In this first episode of Let’s Step Outside, RUL members Julia Lurfová and Dr Nerina Boursinou joined by guests Ellie Bouton and Lily von Geyer from the Campaign for Affordable Student Housing (CASH)discuss the precarious living situation in St Andrews. We explore the specifics of the St Andrew’s ‘housing crisis’ and delve into what it is like to be a student activist for affordable housing in a rich student town on the east coast of Scotland.
Logo credits: Alma Hummelsberger Editor: Eden Igwe Music: Matthew Lewis (@matthewlewy on Spotify)
Let’s Step Outside (LSO)is a podcast series bringing urban-related activism and exciting research outside the walls of Academia and one step closer to people who don’t fancy talking with jargon. LSO’s episodes feature women researchers/speakers at all stages of their career, as well as a range of activists engaged with all things urban. Delicious food for thought delivered to your ears.
Athens Zine is the creative outcome of the collaboration between people from diverse backgrounds who live or have lived in Athens for a significant part of their lives, with ‘significant’ being understood primarily in terms of impact and not necessarily in terms of duration. Its planning and development lasted almost 7 months using a mixture of hybrid, online and in person collaboration.
There are various but interconnected themes addressed in this little publication. Below, we present some reflections/conclusions on the content. Initially, this was planned to be included in the zine content, however in the final version it has been omitted. This happened for two reasons: The first one is because our incredible graphic designer warned us that the zine was already too big, and it would not be wise to keep adding pages and this led us to the think that perhaps we should allow readers reach their own conclusions without any influence at all.
So, feel free to read or skip the following paragraphs, but please make sure to let us know your thoughts once you’ve gone through Athens Zine.
A day-long (10:00-16:00, April 11th) documentary film-making workshop led by the award-winning film-maker Ross Domoney (https://www.ross-domoney.com/), Julia Lurfova and Antonis Vradis.
We will be using original footage filmed by Ross and I in Ukraine in the outbreak of the war last year, for an interactive and hands-on workshop on the process of documentary film-making as a research method.
With the kind support of the St Andrews Impact and Innovation Fund.
What can global spaces and infrastructure teach us about the current mutations in the relation between capital and sovereignty? How do heterogeneous actors and qualities of power work on each other in these spaces, producing peculiar yet fragile articulations? In what ways does information reproblematise the production and governance of the spatial?
Drawing on his recent research on the digitalisation and technological reconfiguration of the port of Piraeus in Greece, Andreas Makris interviews Sandro Mezzadra. Together they revisit some of the critical concepts that Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have produced in their fascinating work over the last decade, and reflect on the contemporary politics of logistical operations and infrastructure. The discussion is preceded by a short introduction that attempts to set the scene by narrating Piraeus’ complex arrangements and recent events.
The podcast is part of Andreas’ recent research project funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Entitled ‘Becoming-digital: Logistical media, territorial mutations and the production of information space in the port of Piraeus, Greece’, this project was awarded an RSE Saltire Early Career Fellowship and involved a placement at the University of Bologna.
Andreas Makris is a PhD student in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews.
Sandro Mezzadra is a Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Bologna.
Τι μπορούμε να διδαχθούμε από παγκόσμιους χώρους και υποδομές, όπως το λιμάνι του Πειραιά, για τις σύγχρονες μεταλλαγές της σχέσης ανάμεσα στο κεφάλαιο και την κυριαρχία; Πώς διαρθρώνονται οι ετερογενείς δρώντες παράγοντες και ποιότητες εξουσίας σε τέτοιους χώρους και ποιο είναι το υλικό υβριδικό πολίτευμα που παράγουν; Με τι τρόπους η ανάδυση της πληροφορίας ως ιστορικής παραγωγικής δύναμης επαναπροβληματικοποιεί την παραγωγή και διακυβέρνηση του χωρικού;
Εκκινώντας από την πρόσφατη έρευνά του σχετικά με την ψηφιο-ποίηση και τον τεχνολογικό μετασχηματισμό του εμπορικού λιμανιού του Πειραιά, ο Ανδρέας Μακρής συζητά με τον Δημήτρη Μ. Μόσχο για την πολιτική των υποδομών της εφοδιαστικής. Χρησιμοποιώντας τον Πειραιά και τις παγκόσμιες οικολογίες των logistics ως σημείο εισόδου σε μια ευρύτερη συζήτηση για τις πολλαπλές μεταβάσεις που εκτυλίσσονται σε πλανητικό επίπεδο, η συζήτηση ανοίγεται σε ζητήματα όπως οι μετασχηματισμοί του ελληνικού κράτους και της επικράτειάς του, τα οικονομικά και πολιτικά αποτελέσματα που παράγονται από τις πλατφόρμες και αντίστοιχα ψηφιακά μέσα, τον ρόλο της πληροφορίας και του υπολογισμού στους παραδοσιακούς γεωπολιτικoύς σχηματισμούς και σε αυτούς που ενδεχομένως έρχονται.
