Post-democratic governance in refugee camps versus newcomers’ architectural housing commons in Athens and Thessaloniki

Abstract

In the five years spanning from 2015 to 2020, in Greece and particularly in Athens and Thessaloniki, several state-run refugee camps were created at the peripheries of the cities, away from the urban fabric, but at the same time, numerous refugees’ self-organised housing projects were organised in the city centres. These different accommodation structures could be conceptualised through the lens of housing commons versus spatial enclosures. The paper is based on an extensive three-year fieldwork, spatial analysis, and ethnographic research in refugee camps and refugee housing projects in Athens and Thessaloniki. Drawing on post-democracy literature and urban commons theories, the paper critically approaches state-run refugee camps as places of law exception that follow a post-democratic top-down model of governance and contrast these to refugee housing commons as threshold places of direct democracy, self-organisation, and co-habitation.