated and related to what, by whom and why would be included in the discursive category of the 'spontaneity'. This approach I will explore below. Nothing is entirely spontaneous in the world's so-called spontaneous neighbourhoods and in the so-called spontaneous uprisings. The people participating in acts characterised as 'spontaneous' without rules enforced by any superior authorities, simply refuse to define their bodies as machines. The question is if the so-called spontaneous resistances became, or may become, under certain conditions, dangerous cracks. The right to the city is not the right to the impersonal urban space but the right to the polis . In these new movements, the right to the polis is exercised in the everyday life by many different actors and through different ways of action. The motto is: Changing values within spaces of encounters and experimentation. Let us all be rebel poets in the present.

Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2014.939478

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