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Session 4

Looking for (the) place in intersecting urban displacements

Organisers: Eva Papatzani (National Centre for Social Research)

  • Friday, 27 November 2026 · 09:30–11:00, 11:30–13:00

    Main Hall, National Centre for Social Research (EKKE)

About this session
Contemporary cities are shaped by multiple, intersecting, and simultaneous forms of displacement. Geographical scholarship has long engaged with displacement, albeit through distinct disciplinary trajectories. Urban geography has examined displacement primarily as a consequence of urban restructuring, housing financialization, gentrification and touristification, processes that generate the involuntary relocation of residents from their neighbourhoods. In parallel, forced migration studies informed by geographical perspectives have conceptualised displacement as both constitutive of the refugee subject and as an ongoing condition experienced by displaced populations in cities of arrival and settlement. This literature highlights the role of migration regimes, accommodation (and eviction) policies, and formal and informal everyday practices - i.e. of racial banishment - in shaping ongoing displacement. Bringing these approaches into dialogue reveals displacement as a multifaceted process that unfolds simultaneously through diverse mechanisms within urban contexts. Urban displacements are produced across different interrelated scales, characterized by relational temporalities and spatialities, and concern diverse subjects. At the core of these processes lies the rupture of relationships between people and place; a process of un-homing and unsettling of relations, encounters and practices of familiarity and belonging in situ; a process contributing to the broader reconfiguration of urban space. This session seeks to foreground the centrality of place in the context of multiple and intersecting displacements, both empirically and theoretically. Although place has long been a contested concept, it re-emerges as critical in addressing contemporary sociospatial challenges. Place remains central even when it appears to be 'lost' through the temporality and rupture of displacement or undermined by forced mobility and relocation. The session aims to explore how place(s) are reshaped in displacements, how displacement is experienced in everyday life, and how negotiations and contestations over place(s), as well as practices of emplacement function as counter-processes sustaining sociospatial relations at both individual and collective levels.

Presentations are listed in the order set by the session organisers.

Presentations10

Slot 1 · Fri 27 Nov · 09:30–11:00

  1. 1.Disorientation, Un-homing, and the Criminalization of Memory: Rethinking Urban Displacement in Sur (Amed/Diyarbakır)

    Rüstü Demirkaya

    • University of Geneva
    Abstract
    This paper examines urban displacement in Sur (Diyarbakır) not merely as the physical relocation of populations, but as a multi-layered process that reconfigures the relationship between space, memory, and belonging. Building on critical urban geography and forced migration studies, it argues that displacement unfolds through intersecting regimes of violence, including militarization, legal-administrative intervention, and neoliberal urban restructuring. These processes do not operate sequentially but simultaneously, producing overlapping forms of dispossession and spatial reordering. Drawing on the concepts of “homeplace” (bell hooks,1997) and the “hunted home” (Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,2015), the paper conceptualizes displacement as a form of un-homing that targets the home as both a material and mnemonic infrastructure. In Sur, the destruction of housing during the 2015–2016 military operations, followed by state-led reconstruction and commodification, not only displaced residents but also disrupted spatial familiarity and collective memory. This paper introduces the concept of disorientation to capture how the erasure of streets, landmarks, and everyday spatial references undermines inhabitants’ ability to navigate, recognize, and reinhabit urban space. Furthermore, the paper argues that displacement in Sur involves the criminalization of memory, where acts of remembering, witnessing, and narrating are subjected to legal and political repression. In this context, displacement extends beyond forced mobility to encompass epistemic and affective dimensions, reshaping how space is inhabited and remembered. At the same time, the paper highlights counter-processes of emplacement, including local memory practices, digital archiving, and everyday forms of staying, through which displaced subjects attempt to reconstitute relations to place. By foregrounding disorientation and memory as central to urban displacement, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on intersecting displacements and calls for a rethinking of place as a contested and continuously reconfigured socio-spatial relation.

  2. 2.Contesting displacement: staying, returning, and the politics of place in post-disaster settings

