Athens rising

Urban space has always expressed the inequality of social relations and offered a site of conflict. Urban legality comprises planning, architectural and traffic regulations, public entertainment, protest and expression rules, and licit and illicit ways of being in public. It imposes a grid of regularity and legibility, ascribing places to legitimate activities while banning others, structuring the movement of people and vehicles across space, ordering encounters between strangers. Yet from the regular urban riots of early modernity to the civil rights movement, May 1968, or the Athens Polytechnic, the ‘street’ has confronted and unsettled urban legality and changed social systems, laws and institutions across epochs and places. The vote, the vote for women, basic laws to protect labour and stop discrimination, and many other entitlements, today taken for granted, were the result of street protests, insurrections and riots. The ‘street’ and the ‘square’ have now returned to politics. Over the last 10 years, a persistent sequence of spontaneous protests, riots and insurrections has broken out all over the world. They include the Paris banlieus riots in 2005 and 2007, the Athens insurrection in December 2008, the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados and the Greek aganaktismenoi, London August 2011 and the Occupy movements, amongst many others. Although the form of these protests is recognizable, their political force is located within an unprecedented socio-economic environment. I will focus on three types of resistance which have both something old and something new. I will illustrate them from the experience of recent events in Greece.