From Urban Safari to Becoming-Territorial: Locality Perspectives of the Centre of Athens

Abstract

This article examines how public space in central Athens is produced, evaluated, and contested under conditions of touristification, privatization, and neoliberal urban restructuring. In the wake of the economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, dominant frameworks of public space quality - typically focused on safety, efficiency, and attractiveness for investment - are increasingly challenged. Public space emerges not as a fixed entity but as a dynamic and contested field where competing forms of value, use, and meaning are negotiated. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becomings alongside Ghassan Hage’s notion of generalized domestication, the article conceptualizes gentrification and touristification as intertwined processes that produce a new “familiar” urban space. This is described as a domesticating pole, where public space is reshaped to accommodate tourism, transforming everyday life into a consumable and managed resource.
In contrast, the article identifies a “wild” pole of public space production, driven by grassroots movements and informal collectivities. These actors cultivate alternative ways of inhabiting space based on care, coexistence, solidarity, and non-instrumental uses, challenging dominant urban rationality. Focusing on the territorial struggles surrounding Strefi Hill - a hill serving as a small-scale forest area in the Exarcheia neighbourhood in the centre of Athens - the article employs a comparative qualitative methodology to examine representations, discourses, and everyday practices of inhabiting public space as articulated by different actors. This methodological approach enables an examination of how divergent enactments of locality correspond to different evaluative understandings and criteria of public space quality, highlighting evaluation as a situated, contested, and politically embedded process.