The spatiality of a social struggle in Greece at the time of the IMF

The €110 billion bailout offered to the Greek government in May 2010 by the so-called troika (comprising of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union) was not only the largest of its kind in Western history to date, it also marked the entrance of Greek society into a period of extreme turmoil, with profound changes in the standard of living and the everyday reality of large segments of the population. The country's extensive public sector saw wage reductions, pension decreases and tax rises. In the private sector mass lay-offs and redundancies became widespread, as did wage reductions and renegotiations of labour contracts. Against this turbulent backdrop an extraordinary event would soon take place in the cities of Athens and Thessaloniki. In early 2011, the beginning of the largest mass hunger strike on European soil saw 300 undocumented migrants, mostly of Maghrebi origin, demand the legalisation of all undocumented migrants in the country. Regina Mantanika and Hara Kouki, Athens-based researchers and activists, trace the chronology of the strike in the city by looking at the series of different spaces—both public and private—that took turns in hosting it: the Law Faculty of the University of Athens, in which the migrants were quickly made unwelcome; the private mansion in which they found shelter and finally, the public hospitals to which many of them were transferred and in which they ended their strike. Mantanika and Kouki offer us the preliminary findings of their research on these spaces' dynamics, the way in which they interacted with the strike and how the strike itself transformed some of these spaces in return. I can hardly think of a more appropriate topic and paper with which to launch my term as editor of the Alternatives section of City, a section set to engage and discuss 'with groups and individuals who are developing alternative urban visions and practices’. Here we have an extraordinary such example: the practice of a small number of people who nevertheless forced us to rethink the distinctions between private and public, between local and foreign, between a struggle for life and for death. In a historical conjuncture where alternatives are desperately sought but seldom found, where the public retreats in the face of the private, tracing the spatiality of this newly encountered social struggle is a much needed and rewarding exercise. Antonis Vradis, Alternatives Editor