Occupy Urban Space: Dialectic of Formality and Informality in Greece in The Era of Crisis

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Occupy urban space: dialectic of formality and informality in Greece in the

era of crisis
Conference Paper · November 2013

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4799.5364
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Occupy urban space:
Dialectic of formality and informality in Greece in the era of crisis1

Tsavdaroglou Ch. & Makrygianni V.
Phd Candidates, Department of Urban and Regional Planning,
School of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

Abstract
In this paper we problematize the occupation tactics in urban space and
examine the socio-‐spatial effects of the informal-‐arbitrary buildings and squats
in Greece during the crisis era. We approach squats, informal housing and
formal private property as a social relation and as a mean of production of
space. We draw particular inspiration from the Marxian category of the so-‐
called primitive accumulation, which describes the permanent process through
which people are separated from the means of production, reproduction and
existence and are forced, in order to survive, to migrate in the rising cities and
become wage labours in order to produce value and surplusvalue. Several
contemporary geographers and urban thinkers like Harvey, Chatterton,
Hodkinson, Vasudevan, Glassman, Prudham, while studying the spatial
evolution of primitive accumulation, argue that it is a permanent process of
capitalism that is intensified during periods of crisis. In such periods certain
tools appear in order to maintain and expand sovereignty, like the ‘state of
exception’ a notion that is introduced by Schmitt and Agamben.
In this framework we question the dipole of formality and informality and we
argue that informal construction -‐along with small scale private property-‐
function more as a rule rather than as an exception for the production of the
Greek urban space. We focus on the recent dispossession-‐eviction-‐
criminalization of squatters and regulations, taxations, legalization-‐
formalization of informal-‐arbitrary constructions, which came as a result of the
recent financial crisis in Greece. We compare them to relevant urban policies
around the western world and approach them as the contemporary means of
the intensified accumulation that takes place during this socio-‐economic crisis.

Key words: crisis, primitive accumulation, formality, informality, Greece

1
Tsavdaroglou Ch., Makrygianni V. (2013) Occupy urban space: dialectic of
formality and informality in Greece in the era of crisis, in N. Catak, E. Duyan, S. Secer
(eds) Rethinking The Urban DAKAM’s CUI '13 Contemporary Urban Issues Conference,
vol. Ι, pp. 87-‐98, ISBN 978-‐605-‐5120-‐24-‐5, Istanbul 4-‐6 Νοεμβρίου 2013
87

Introduction
While concepts of the so-‐called primitive accumulation and enclosures are
becoming increasingly popular in critical geography, there have been few
attempts to think them together with the notion of crisis in the neoliberal era.
According to Vasudevan et al. (2008, pp.1644) and Hodkinson (2012, pp.501),
we lack ‘spatial histories of neoliberalism that take due consideration of the
broader politico-‐economic canvas’ and specifically explore the ‘complex
figurations through which enclosure and neoliberalism are intertwined’. In this
paper, we want to contribute to the process of redressing the theoretical and
empirical lacunae of contemporary spatialities of the so-‐called primitive
accumulation in the context of crisis. In order to unsettle this view, we examine
and problematize the evolution of informal-‐unlicensed construction in Greece
in the era of crisis. In a dialectical approach we consider private property as a
social relation of production of space, hence we focus in the social and political
causes and we provide a theoretical framework for the interpretation through
the critical category of permanence of the so-‐called primitive accumulation.
In the beginning we briefly present the concept of the so-‐called primitive
accumulation and its connections with the concepts of space and crisis. Then
we discuss the evolution of informal buildings in Greece. Afterwards through
the dialectic relation of rule and exception we approach the institutional
framework of legalization and regulation of informal-‐arbitrary construction in
Greece. Then we discuss the recent legal arrangements of regulation and
taxation and finally we reach some conclusions.