Το podcast είναι μέρος του πρόσφατου ερευντικού πρότζεκτ του Ανδρέα που χρηματοδοτήθηκε από τη Royal Society of Edinburgh. Φέροντας τον τίτλο ‘Becoming-digital: Logistical media, territorial mutations and the production of information space in the port of Piraeus, Greece’ (Γίγνεσθαι-ψηφιακό: Ψηφιακά μέσα της εφοδιαστικής, εδαφικές μεταλλαγές και η παραγωγή του πληροφοριακού χώρου στο λιμάνι του Πειραιά), το πρότζεκτ αυτό υποστηρίχθηκε από το πρόγραμμα υποτροφιών RSE Saltire Early Career Fellowships και συμπεριέλαβε τη συνεργασία με το Πανεπιστήμιο της Bologna και τον καθηγητή Sandro Mezzadra.
Ο Ανδρέας Μακρής είναι υποψήφιος διδάκτορας στη Σχολή Γεωγραφίας και Βιώσιμης Ανάπτυξης στο Πανεπιστήμιο του St Andrews.
Ο Δημήτρης Μ. Μόσχος είναι υποψήφιος διδάκτορας στη Σχολή Πολιτικών Επιστημών στο Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο.
The Radical Urban Lab and GOSSIP at the School of Geography and Sustainable Development proudly present:
Dr Paul Griffin (Northumbria University)
Spatial Politics, Solidarity Infrastructures, and Unemployed Organising
This talk will reflect on the politicisation of unemployment across UK towns and cities in the early 1980s. With a particular focus on trade union and community organising, the presentation will reflect on the role of Unemployed Workers’ Centres in articulating opposition to deindustrialisation, redundancies, and long-term unemployment. Focusing upon centres as ‘solidarity infrastructures’ allows an analysis that considers the quieter acts of care and advice alongside organising practices and campaigning. This paper revisits these histories through archives and oral histories of unemployed organising and includes reflections on the People’s March for Jobs 1981, the emergence of TUC Unemployed Workers’ Centres and wider unemployed resistances. In doing so, it connects with ongoing works across social movement studies and labour geographies, as well as related works focusing upon the politics of working-class presence within urban environments.
April 3, 2023 12pm – 1pm Lapworth laboratory (IRV: 208) Irvine Building University of St. Andrews
On November 24, 25 and 30 over 70,000 academics in 150 universities across the UK are going on strike over attacks on pay, working conditions and pensions. The Radical Urban Lab supports the strikes and will be cancelling all its activity over these dates.
Find more about the UCU strikes here and here on the UCU website. The longer the picket line, the shorter the dispute!
A shorter version of this article was used in the author’s keynote speech at the RC21 conference in Athens, August 24, 2022.
“I shall continue on the path of building more solid democratic institutions”. – PM Konstantinos Mitsotakis, August 8, 2022 “The economic and military tyranny of today has been established”. – John Berger, Hold Everything Dear, 2006
It is a moving occasion for me to be here in this room, not because of who is here–please do not get me wrong, it is wonderful to know and feel we are finally among friends that we have not seen for a while, for reasons only too obvious. But it is also a moving occasion because of the where and then when we meet.
The where, of course, we all know: we are in the historic campus of the Athens Polytechnic, right in the heart of the Exarcheia neighbourhood. And as for the when? We are here right when our neighbourhood is coming under attack. Those of you who made your way here through Exarcheia this afternoon will have surely seen that what was once its square is now a barricaded mass, a construction site for a new metro stop guarded 24/7 by scores of riot police. For those of you who have not visited Athens for a while, or those who may have heard so much about the neighbourhood’s past but only happen to visit now for the first time, this image must surely come as a shock. This is equally a shock to those who frequent Exarcheia more often: an unprecedented situation, and the reason why I have decided to dedicate this intervention to Exarcheia and its square in particular.
