Solidarity and the city

Crises challenge the ways resources are socially distributed and fuel clashes over new ways of potential redistribution. Crises also provide opportunities-individual opportunities to profit from those forced to sell their property and/or labor force at bargain price.

However, crises provide collective opportunities, too, which can have a positive social impact -opportunities to rethink the social values, arrangements and practices which are judged responsible for the crisis and to search for alternatives, which can range from attempts to alleviate the immediate consequences of the crisis to a much broader renegotiation of a society’s future.

Crisis-era Athens has witnessed phenomena which have fed into a sharpening of social clashes and divisions but also into social solidarity. Of course, the two are not clearly distinguished: conflict creates spaces of solidarity, and solidarity is never devoid of disagreement, starting with the terms on which it is founded. The discussion will focus on the multivalency of the solidarity practices which have emerged in recent years, the conditions and prerequisites of this development, the wide-ranging historical and ideological underpinnings of the practices, and their social impact in relation to the needs brought into being both by the Crisis itself and the parallel withdrawal of social welfare structures which had never been particularly robust in Greece.