Primitive accumulation, private property and crisis
The concept of the so-‐called primitive accumulation is mentioned in the analysis
of Marx’s Capital and concerns the procedures of theft, dispossession and
usurpation of communal lands through enclosures during the transition of
th
feudalism to capitalism in England during the period of 15 to 18th century.
th
Marx (1867, pp.895) describes in 26 chapter, Volume One of Capital that in the
case of England the so-‐called primitive accumulation used the following
methods:
‘The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the
state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and
clan property and its transformation into modern private property under
circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic
methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist
agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban
industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians’
This theft was intended to separate the users of communal land, the
commoners, from the means of production, reproduction, and existence. The
ex-‐commoners were violently forced to migrate to emerging industrial cities,
88

proletarianized, became wage labor workers and established the capital
relationship, hence developed the class of proletarians and the capitalist class.
According to Marx (1867, pp.874):
‘The process, therefore, which creates the capital-‐relation can be nothing
other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the
conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two
transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production
are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-‐
labourers’
From the late nineteenth century until the last decades of the twentieth
century, the dominant understanding within the Marxist literature, apart from
few exceptions like Rosa Luxemburg, has always considered enclosures and the
so-‐called primitive accumulation as a precondition fixed in time. According to
this interpretation dispossession and expropriation occurred only in the
transition from feudalism to capitalism with the enclosure of communal lands.
However, Marx (1867, pp. 873) clarified from the beginning of the chapter
of the so-‐called primitive accumulation that in fact there is no primitive
accumulation but accumulation constitutes an ongoing process for the
existence of capital. The capital relationship does not have as a precondition the
primitive accumulation, but the surplus-‐value.
The last decades of the twentieth century, especially after the crisis of
seventies and the emergence of postfordism and neoliberalism, various
scholars, mostly from the perspective of autonomous Marxism, have
reconsidered the discourse on primitive accumulation and argue that
enclosures are constantly expanding and therefore they are not merely a pre-‐
capitalist procedure. Autonomous Marxists recognize as ‘New Enclosures’ the
gendered oppression, biometrics, informational accumulation, land grabbing
and dispossession, the accumulation of population in urban slums, the
Structural Adjustment Programs of IMF and WB, immigration, the debt crisis,
environmental pollution and climate change, the fall of the Eastern bloc, the
capitalist road of China and the decline of the post war welfare state of Western
European countries. (De Angelis, 2001; Midnight Notes Collective 1990; 2009;
Negri & Hardt, 2000; Vasudevan et al., 2008; Harvey, 2011)
Furthermore, during the last decades, several geographers looking at the
spatial evolution of enclosures have similarly argued that primitive
accumulation is an ongoing feature of capitalism rather than simply a
precapitalist phenomenon (Glassman, 2006; Prudham, 2007). Specifically David
Harvey (2005, pp.159) has suggested that new mechanisms and practices of
accumulation by dispossession include:
‘the commodification and privatisation of land (...); conversion of various
forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive
private property rights (...); suppression of rights to the commons;
89

commodification of labour power (…); colonial, neo-‐colonial, and imperial
processes of appropriation of assets (…); monetization of exchange and
taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (…); and usury, the national
debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical
means of accumulation by dispossession.’
Harvey (2003), summarizing his analysis identifies four main features of
‘accumulation by dispossession’ that is privatisation, commodification,
financialization and the management-‐manipulation of assets.
Therefore, the analysis of ‘New Enclosures’ highlights the crucial and
permanent character of the notion of the so-‐called primitive accumulation. In
order to be developed, the capital relation is constantly attempting to extend
enclosures on new material and immaterial spheres, to commercialize more
and more dimensions of life and to constantly reproduce the separation of
producers from the means of production, reproduction and existence.
To complement the above analysis it is important to connect the permanence
of the so-‐called primitive accumulation with the crises of capitalism. According
to several scholars (Bonefeld, 2009; Midnight Notes Collective and Friends,
2009; Hodkinson, 2012) capitalism in order to overcome crisis period, seeks
both to extend the capital relationship in new spheres and to deepen the
existing relations, that is, to separate humans from their means of production,
reproduction and existence. Therefore in crisis era, new enclosures are applying
or existing processes of the so-‐called primitive accumulation are intensified.