At the time when the so-called “first place” (the home) and the “second place” (the workplace) merge, the future of third places is thrown wide open: anything and anywhere that is not private or corporate is severely questioned and pushed to become at least one of the two. It is in this context that Lurfova’s report has a rare urgency. Her perambulation starting with the Stalin Plaza in Prague and her drawing of lessons on what post-communist nostalgia might signal for the current state affairs in the Czech society (and beyond) is an apt reminder of a cunning ability of third places: the ability not only to preserve public memory and emit nostalgia but to tell us, in the process of so doing, much about the current status quo. And Lurfova’s report has become even more urgent and timely as Russian imperialism is invading Ukraine and as Western imperialism is fanning the flames of the present war while confronting the spectres of its own imperialist past. From the toppling of slave trader statues in Bristol to the struggle against the regeneration of public spaces in Athens, people are fighting for their right to representation in third place present and past. This report is an apt reminder of what is at stake in this struggle.
Julia Lurfová’s report is the final product of her engagement with the St Andrews Research Internship Scheme (StARIS) and her collaboration with all other RUL members, which is ongoing. The StARIS Scheme offers the opportunity for undergraduate students to enhance their learning experience by working on academic research projects. Julia’s report also ties into a broader exploration of Third Place under the auspices of the Radical Urban Lab.
Introducing the case of the Stalin plaza
For a brief period of seven years, an imposing granite monument of the Soviet Union’s Generalissimo, Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, surrounded by archetypes of Soviet and Czechoslovak citizens, towered over the city of Prague. The statue was the winner of a 1949 competition honouring Stalin’s 70th birthday, commissioned by the Czechoslovak communist political party chaired by Klement Gottwald. At the time, Stalin – as Czechoslovakia’s “liberator” from Nazi Germany – was becoming a near-sacred and hence frequently monumentalized figure among communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Eventually finished in 1955, the socialist realist monument of Stalin in Prague became the world’s largest depiction of the Soviet leader. But it did not loom for long. As a result of Khrushchev’s 1956 confidential speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” that heavily criticized the Stalinist regime and provoked a gradual wave of de-Stalinization, the monument was toppled in 1962.
In 1991, a giant red Metronome was erected on the pedestal left bare after Stalin’s statue was demolished by explosives. The Metronome, as a reminder of time’s passage and finiteness, mocks the propagandist narrative of a Soviet-Czech partnership “for all eternity”. Ticking from East to West, the symbol of freedom bridges the two worlds in the newly-independent Czech Republic. Six decades later, in the nation’s collective memory, the place once dominated by Stalin’s monument continues to be strongly associated with the demolished landmark, kept alive through narrative accounts. Nowadays, among Czechs, the term “Stalin” refers to the plaza around the Metronome, turned into a meeting point popular among young people and an open air cultural hub hosting a variety of DJ and film-screening events, beer gardens, and a pop-up bar during the summer months.
The smooth concrete surfaces of the plaza have also been repurposed by the city’s skaters. In 1970s communist Czechoslovakia, skating emerged as an important anti-establishment subculture resisting the totalitarian regime, which recently became the subject of ‘King Skate’, a 2018 documentary directed by Šimon Šafránek. Skating remains pivotal to both Prague’s urban youth culture and to Stalin, “a square with no boundaries and no regulations”. However, the future of skaters at Stalin – and, as a matter of fact, of the public space as a whole – came under threat in September 2019, when the city temporarily closed the plaza in order to structurally refurbish it, while also re-opening a longstanding debate on potential commercial development in the area. Critics of proposals to replace the Metronome with a church or an aquarium have condemned these developments as pathways towards “cultural amnesia”, attempting to erase the contentious yet critically important history of the place within the Czech landscape of memory. Skaters and other Prague locals have since protested the closure and the redevelopment discourse by organising a ‘Save Stalin Plaza’ protest. “[D]on’t touch the genealogy, don’t touch the heritage of this place”, urges urban architect and local skateboarder Martin Hrouda. “Keep it like it is.”
Stalin Monument in Letná Park, Prague. Source: Pichova, 2008, p. 618.
Stalin plaza nowadays. Source: U/U Studio and Kevin Loo for Design Disco, 2019.
