This book has grown out of our interest in the particular ways in which urban life unfolds in the places where we do research and/or live. Among all of us who contributed to this book, we have over the years, exchanged ideas in formal and informal meetings and we have shared our concerns about the many silences and absences, from research and theorymaking, of processes and practices that we had identified as key components of the making of cities. Missing from the picture were the voices, concerns, and perspectives of those who do not hold positions of power, who are pushed to the margins on the basis of gender, ethnicity/race, social class, sexuality, age, and other axes of power and exclusion. However, subjects constituted along such lines, and, most importantly, combinations of these, have been systematically appearing in our own research, as major individual and collective actors, whose everyday practices contribute to making “our” cities livable. This book is a modest proposition for alternative perspectives based on such concerns, which, as expected, require different methodological approaches and priorities about theorizing.

Recent decades have been marked by rapid economic and social change — signaled by terms such as “globalization” and “post-industrial society” — in which cities play a central role. Speed also characterizes changes in the dominant discourse on space, which bring to the forefront new political concepts and priorities, new forms of governance, and also dynamic shifts in decision-making centers. Since the 19th century, theories and discourses on the city and urbanization have developed mainly within the historical framework and experience of industrialized countries. These theories are more related to social relations in these countries, their production organization, and their rates and forms of technological development. In this context, different histories of urban development, including those of Southern European cities, were perceived as “exceptional” or “divergent” processes.

Among the “divergences” is the fact that the social state has rarely been involved in housing production, while employment and unemployment policies, and care for the elderly or children, among others, pre-supposed the involvement of the family — practically of its female members. Here, the state is a “carer of last resort” that contributes selectively and mainly through cash transfers (subsidies, pensions, etc.) and not through the provision of services (Bettio et al. 2006). This so-called “family” model of care has also marked the production of urban space where informal practices often predominate. These are held responsible for many of the negative characteristics of the urban structure, but at the same time, they have contributed to the formation of “interstices” where newcomers to the city have been able to integrate, thus reducing conflicts in the urban social geography. This condition has proven even more significant after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the opening of previously rigid borders, which led thousands of migrants to Southern European cities.

These changes, fueled by political upheavals in Europe and beyond, have helped to initiate a debate on the need to integrate into urban thinking the perspective of local particularities in various fields that influence development and urban life, such as the structure of the local economy, gender relations, migrant presence, diversity of cultural practices, access to housing, or mechanisms of building the city. The debate has been reinforced by significant volumes of research produced in “other” places since the 1970s and systematically communicated to the international academic community through not only conferences and academic journals but also Erasmus exchanges of students and staff.

This debate has directly challenged theoretical proposals, as well as urban policies, which focus exclusively on macroeconomic processes and general(izing) interpretations of spatial restructuring. At the same time, abundant, and often contradictory, information causes embarrassment and confusion both to those who do research on the urban and to the everyday relationships in the city. In this context, it becomes urgent to compose new perspectives and alternative ways of approaching and understanding urban space, approaches that weave local particularities with the “big picture” and highlight the trajectories (local and global) that constitute the current conjuncture beyond its economic parameters.

Our starting point (urban living) already points to an aim and a perspective. This book attempts to contribute to this effort by bringing together approaches to the city that aim to reveal the mosaic of relationships and sociospatial situations that make up the plurality of everyday space in contemporary cities. The authors of the various chapters share a theoretical framework that treats space as relational, as a product of interrelationships, a dynamic sphere of possibility and multiplicity in which distinct human trajectories coexist (Massey 2001). In other words, we approach urban places, not as sterile and static containers, but, as Doreen Massey (1995) explains, as a meeting point and accumulation of particular elements. From this point of view, space contains its (own) history and at the same time follows a process of permanent change.

From this perspective, the city is perceived as the space of the everyday — what Henri Lefebvre (1981: 131, 132) calls “the spectrum of the city”. The everyday brings together material elements, people, works, conceptions, representations, symbols, and lived experiences in many networks. This means that, in the space of the city, multiple stories can evolve at any given moment — perhaps insignificant, visible or invisible, repetitive or subversive, quite real but also imaginary. Henri Lefebvre’s work has taught us that space is as much socially produced as society is spatially constituted. The same applies to representations. Meanings, rules, and boundaries that are often considered given, “natural”, and indisputable appear under this open and constantly evolving prism — and space is the potential starting point for new and different explorations of other places (Soja 1999).