The evolution of arbitrary building and its regulation in Greek urban space
The historical evolution of informal-‐arbitrary buildings is closely interrelated
with periods of economic, social and political crises. We argue that informal
building expresses the dialectical relationship between the dispossession and
the reunification with the means of production, reproduction and existence; at
the same time the legalization and taxation of unlicensed-‐informal buildings
constitute the beginning of a new cycle of the so-‐called primitive accumulation
process. Studying the historical thread of informal building, we claim that on
the one hand the appearance of informal buildings comes most often as a
humans response to the lack or the grabbing of their means of production and
reproduction and on the other hand the regulation and legalization constitutes
the deeper integration of the populations in the capitalist mode of production.
The first generation of arbitrary buildings in the recent history of Greece is
considered to be the interwar period of the 20’s and 30’s, after the Balkan Wars
(1912-‐1913), the First World War (1914-‐1918) and the Greek-‐Turkish War
(1919-‐1922). During that period the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire took
place and the capitalist national states of Balkans (Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria,
Serbia and Albania) were reinforced or emerged. A major result of that
economic and political transformation was that hundreds of thousands of
90

people were displaced from their homeland; Muslims were forced to abandon
Balkans and settle in the new Turkish state and the Greek orthodox Christian
population was forced to abandon eastern Balkans -‐ Thrace, Asia Minor and
Pontos (northeastern Turkish coast of Black Sea) and settle in the Greek state.
This procedure is well-‐known as population exchange between Greece and
Turkey and it involved approximately 2 million people, around 1.5 million
Anatolian Greeks and 500,000 Muslims in Greece, most of whom were forcibly
made refugees and de jure denaturalized from their homelands. (Mazower,
2004; Foudanopoulos, 2005) These refugees lost their means of productions,
reproduction and existence and most of them, in order to survive, were forced
to settle in the perimeter of Greek and Turkish cities in informal-‐arbitrary
buildings, slums, deprived of water, electricity, sewer and transportation
networks. Although, at that time, a major state project was conducted for the
regulation of refugees’ settlement, most of them covered their housing needs
through illegal-‐arbitrary buildings. It’s worth noting that the impoverished
refugees were the cheap labor force and contributed to the revitalization of the
Greek economy (Foudanopoulos, 2005, pp.47, 210).
In an equal way, the second generation of informal-‐unlicensed buildings in
Greece appeared during the decades of 50’s and 60’s, after the Second World
War (1939-‐1945) and the Greek Civil War (1946-‐1949). Having lost their means
of production and reproduction large groups of rural population were forced to
abandon their homes and seek for better conditions of living and working in the
cities. (Mantouvalou and Mauridou, 2005) During 50’s and 70’s approximately
45% of the Greek population, that is, more than three million of people was
relocated, either to the big Greek cities (Athens, Thessaloniki) or to other
countries like US, Germany and Australia. (Margaritis, 2000; Clogg, 1999)
Significantly the major metropolis Athens and Thessaloniki doubled their
population in less than twenty years. (ESYE 1961, 1971, 1981) In contrast to the
state housing program of the interwar period (decades of 20s-‐30s), this time
there was no organized state urban and social housing plan to absorb the
internal immigration, thereby the vast majority of new residents settled into
informal-‐arbitrary makeshift constructions and slums, again in the perimeter of
the big cities.
It is worth noting that according to several urban scholars (Mantouvalou and
Mauridou, 2005; Vaiou et al. 2000) the illegal construction in Greece
substituted a state social-‐housing policy, and as we said in another paper:
“the post-‐war authorities, in their attempt to achieve social peace and to
control the population, pushed for two parallel processes: first, a violent
urbanisation and proletarianisation of the left-‐wing rural population, and
second, a certain amount of tolerance towards unlicensed building and
construction which called “exchange in kind” (antiparochi). […] In its
promotion of private ownership and development, antiparochi would in fact
comprise a spatial and social extension of the Marshall Plan, which aimed at
the capitalist development of the country. The Plan’s aim was the post-‐war
91

