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Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the refugees' right to the city in Athens where more than ten State-run camps in the outskirts of the city and several refugee squatted buildings in the center of the city establish a dialectic contrast.

Paper long abstract:

A noticeable body of literature explores aspects of social philanthropy, NGOs' activities and State immigration policies related to the ongoing refugee crisis. However, there is little attempt to research how the refugees themselves self-organize and enact the production of collective housing common spaces based on principles of self-organization and mutual help. This paper aims to fill this gap.

Following the recent spatial approaches on "commons" and "enclosures" the paper compares and contrasts refugee led solidarity housing commons with State-run refugee camps.

The paper focuses empirically on Greece, which is situated at the epicentre of the refugee crisis, and on Athens in particular, the capital of Greece and the main refugee transit city with almost 20 thousand refugees. Most of the refugees are settled in State-run camps on the outskirts of the city, however a growing amount is accommodated in self-organized occupied buildings in the urban core. Focused on this context, the paper examines the refugees' right to housing and to the city as it is expressed by the State housing policies and the solidarity housing practices of newly arrived refugees.

The paper is based in participatory action research and ethnographic analysis and the main findings are that the refugees do not only challenge the State-run camps, but also seek to negotiate and go beyond cultural, class, gender, religious and political identities. Consequently, the newcomers are transformed into an unpredictable and misfitted multitude that claim the right to city and produce unique housing common spaces, spaces in movement and threshold spaces.