More specifically, the reflections in this book are based on the multidisciplinary study of new forms of mobility, as well as their gendered and spatial implications, in the Southern European context and from a perspective particular to it. This context, characterized by great diversity, is perceived as a complex and contradictory space, i.e. a real laboratory for the local practice of the everyday, as well as for the globalization of flows and networks. On this basis, the authors try, in their various case studies, to highlight multiple aspects of urban life, particularly those that are the least visible, often ignored in the “big picture,” conflictual, and loaded with inequalities. By focusing on varied everyday practices and the struggle for the survival of different social groups, they review the timeless aspects of the city in different contexts and circumstances.

The conjuncture of the current crisis has brought the countries of Southern Europe to the forefront of unpredictable political processes, whose imprint is increasingly evident, particularly in urban areas. The questions raised are numerous and concern both policies attempting to overcome the crisis and the impasses of “global” strategies, as well as the very divergent effects of the crisis in local contexts. The different examples of cities in this book refer to the period of the crisis but do not consider it as their main subject. Rather, the crisis is examined as a circumstance of spatial redefinition, expression of meanings, and alternative representations — allowing a re-interpretation of Europe’s cities in the light of recent socioeconomic, political, and ideological developments. The questions raised in the different chapters include the following: when urban time accelerates and extends over 24 hours, how do different social groups experience the everyday; what is the impact of the shrinking and/or restructuring of social services which used to be generalized; how are the geographies of fear and insecurity mapped onto urban space; what are the processes of debt accumulation and the issues of exclusion/access to housing; how is a way of living “together and apart” shaped with migrant and refugee populations in everyday spaces; what perceptions of urban space do children develop in multicultural societies; and what is the imprint of global mobilities on urban space and society.

The texts come from different scientific fields and follow more or less similar points of view and structure: they start with a scene or a snapshot of empirical research. This scene is then analyzed theoretically to conclude with an alternative proposal, providing analytical and methodological tools for the approach of urban space. However, the proposed tools are not passe-partout; they provide inspiration for adaptation to different sociospatial contexts. The first four chapters adopt a gendered and spatial perspective that reveals multiple aspects of the everyday lives of women (migrant and non-migrant) in cities in Southern Europe.

Camille Schmoll proposes a reading of public spaces in Southern European cities through the specific spatialities and temporalities of migrant women, which she considers to be a good key to understanding the relationship that these female migrants have with host societies. Based on observations made in the context of ethnographic studies in Nicosia, Valletta, Rome, and Naples, she underlines the narrow limits of the dominant vision of public/private relations and reveals the complexity of sociospatial constraints, exclusions and inequalities, and the practices that reproduce or redefine them. She thus manages to explore how public space could contribute to the creation of migrant agency and at the same time shed light on how migrant women, through their practices, contribute to redefining what public space is.

Adelina Miranda, by presenting in an original way the processes of gendered spatial inclusion and exclusion in the region of Naples in Italy, highlights how, over time, the gap between an egalitarian ideal of the city and strongly gendered local spatial practices has widened. In this context, the analysis of differences and similarities between migrant and non-migrant women assumes a fundamental theoretical relevance in understanding how exploitation, subordination, and othering can determine the naturalization of relationships of domination between and within gender.

Gabriella Paolucci, in her text, takes up the temporal dimension, highlighting how time, transformed into a commodity, penetrates deeply into the structure of contemporary everyday experience. Thus, the city appears as a temporal power machine that marks the rhythms of collective and individual time. Nevertheless, in this process, women and men are affected in different ways: women’s time budgets are highly fragmented and heterogeneous, beyond a dominant normality.

Dina Vaiou, through examples of care restructuring in the city of Athens, also adopts the everyday as a theoretical perspective that traces the multiplicity and dynamics of urban life, helping to revalue aspects that tend to disappear. Thus, she highlights the multiple practices and encounters in everyday spaces that have contributed to the familiarization with difference as well as to its “ordinariness” and “domestication,” especially among the new generations. Adaptations and transformations are more reciprocal than is usually thought and provide clues as to how “living together” has gradually been achieved. She argues that care work, to which women contribute abundantly, is a common “missing piece” in the puzzle of this “living together” and of day-to-day survival in the city — a piece that gains particular importance in the context of the persisting crisis.

