THE CONDITIONS OF DISPLACEMENT IN ATHENS

This paper addresses the transformation of spaces and objects in metropolitan conditions of displacement. Disorder results in the metropolises from the movement of displaced urban nomads. Refugees and immigrants without papers move to the great metropolises forced by wars, or other population displacements. This is the outcome of catastrophes in various places of the planet. Wars, territorial disputes, and natural disasters are causes of these frequent movements. This situation is not an exceptional condition but a constant reality in the fluidity of post-modernity. The bodies arrive from their long trip deprived of material possessions except for few objects that they have perhaps managed to carry with them. The condition of abandonment of everyday life in their countries creates a disorder which concerns them and their environment.

Impoverished they reach the metropolises and transform the space and time which they find in order to survive. A new design, fluid and physical, results through everyday needs and habitation. The body transforms space. This design is done with makeshift low-cost materials while body and movement acquire great importance. Initially, this situation provokes disorder in the metropolis, a disorder which is interesting in terms of design, architecture, or anthropology.

Specifically, this paper examines this issue in the metropolitan conditions of Athens. Many people arrive from Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Eastern European countries. The refugee reception center in Lavrio and the other small centers run by non-state organizations cannot cover the needs that have been created. As a consequence, many people are often forced to live in the streets or in very tight conditions, in crowded houses. The street, the square, the public space and the empty spaces of the city acquire special importance and become spaces of habitation, work, and expression for the displaced.

Initially, disorder arises in the city and its public spaces.

This disorder, while apparently irrevocable, finally results in some kind of order, a reconciliation, a new dispersed urban condition.

This paper presents such habitation in the center of Athens through a mapping of streets like Menadrou Str., squares, like Koumoundourou Square, and open markets, like the Korean market.

Furthermore, it addresses the ways that the body transforms these spaces: How the concept of place is transferred and what the characteristics of these temporary habitations are as the flows and movements create new spatial actions which are characterized by dispersal and disorder on the urban turf.

Athens operates as a refuge, since it is peculiarly suited to this function to begin with due to the urban gaps that create fissures and disorder in its fabric, as well as the activities of the bazaar. In the heart of the city, a different disparate fabric is woven underground, the fabric of a secret disordered city of the displaced.

Their autonomous tendencies lead them to create a greater and greater disorder in the fabric of the city. It creates new special relations-actions dispersed in Athens and new versions of habitation, as well as new objects through improvisation and from makeshift materials.

THIS DISORDER, however, also creates a new spatial transformational order. How is design inspired by it? There are some proposals by architects and designers in Athens. This paper aims at answering this question too.