elimination of communist visions -‐still popular at the time-‐ by promoting a
liberal ideology of economic development, strengthening small private
property, and promoting specific new patterns of consumption.”
(Makrygianni and Tsavdaroglou 2011, pp.30)
During the period of 50s and 60s more than 380.000 illegal arbitrary buildings
were built in Athens and Thessaloniki, without a formal urban and spatial plan.
The next two generations of informal buildings located in the decades of
70s-‐80s and 90s-‐00s and were associated with management-‐manipulation of
private property, with the appearance of suburbanization and holiday homes
and with the commodification and financialization of private property.
Specifically, the third generation from the late 60’s to early 80’s was associated
with the state tolerance in arbitrary buildings. Both the dictatorship regime
(1967-‐1974) and the following governments, for petty patronage reasons,
encouraged the model of arbitrary construction and imposed low fines for the
breaches of the law. Thereafter, the fourth generation from mid 80s until the
end of 00s concerned the suburbanization and holiday homes and was mainly
affected by two factors. On the one hand the fall of the Eastern bloc and the
arrival and settlement of approximately 1.5 million migrants in Greek city
centers and on the other hand the changes in the socio-‐economic status of
Greek citizens that started looking for better quality housing in the urban
perimeter. (Minetos et al., 2007; Polyzos et al., 2012) Moreover, the building
development of the last two decades is considerably strengthened by the
provision of mortgage loans for the 15% of total dwellings in Greece (Eurostat,
2009). According to estimated approaches, the arbitrary buildings in Greece
were increased from 200.000 in the early of 90s to at least 1.000.000 in early
2011. Furthermore according to Oikonomou (2007) ‘the 45-‐50% of new
buildings are unlincend, the 30-‐35% have important construction arbitrariness
and less than the 20% are totally legal.’

The arbitrary building as a rule and as an exception
Based on the brief overview of the historical evolution of informal building in
Greece we put forward our hypothesis, that is, the dialectical relation of rule
and exception. According to Agamben (1998, pp.18)
‘The exception is a kind of exclusion. What is excluded from the general rule
is an individual case. But the most proper characteristic of the exception is
that what is excluded in it is not, on account of being excluded, absolutely
without relation to the rule.’
We argue that the form of informal building is an installed rule which appears
as an exception, either from real estate agents and inhabitants or from the
state, which through legislation acts exceptionally legalizes the illegal-‐informal
constructions. According to several urban scholars (Mantouvalou and
Mauridou, 2005; Vaiou et al., 2000) informal-‐arbitrary buildings in Greece were
92

signaled by continuous history of normalization through countless law
exceptions and regulations which reflect the social and political relations and
class antagonisms of each concrete historical period. According to Mantouvalou
(1996, pp.57)
‘The housing needs of the urbanized population were covered by the
arbitrary self-‐building constructions without any urban planning. This
construction was favored both by the gaps in urban planning legislation and
the tolerance of administrative authorities. Consequently, the arbitrary
construction essentially became a crucial element of state social policy and a
basic mechanism for the urban space production.’
In Greece the first universal town planning legislation came into force in
1923 after the population exchange between Greece and Turkey and the arrival
of 1.5 million refugees. The Degree Law ‘On City Plans, Large Villages and
Agglomerations of the State and their construction’ (Government Gazette Issue
GG/228/A/16.08.1923) constituted the basic legislative framework of urban
planning for half a century. Based on this urban planning, the Greek territory
was divided in: a) areas included in the City Plan (with an approved street layout
plan), and b) areas ‘not included in the city plan’. (Aravandinos, 1997, pp.96)
Furthermore the Degree Law orders that informal-‐arbitrary buildings should be
demolished by the police. The inclusion or exclusion of an area from the city
plan was made without any general spatial and urban planning study but came
as a result of the pressure among different interest groups with the vast
majority of informal refugee settlements being arbitrary. Consequently during
the interwar period and after the Greek civil war the state authorities recognize
their inability to control the informal-‐illegal buildings. Therefore, with a series of
new laws almost were legalized all the first generation of informal-‐unauthorized
constructions. Τhe process of legalization was formulated by the Presidential
Decree 18.03.1926 ‘On arbitrary structures and prosecution of offenders in
carrying out building works’ (Government Gazette Issue GG/101/A/1926).
Thereafter during the military junta period (1967-‐1974) the government of
the Colonels, in order to absorb the social reactions, legalized the vast majority
of the second-‐generation of informal settlements (50s-‐60s) with the L.410/1968
‘On arbitrary structures’ (Government Gazette Issue GG/110/A/16.05.1968).
Afterwards during the democratic political changeover of the late ‘70s and early
‘80s the L.720/77 ‘On exemptions from demolishing arbitrary buildings’
(Government Gazette Issue GG/297/A/26.7.1977), the L.947/79 ‘Residential
Law’ (Government Gazette Issue GG/169/A/26.7.1979) and the L.1337/1983
‘For the expanding of urban plans, the residential development and associated
settings’ (Government Gazette Issue GG/33/A/14.3.1983) legalized the third
generation of informal settlements (1968-‐1983) and once again served as a
governmental tool for social integration offering high revenues in land and
house owners. Significantly, the L.1337/1983 was based on the premise that the
new massive urban plans on areas with high density of unauthorized buildings
would face the social cause of their construction, hence informal buildings.
93

