Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates how urban mobility, touristic gentrification, spatial injustice and political controversy intersect with the construction of the Metro Line 4 infrastructure in the neighbourhood of Exarchia, Athens, by describing this process from the perspective of contemporary logistics.

Paper long abstract:

”Who moves? Who moves who? Who has to move? Who can stay put?" wondered Jonh Urry (2010:7). These questions seem all the more pertinent in the contemporary urban dimension. 

The paper intends to investigate the urban mobility dimension of the city of Athens and the construction of its infrastructure, Metro Line 4, by describing it from the perspective of contemporary logistics. 

Indeed, intending logistics as "a heterogeneous apparatus of techniques, knowledge and infrastructures finalised to circulation" (ITBB, 2022) that "exhibiting its apparently technical disposition (…), transforms and reproduces social relations and power conditions" (Grappi, 2018), we can grasp both the political size of logistics and the importance of extending its domains to the everyday spatialities of the city. The paper dwells on the paradox of circulation as a pervasive urban phenomenon and the effects that this and its immobile infrastructures produce on the territories where these last are implemented, exacerbating old spatial injustices and creating new ones, in turn driving new forms of mobility. 

Focusing on the frictions between the formal rhetorics of free flows and mobility of people and goods on one side and the stability and temporalities of the spatialised practices of Exarchia inhabitants on the other, I define "petty logistics" as the everyday assemblages of subjectivities and urban infrastructures and trajectories, through which people, algorithmic goods, and capital move and intersect different forms of informal urban mobility, deeply imbricated with the social and spatial transformations in which cities are involved (tourism, leisure, displacement, commuting, care work, financialization,…).