    Maria Sassalou

    • Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
    Abstract
    While displacement has been extensively studied in urban contexts, this paper extends the discussion to post-disaster settings, examining how displacement and emplacement are shaped through the interaction of place-based relations, infrastructures, and recovery processes. It presents the conceptual foundations of ongoing doctoral research on post-disaster (im)mobility in Southern Europe. In the context of a changing climate, the paper argues for an expanded understanding of displacement, one that goes beyond forced mobility to encompass a spectrum of (im)mobility across both urban and rural settings. Displacement after disaster is thus approached not as a single outcome, but as a contested process through which place is disrupted and re-made. Challenging dominant frameworks that equate displacement exclusively with physical relocation, the paper positions (im)mobility as a central analytical lens for understanding how communities navigate trajectories of staying, moving, or returning. In doing so, it contributes to debates on climate (im)mobility by foregrounding the relational dimensions of displacement, including care practices, place attachment, and everyday negotiations of belonging. In dialogue with recent flood events in Southern Europe, including Storm Daniel in Thessaly and the Valencia floods, the paper proposes that the rupture of place is produced not only through physical destruction, but also through uneven recovery processes and infrastructural failure. In this context, the paper argues that austerity legacies and uneven infrastructural maintenance shape uneven possibilities of staying, moving, or returning. The paper examines practices of care and place attachment as forms of emplacement that reconstitute socio-spatial relations. These practices are shown to operate under–and in tension with–conditions of uneven recovery. By integrating insights from critical geography, disaster governance, and climate (im)mobilities scholarship, the paper contributes to broader debates on how post-disaster (im)mobility is lived and contested–and how place, far from being simply lost, is actively remade through everyday practices of staying, moving, and returning.

  3. 3.Places lost, places found, places displacing: narrative constructions of place at Viktoria Square

    Matthaios Velogiannis

    • National Technical University of Athens
    Abstract
    The proposed announcement is based on early findings of the doctoral research I conduct at Viktoria Square in Athens, using field observation, informal discussions and semi-structured walking interviews with a variety of respondents that have lived or worked in the area. We take as principle that places are not synonymous with the geographical and material site they occupy; they are created through narratives and are neither universal nor objective. A usual hypothesis among relevant bibliography proposes that place comes to being through an influx of memory into space. Guided by these propositions, we analyse the construction of two different “places” at Viktoria Square. - A lost place of a middle-class, prestigious, homogeneously Greek neighbourhood which is often invoked by elderly respondents. This place is created in a contrast with todays’ multinational, working-class. - A place of resistance and solidarity which, across different narratives, may be considered lost, persisting or imminent. This place is found on the remarks of progressive, politicised respondents and in posters, slogans on the wall, pamphlets and demonstrations. It is narratively constructed around squats, the movement of solidarity towards immigrants and the response to the development of fascist groups in the area. By addressing these “places” we can then ask how places can actually displace; the constructed place of one group can act as a rejecting discourse for another group. In Viktoria, the discourse surrounding the lost place of affluence and homogeneity is engulfed in a sentiment of rejection towards immigrants, often utilised by extremist groups and government practices of intimidation and control. Thus, we discuss how places concurring at the same geographical site can be oppositional to each other. The imbalance in power between the social groups that construct them is translated in material consequences, with the danger of material displacement always present.

  4. 4.Urban transformations and elective minorities: Creative individuals on survival mode in the city centre, First findings and discussion of empirical research in Istanbul

    Eirini Oraiopoulou

    • AUTH, Faculty of Engineering, School of Architecture, Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Development
    Abstract
    Since the vast opening of Turkey in the global economy, the inner areas of Istanbul’s historical center have been going under urban transformations in different and multiple spatio-temporal waves, resembling a complex domino effect. The proposed presentation is based on an empirical research that took place in Istanbul and focuses on a group of people: “intersectionally creative” -associated (in international and Istanbul’s bibliography) with urban transformations -mostly gentrification studies and often identified with pioneer gentrifiers. As living within the city’s central areas forms a structural element for the lives of the people in focus- the research (which was mainly conducted in situ, through in-depth interviews) follows their residential biographies as “habitation trajectories” in relation to the centre’s urban transformations and their everyday lives. The notion of “surviving /staying alive” in the city, repeatedly appears in their narratives, tracing a state of constant precariousness, and resembling aspects of the “minority” concept – which is an idiosyncratic element of Istanbul- now revisited in the context of the contemporary- under transformation city, forming an active oxymoron in relation to aspects of elective belonging (M. Savage) which also emerge from the same narratives. Within the expected reasons for organizing a living there -centrality, affordability, social heterogeneity (diversity/ superdiversity), the latter is further examined - within the scope of everyday life and co-habitation co- existence with reference to D.Massey’s approach on the event of place and throwntogetherness. Through this examination issues of “difference” and intersectionality emerge (gender, cultural, social, the status of a “creative”, being single, being a woman, being all of the above together, unmarried couple, etc.) that reflect the groups’ s position and precariousness within the city and within the contemporary Turkish society- thus questioning and tracing aspects of belonging beyond the area and the city.

