1172 | 258 | Emerging territorialities of encounter in Athens of Covid-19: Towards a spatiality of contact | Kallia Fysaraki Dimitris Loupetis
The Covid-19 pandemic management has had an obvious impact on everyday urban life at a global scale. In Athens, the policies of managing the pandemic were expressed in the urban territory through the creation and establishment of mechanisms of surveillance, control and repression. This cultivated urgency for physical isolation – implementing a deprivation of existing social bonds – had severe consequences to the potentiality of formulating active relations between the self and the other._x000D_
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Moving away from the conception of public space as a sterile economic or consumer field, the local level seems to reintroduce a new kind of safe(r) spaces that offered many a refuge between the fear of infection and the fear of isolation. Urban nature seems to have been inhabited in different ways and intensities during the quarantine, functioning both as a form of affective infrastructure and as the privileged field for recovering a relationship with the city as a whole. In this context, squares and parks in the neighborhoods of Athens seem to be able to play the role of a network of interconnection between places, people, things, experiences and desires that act as a catalyst for the emergence of new forms of urban life._x000D_
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Drawing from empirical perceptions, this presentation will attempt to reflect upon the modes of habitation that emerged during the pandemic in specific instances of public spaces in the Athenian city center (Pedion Areos park, Strefi’s hill and Agiou Georgiou square), as they constitute practices of care and recognition of interdependence between the acting subjects, through the manifestation of new territorialities of encounter. What we will try to unfold is a perspective of habitation as the material realization of the possibility of another world that is gestating within this one: no longer a spatiality of fear and isolation, but a spatiality of contact. _x000D_
Kallia Fysaraki Dimitris Loupetis
PhD candidates
ID Abstract: 258