Paper Short Abstract:

Through the case-study of the Residents’ Assembly ‘No Metro at Exarchia Square’ the paper examines how memory of past resistance becomes implicated in struggles against gentrification and eviction, combining work from memory activism with anthropological research on haunting and resistance.

Paper Abstract:

In the 21st century gentrification has shifted from a local phenomenon in some Western contexts, to a global strategy of interurban competition, leading to mass evictions of working class and minority residents across the world. In the limited research available on resistance to gentrification, few studies have emphasized the role of memory in struggles over staying put and against the erasure of cultural and politically-sensitive geographies. Building on recent work that attempts to combine the field of memory studies with social movement research, as well as on seminal work on haunting in relation to resistance in anthropology, this paper will explore the memory practices of the Residents’ Assembly ‘No Metro at Exarchia Square’, in the neighbourhood of Exarchia, in Athens, Greece. The assembly struggles for the right to stay put and for the preservation of the neighbourhood’s central public space, threatened by the development of a new metro line, that has been symbolic of former and present counter-establishment struggles against dictatorship and police brutality. The paper will examine how these resident-activists’ resistance effectively constitutes a struggle against, as they say ‘the erasure of memory’, but will also examine the role ‘inspirational hauntings’ (Yonucu, 2023) play in such struggle and in broader efforts to form counter-publics in moments of extensive neoliberal appropriation. In this sense the paper aims to connect anthropological research on haunting with studies in memory activism, and place such phenomena within broader urban struggles over public space and against eviction which form quintessential struggles of our current times.