Community gardening in Hellinikon as a resistance struggle against neoliberal urbanism: spatial autogestion and the right to the city in post-crisis Athens, Greece

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to explore how community gardening can embed and foment grassroots resistance to the privatization of urban space in the current configuration of a prolonged socio-economic and ecological crisis in European cities. We focus on the emblematic case of the Hellinikon self-organized garden; a case of guerrilla gardening that emerged as part of a social movement against the real estate development of the former International Airport of Athens. Community gardening in Hellinikon emerged as a resistance struggle against a controversial urban regeneration plan that combined green gentrification with unsustainable development and as a prefigurative politics of radically different sociospatial and socionatural relationships. We argue that community gardening initiatives that are part of broader urban struggles and grassroots activism denote a radical practice that has the potential to challenge crisis-driven dispossessions and claim the right to the city through spatial autogestion. This theorization of community gardening can shed light on the emergence of a new era of urban politics where demands for the re-appropriation of urban space by its inhabitants coalesce with demands for radically different urban socionatures in crisis-ridden megacities linking struggles for the right to the city to struggles for the right to urban nature.