Slot 2 · Fri 27 Nov · 11:30–13:00

  1. 1.Beyond Camp vs Market: Housing Regimes and Multiplied Displacement in Athens and Berlin

    Erasmo Sossich1, René Kreichauf2

    • 1Università degli Studi di Milano
    • 2Harvard University
    Abstract
    Displacement in European cities does not end upon arrival but unfolds as an ongoing and multiplied process across institutional, spatial, and everyday domains. This paper examines how different urban configurations of refugee accommodation—camp clearance in Athens and camp expansion in Berlin—produce distinct yet intersecting trajectories of displacement, reshaping relations to place and housing and producing instability across both mobility and enforced stasis. Based on qualitative and ethnographic research with affected populations and institutional actors, we juxtapose two seemingly opposed housing regimes that, in practice, converge in generating dispossession. In Athens, the closure of urban camps such as Eleonas has not marked a transition to inclusion but a displacement into a highly segregated system of extra-urban confinement camps. As a result, more than half of the asylum seekers seek refuge in the city through informal, overcrowded, and extractive rental arrangements, where exploitation substitutes for formal exclusion, and displacement is dispersed and privatized through the market. In Berlin, by contrast, the expansion of large reception facilities, “housing-like” camps and container-based accommodations institutionalize displacement. Refugees—including those with legal status and employment—are frequently unable to exit these facilities due to structural barriers in the housing market. Camps thus function as long-term holding infrastructures, producing a condition of enforced immobility that mirrors forms of urban homelessness. The paper conceptualizes these dynamics as a continuum of multiplied displacement, in which both camps and housing markets operate as mechanisms of racialized control, housing exploitation and banishment. We argue that both models reveal a shared logic: the systematic denial of secure housing through an expansion of campization as means of governing refugee presence in the city. In this sense, housing emerges not as a solution to displacement, but as one of its primary instruments.

  2. 2.What's in a square meter?

    Nikolaos Vrantsis

    • Institute for Housing and Urban Research
    Abstract
    This text examines how urban land valorization restructures housing relations and class divisions in post-crisis Greece. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in western Thessaloniki, it situates eviction campaigns by small landowners in 2020 within broader transformations in the political economy of land. It develops a Marxian account of urban ground rent, emphasizing its class character under rising land values and expanded housing assetization. Greece is approached as a historically specific urban land property regime, shaped by possessive familialism and reconfigured after the sovereign debt crisis through austerity and renewed real estate investment. Focusing on western Thessaloniki, the article traces alliances linking developers, construction firms, financial intermediaries, transnational investors and segments of small landownership. It argues that the rent gaps and their closure are linked to the differentiated returns across the actors of this alliance. As these alliances consolidate, pressures vis-à-vis returns are pushed downward, intensifying evictions as moments in the realization of urban ground rent. The text concludes that struggles over urban land constitute a central axis of class conflict in contemporary Greek cities.

  3. 3.Contesting displacement: Struggles for place in the city of Athens

    Eva Papatzani

    • National Centre for Social Research
    Abstract
    What does it mean to be displaced, often more than once, in a city marked by overlapping unsettlements? This paper conceptualizes displacement as a set of processes that rupture the relationship between people and place(s), producing forms of un-homing that unsettle relations, encounters, and practices of belonging. Drawing on an ongoing research project in Athens (H.F.R.I. Project Nο.: 28207), the paper examines intersecting displacement processes across multiple domains, including housing commercialization, touristification, asylum accommodation policies, and everyday racism. It argues that experiences of displacement must be understood alongside practices of contestation, as well as the embodied, everyday strategies through which affected subjects cope and sustain forms of belonging in place. Although settlement/emplacement and displacement are often framed as oppositional, the paper emphasizes their co-constitution. Empirically, the paper highlights practices such as resistance to involuntary relocation among asylum seekers, everyday homemaking within camps, mobility between isolated camps and urban centers to maintain social ties, translocal connections that exceed displacement pressures, individual usually invisible practices as well as collective actions against housing precarity and gentrification, and informal mutual aid and neighborhood solidarity. These practices are approached as everyday acts of habitation that sustain relationships to people and place, illuminating how affected populations enact their right to the city; in the words of Lefebvre, a right that ‘legitimates the refusal to allow oneself to be removed from urban reality by a discriminatory and segregative organization’ (Lefebvre 1996). Building on Massey’s relational understanding of place, home, and belonging, the analysis explores what it means to struggle for place in a context of intersecting displacements and to attempt settlement within conditions of ongoing unsettlement. It asks how place is reconfigured through displacement and which dimensions of place are crucial for understanding both displacement and emplacement.