Concomitantly the new law provided penalties for the new informal buildings.
However the halting of illegal buildings wasn’t reached because of serious
delays in the implementation of urban plans and of legal exceptions provided by
the state, as referred in the L.1577/85 ‘General Building Regulation’
(Government Gazette Issue GG/210/A/18.12.1985). Then, follows the L.
3212/2003 ‘License construction, urban planning and other provisions of issues
concerning the Ministry of Environment, Urban and Regional Planning and
Public Works’ (Government Gazette Issue GG/308/A/31.12.2003) which
enabled the electrification and the water supply of informal-‐arbitrary structures
for social reasons.
Finally in the laws connected with the crisis legislation L. 3843/2010
‘Buildings’ identity, constructions overruns and changes of use, metropolitan
reformations and other provisions’ (Government Gazette Issue
GG/62/A/28.4.2010), the L.4014/2011 ‘Environmental permitting of projects
and activities, setting arbitrary in relation to creating environmental balance
and other provisions concerning the Ministry of Environment’ (Government
Gazette Issue GG/209/A/21.09.2011) and the L.4178/2013 ‘Addressing arbitrary
construction -‐ Environmental Balance and other provisions’ (Government
Gazette Issue GG/174/A/08.08.2013) attempted to regulate and legalize
arbitrary construction of the third and fourth generation in order to collect
money for the repayment of the Greek loans. The goal of the recent laws is to
collect 6 billion euros from fines and taxes, that is, the 2% of the Greek Debt.
At this point we should note that the dialectic relation between rule and
exception on informal-‐formal building and the practices of dispossession,
legalization and taxation of house property are not a Greek peculiarity but they
constitute structural processes of the circulation of capital as it seen in the
history of urbanization across the world (Harvey, 2003; Hodkinson, 2012;
Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Glassman, 2006).
In the case of Greek urban space, we argue that the informal-‐illegal building
constitutes one of the main urban policies for the production of the Greek cities
and not just citizens’ arbitrariness. Since a mass production model of state
social housing has never been applied in Greece we claim that the illegal
construction constitutes the catalyst and key driver for the production of the
Greek urban space.

Crisis, homeownership, arbitrary construction and permanence of the so-‐
called primitive accumulation
Based on the previous analysis it became clear the dialect relation of home
ownership which is constantly changing from the informal into formal form,
from the exception to the rule and reflects the each time historical, socio-‐
economic and political relations.
94