Irini Micha, based on the theoretical framework that considers everyday life as an essential tool for the study of the urban, is interested in the complex relationships that children have with the city. She highlights the questions that the child’s spatial gaze raises about some theoretical certainties and proposes a re-reading of the city of Athens through the habits, routines, and sociospatial networks that develop around their everyday movements. The study of the school district in many educational processes reveals what is at stake today in various places in the center of Athens, and helps to shed light on different aspects of the crisis and to bring out of the shadows the practices that continuously challenge the normative dichotomies of the dominant narrative, both for childhood and for its spaces.

The following two chapters focus on issues that have emerged in the current crisis in particular. Marisol Garcia analyzes social movements in response to housing needs that have emerged in Barcelona and quickly spread to other cities in Spain. In this text, she highlights their innovative capacity as political actors who have successfully moved from the local to the European level. By focusing on the ways in which the housing crisis, which has left thousands of families homeless, has triggered major social and political actions, she shows how a social movement can play a pivotal role in urban everyday life and, conversely, how the role of the city, as an important framework for social action, can contribute to the formation of new forms of solidarity and urban citizenship.

Penny Koutrolikou, for her part, presents a reading of perceptions of the “other” through public debates and discourses on Islamic religious practices in the center of Athens. She identifies the intermediate gray areas between invisibility practices and visibility claims, between recognition and difference, and between formality/informality in its public articulations, where it is clear that integration is deeply rooted in the definitions of public and private spheres, spaces and practices, as well as in the struggles that concern them.

The authors of this book have intentionally considered population movements within and across national borders as a key issue in their research. This applies both to the chapters in which migration is an explicit focus of research and to those that, at first reading, seem to have a different focus. On the other hand, gendered perspectives, and, more specifically, combinations of gender with other markers of inequality and difference, shape alternative understandings and interpretations of public/private divisions, shifting boundaries between “us” and “them” (or identity/otherness), presences and absences in urban debates.

In this sense, the contributions to this book, along with other approaches to the urban, transpose research interests toward the practices and concerns of individual and collective subjects, generally left in the margins of mainstream analyses. By engaging with these subjects, in all their variety and specificity, these chapters unveil different instances of urban life in which everyday spaces and times become fields of communication, exchange, and familiarization with difference and contribute to shaping conditions for living together, within and beyond the current crisis. They also unveil a multiplicity of cultures, dynamics, struggles, conflicts, and negotiations which shape the multiple identities of cities and the processes that contribute to social cohesion and make cities and localities habitable places.

To these ends, complex and penetrating methodologies are mobilized, which ultimately result in “alternative truths” and enrich our ways of knowing. Crossing geographical scales and passages from general data and theoretical conceptions to concrete places and to the experiences of particular embodied subjects (and vice versa) reveal different but equally important aspects of the issues under study. They help shape approaches that consciously oscillate between, on the one hand, discourses and explanations constituted by “big pictures” and global analyses, and on the other hand, urban space and the spatialities produced by the bodily presence and everyday practices of individuals and groups, urban residents who actually exist.

Thirty years ago, Michaël Papayannakis (1989), in his contribution to the special issue of the Monde Series of the magazine Autrement, titled Grèce un théâtre d’ombres (Greece, a shadow theatre), referred to the “demon of the Greek race” — the “para-economy”¹ — one of the characteristics that reinforced the perception of a gap within Western economic development models. He explained how there is an “other Greece”, which the official state pretends to ignore and which everyone knows. This “other” aspect of the country was becoming more and more complex at the time and, little by little, gave way to perplexity and anger. The current crisis is not independent of how dominant narratives treat the world of informal work (migrant and non-migrant), as well as the state’s traditional relationship with them. This “other” face of the city, as well as various other distinctive features, revised the simplistic theoretical categorizations and generalized the national representations. Their fluidity reveals an everyday that is conflict-ridden, complex, multicolored, and certainly interesting. The chapters of this book, each in their own way and through the object of their research, and also all together, contribute to placing emphasis on these obscure and little discussed aspects of moving toward “alternative takes to the city”.

Introduction written by Irini MICHA and Dina VAIOU.