Paper short abstract:

Public space, food, housing, and care are converted from commodities to commons and a self-organized community offers relief, after a natural hazard. Commoning in a rural area of Greece transforms help into a commons, after a crisis, in collaboration or noncooperation with the state system.

Paper long abstract:

This work tries to identify how people transform their organizational patterns in an effort to come to terms with events of catastrophe, like an earthquake. This procedure involves alterations in social attitudes and values. It is discussed how a self-organized community acts before and after a catastrophic natural phenomenon, in a rural area. This work examines how this community reconstructs and reorganizes the relationships and the subjects in a rural landscape, during a crisis. The footprint of the community’s action, after the disaster, is studied. The adaptive strategies used to confront the consequences of the natural hazard, the transformation of mechanisms that occur within the local, social and political system, because of the upheaval of forced relocation, and the informal and formal forms of care are discussed. Community resilience and adaptability, in times of crisis, are examined with reference to the community’s help praxis and strategies that have been exercised to enable people to continue their life under emergency conditions. Material subsistence and exchange, sharing, egalitarianism, trust, altruism, and reciprocity are treated, and help emerges as a commons.