Today, in the current crisis we argue that the taxation and re-‐legalization of
informal-‐illegal buildings is related to the permanence of the so-‐called primitive
accumulation. In time of crisis, new enclosures are applied or existing processes
of the so-‐called primitive accumulation are intensified. These policies focus,
among other, on habitation, as a crucial reproductive resource for the
population. This theoretical framework includes policies such as the
privatisation of social housing in England, the mortgaged homes in the U.S. and
the displacement, the de-‐communalization and the land grabbing policies in
Latin America, India, China and Africa. (Hodkinson, 2012: 509; Caffentzis, 2010:
26-‐27; Harvey, 2012 :75; Vasudevan et al, 2011:5)
In Greece, during the last years, the processes of the so-‐called primitive
accumulation are expressed by the troika’s and Greek government’s structural
adjustment programs and austerity measures which have as a result four crucial
implementations: 1. The drastic cuts, about 40%, in salaries, pensions,
education, healthcare system. 2. The imposition of new enclosures in
environmental and in the so-‐called “public commons” commodification-‐
privatization of public infrastructures, services and public land. 3. The
imposition of urban policies for the dispossession-‐eviction-‐criminalization of
squatters. 4. The increment, about 50%, of taxes in transportations, gas, petrol,
water, energy prices and home property. Furthermore there are taxation tricks
like the L. 4021/2011 “Temporary Special Tax for electrified Structured
Surfaces” (Government Gazette Issue GG/218/A/03.10.2011) the so-‐called
‘haratsi’ (ottoman word for a poll tax). This tax is attached on to the already
increased electricity bill; thus, if you did not pay your tax, your electricity would
be turned off, even though you had paid the electricity portion of the total bill.
Especially taxes for households have the a result more and more people being
forced to sell their houses and to emigrate in order to find jobs and money;
however according to EL.STAT (2013) the unemployment in Greece has
increased from 7% in 2008 to 27% in 2013, hence, many Greeks try to emigrate
to western and northern European countries, Middle East and Australia.
We consider this to be a typical process of permanence of primitive
accumulation, that is, the continuous process which separates humans from the
means of production, reproduction and existence, in order people to be forced
to become wage labour workers and the capital relationship to be established.
As mentioned in the beginning of this paper, according to Marx (1867) and
autonomous and open Marxists like Caffentzis (2010), Federici (2004), De
Angelis (2002) etc., primitive accumulation is an ongoing feature of capitalism.
Following autonomous and open Marxist approach we argue that crisis and the
process of permanence of primitive accumulation is the capital’s response to
the previous social and political struggles, through which humans achieved or
tended to reunite themselves with their means of existence.
To approve this thesis, we claim that the last decades people in Greece
through many different ways of struggles gained some important means of
existence such as public education, healthcare, housing (Vaiou et al., 2000,
95

pp.10),. It is also true that the employment rate in Greece is very low and the
home ownership very high. Furthermore, according to Marx’s (1867, pp.270)
analysis the key point in capital circuit is that the only commodity that
generates surplus value is the labour-‐power. Hence the value and surplus value
process is produced through the labour process. Thus in the paradigm of Greek
crisis we assume that capital relation tends to change the previous situation
through the processes of new enclosures and permanence of the so-‐called
primitive accumulation that is dispossession, robbery and cuts. The goal of
these processes is humans to lose their means of existence and to become
dependent on wage labour.
A typical paradigm to approve this thesis is to compare the employment rate
and the home ownership rate in EU countries (matrix 1). The employment rate
is low in countries with high home ownership rate and vice versa. For example,
according to Eurostat in Germany in 2009 home ownership was 42.0% and
employment rate in 2012 was 72.8%, however during the same years in
Mediterranean countries -‐Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal-‐ the home ownership
was more than 74.0% and the employment rate was less than 60.0%.
Furthermore the European Commission (2010, pp.5) has set a goal, in order to
increase the competitiveness of EU countries, the employment rate in all EU
countries to rise up to 75% in 2020, which we can suppose that can be achieved
only with process of permanence of the so-‐called primitive accumulation.

Table 1. Home ownership and employment rate in EU countries (Eurostat, 2009;
2012a; b)

Home ownership rate Employment Rate 2012
Countries
2009 % %
Greece 80.1 51.3
Italy 78.0 56.8
Spain 78.0 55.4
Portugal 74.6 61.8
Ireland 73.7 58.8
Netherlands 68.4 75.1
Austria 56.0 72.5
France 55.0 63.9
Denmark 51.3 72.6
Germany 42.0 72.8

Conclusion
96

In this paper we have examined the concepts of ownership and arbitrary
building and we claim that the dialectical form of ownership as formal vis-‐à-‐vis
informal and as rule and exception reveals the spatial expression of the current
fiscal and socio-‐political crisis in Greece. We have shown that over the time the
management of home-‐property is connected with the processes of the so-‐called
primitive accumulation, which are deepened, stressed and extended in times of
crisis in order to strengthen the capital’s circulation and the production of
surplusvalue. We hope that our approach will be useful by scholars of space in
discussing the future developments of property.

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