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Contested Cities and Urban Activism pp 73–98Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Urban Food Activism in Athens: Recovering More Autonomous Forms of Social Reproduction

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Part of the book series: The Contemporary City ((TCONTCI))

Abstract

Within the new neoliberal wave in Europe while progressive food activists adopted a more cooperative relationship with their local states demanding ‘sustainable healthy inclusive and democratic food system’ (see Milan Urban Food Plan), in the city of Athens a trend of food activists engaged in non-state-centric politics challenging the resulting crisis of social reproduction and the rise of far-right activism. Thus, in this paper, we explore the activists’ efforts in the city of Athens towards autonomous and anti-fascist politics in organising social reproduction: the food geography (urban gardens, farmers markets, collective kitchens, etc.); the politics of caregiving and food provisioning; as well as the tensions emerged between activists’ ‘politics of autonomy’ and their more institutional ‘social and solidarity economies’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Following Henri Lefebvre’s (2009) and Judith Butler’s (2015) performative philosophy, we use a theatrical perspective in this chapter.

  2. 2.

    The Greek Government supported by the American Mission for Aid to Greece, see: http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1949020900e.

  3. 3.

    The occupations of the Athens Polytechnic and the Business School in November 1973 caused the end of the Colonels’ dictatorship, the Junta. These occupations, as Kritidis referred to them, ‘marked the beginning of a new era’. ‘The action was a turning point, because it was the first time in Greece that public buildings were occupied and transformed into centers of social and political mass protest. Eventually, the action caused the end of the military dictatorship’ (Kritidis 2014, p. 66).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain

    Inés Morales-Bernardos

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  1. Inés Morales-Bernardos
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Ngai Ming Yip

  2. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Miguel Angel Martínez López

  3. Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Xiaoyi Sun

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Morales-Bernardos, I. (2019). Urban Food Activism in Athens: Recovering More Autonomous Forms of Social Reproduction. In: Yip, N., Martínez López, M., Sun, X. (eds) Contested Cities and Urban Activism. The Contemporary City. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1730-9_4

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