  4. 4.From displacement to emplacement? Rethinking migrants’ relationships to place across times of uncertainty

    Marina Nikolova1, Apostolos G. Papadopoulos2

    • 1Research Associate, Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP)
    • 2Professor, Department of Geography, Harokopio University of Athens
    Abstract
    This paper explores how migrant women’s relationships to place are reconfigured through ongoing and intersecting forms of displacement shaped by migration regimes, labour precarity, and geopolitical change, focusing on women migrants from Ukraine in Athens across two periods marked by extreme uncertainty (2013–2014 and 2022). It examines how shifting socio-political conditions reshape experiences of mobility, inclusion, and belonging over time. Drawing on qualitative interviews with four distinct groups of respondents - economic migrants (primarily women employed in domestic and care work) in Greece, returnees and family members in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014, as well as newly arrived migrants under temporary protection, and long-term residents in 2022 - the paper adopts a comparative temporal lens to analyse how different migration trajectories, legal statuses, and life-course positions produce uneven and partial forms of emplacement. These forms of emplacement are reflected in migrants’ fragmented attachments to place across everyday life, including insecure housing, unstable employment in gendered labour sectors, and changing access to social networks and institutional support over time. The findings show that emplacement does not constitute a stable endpoint but remains continuously negotiated under conditions of uncertainty. This paper contributes to urban geographical debates on migration, displacement, and the production of urban place by interrogating how emplacement is shaped through intersecting regimes of mobility, labour, and crisis over time. In particular, it foregrounds emplacement as an uneven, gendered, and temporally differentiated process that unfolds through everyday practices and shifting socio-political conditions. By focusing on Ukrainian migrant women in Athens across two periods under extreme socio-economic conditions, the paper highlights how legal status, labour precarity, and transnational family arrangements form pathways of belonging in the city.

  5. 5.Through the gates: place-based education as practice of re-emplacement in touristified Florence

    Matteo Puttilli, Panos Bourlessas

    • University of Florence
    Abstract
    Processes of sociospatial displacement linked to touristification and housing financialization reshape urban functions, everyday practices, imaginaries and access to “place” in cities. Florence is exemplary of such dynamics with its UNESCO centre being subject to rapid multifaceted transformations. In this context, this contribution focuses primarily on indirect and lengthy forms of displacement to suggest acts of re-emplacement through geography education. It reflects on the Erasmus+ BIP "A Gaze upon the City", coordinated by the University of Florence in collaboration with partners from Portugal and Spain. The project brought together an interdisciplinary group of students and lecturers to investigate the porte (gates) of Florence as physical-symbolic thresholds through which to explore ongoing transformations. Originally part of the city’s historical fortification system, the gates nowadays survive as fragmented and often overlooked urban remnants, absorbed into the contemporary urban fabric and mobility infrastructures, and overseeing the transforming city in robust silence. Through walking methodologies, observation, mapping, ethnographic inquiry and acoustic explorations, the project explored the changing meanings, uses and imaginaries surrounding these spatialities of passage. Rather than approaching place as fixed or bounded within the displacement processes, the project considered the porte as relational and contested, where displacement-induced dynamics become particularly visible and read from vantage yet ignored viewpoints. The contribution argues that place-based educational practices can function as forms of re-emplacement within contexts marked by multifacetedf displacements, varying from material to symbolic. Through situated and active forms of geographic knowledge production, students critically engaged with urban transformations while experimenting with alternative ways of relating to and interpreting the city. In such a gate-centered epistemological shift, educational fieldwork thus emerges not only as a methodological tool for urban critical understanding, but also as a pedagogical practice capable of rethinking the transformative role of place and reopening possibilities for situated forms of re-emplacement.

Time slot to be confirmed

  1. Reclaiming "Τόπος": Intersecting Urban Displacements and the Erosion of Intangible Place

    Aliki Eleni Kalomenopoulou

    • Politecnico di Torino
    Abstract
    Contemporary urban landscapes are increasingly defined by multiple, intersecting forms of displacement that transcend simple physical relocation. This research explores the centrality of "Τόπος"—a concept encompassing the intangible values, memory, aura, and plurality of a location, expressed by Merleau-Ponty and Norberg-Schulz —arguing that the rupture of the relationship between people and place constitutes the core of the experience, even for those who "stay put". Drawing on the theories of Davidson and Zukin, it distinguishes between direct displacement, driven by property demands, and indirect displacement, which occurs when the social fabric, local shops, and communal facilities are replaced by standardized spaces dictated by gentrification and touristification. This "mutation of place" generates an ongoing, non-visible loss of the feeling of belonging and identity, while transforming the living community into a commodified asset. The rise of the "platform economy," particularly through Airbnb and the influx of "mobility lifestylers" and digital nomads, further complicates these dynamics. These short-term residents redefine gradually, and in a non-direct way, the urban environment to suit their consumption-oriented needs, often at the expense of local "lived space" and "embodied history". In cities like Athens, these forces threaten the very "spirit of place". This study reimagines how the "right to place" can be reclaimed by exploring practices of emplacement and the reactivation of aura and memory as counter-processes to displacement. By foregrounding Τόπος, we can better understand the subjective, intangible "un-homing" that characterizes the contemporary urban polycrisis.