Life in the metropolises is suffocating. In recent years, we have seen the urban beast growing larger and sucking life into its path. Cops and snitches lurk around every corner, poverty and deprivation are reflected in every aspect of daily life, oppression (labour, sexual, racial) is a brutal reality, while the circle of ‘freedoms’ and ‘breaths of life’ are getting narrower and narrower. In this suffocating grip, capitalism comes to remind us that we are expendable materials for its machines, which produce endlessly and thirst for profit.
The gentrification projects are the blunt admission by the state that we exist simply to produce for them. Squares, parks, neighborhoods that were once appropriable by their inhabitants are being gentrified by labor and handed over to tourists and urban bourgeois. Expensive cafes, airbnb, surveillance cameras, increasing tourist population, overall increase in the cost of living are some of the consequences of redevelopment. Consequences that result in the displacement of people who once lived in these neighborhoods as they can no longer cope with the new existing situation. So the so-called ‘gentrification’ thus creates ‘fortress’ (urban) areas with increased social control and repression while other urban areas are ghettoised and impoverished. The segregation of neighbourhoods within cities and their so pronounced differentiations, clearly facilitates the work of the cops in terms of mapping and surveillance.
We see such a project unfolding before us in the Pavlos Mela military camp. A huge space within the confined metropolitan prison, freely appropriable by all and sundry, has been included in the redevelopment plans of Mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis. Continue reading “Thessaloniki, Greece: Communique for an arson attack upon mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis’ car by ‘Nightriders of the Flame’”