Unmapped geographies: Contemporary Socio-Spatial Transformations in Thessaloniki

Urban expansion in Thessaloniki has been increasingly expressed through dispersed residential development, and changing relationships between housing, land use, and the built environment. While urban sprawl models identify spatial patterns of expansion, their interpretation becomes stronger when modelled outputs are examined alongside official census data on buildings and housing. This paper investigates Thessaloniki’s urban expansion by comparing the outputs of Urban Sprawl Models with census-based indicators of housing geography and buildings’ characteristics. The analysis focuses on the spatial relationship between modelled sprawl zones and census data concerning buildings, dwellings, number of floors, and the distribution of residential uses. Attention is given to the distinction between exclusively residential and mixed-use buildings, as well as to the relative share of housing uses compared with other functions, enabling Thessaloniki’s residential patterns to be interpreted in relation to broader spatial reference levels, including Greece, Northern Greece, and the Regional level. In this way, the paper does not treat urban sprawl only as horizontal land consumption, but also as a differentiated transformation of the residential built environment. By combining modelled spatial expansion with census indicators, the study seeks to identify where urban growth corresponds with measurable concentrations of housing, where residential development appears vertically intensified through multi-storey buildings, and where mixed-use patterns complicate the interpretation of sprawl. This approach is especially relevant for peri-urban and transitional areas of Thessaloniki, where urbanisation may be fragmented, uneven, and only partially visible through conventional land-use classifications. The paper focuses on socio-spatial transformations by examining how housing geographies are produced, recorded, and potentially obscured within the expanding urban fabric. It argues that the combined reading of modelled sprawl and census data can provide a more nuanced understanding of Thessaloniki’s urban expansion, revealing not only where the city grows, but also how residential space is structured within that growth.

In recent years, the development of productive activities has posed significant challenges for territorial organization and spatial planning, particularly in metropolitan areas. These challenges include securing suitable land for the location of productive activities amid competing land uses and economic functions, as well as addressing locational requirements that, despite technological advances, continue to depend heavily on proximity factors. At the same time, issues concerning the protection of land and the environment are gaining importance, particularly in relation to the impacts of climate change and the risks of natural disasters The western zone of the Thessaloniki metropolitan area has experienced significant development of productive activities over recent decades, driven by its proximity to the main national road network and the Port of Thessaloniki. In particular, the area of Kalochori has witnessed a considerable expansion of out-of-plan and largely unregulated building activity, mainly for industrial and warehousing purposes, resulting in significant land-use and land-cover transformations and increasing pressures on land resources and the environment. This paper examines transformations in land development in the western peri-urban zone of Thessaloniki, in relation to productive activities and the built and natural environment. It also seeks to identify the challenges these transformations pose for spatial planning and to explore how they may shape the future geography of the area.

The western entrance area of Thessaloniki constitutes one of the city’s most complex and rapidly transforming urban territories. Historically shaped by industrial activities, transport infrastructure, working-class settlements, refugee flows, and logistics functions, the area developed as the productive “backyard” of the city, spatially and symbolically disconnected from its historic and administrative center. Today, this fragmented landscape is undergoing significant socio-spatial transformation through infrastructure upgrades, metro expansion, large-scale real estate investments, and tourism-oriented redevelopment. Despite increasing investment interest and the area’s strategic metropolitan location, development remains highly uneven. Large flagship projects coexist with degraded open spaces, fragmented urban fabric, environmental pressures, vulnerable social groups, and persistent inequalities. The coexistence of logistics infrastructure, abandoned industrial sites, informal activities, transport hubs, and isolated redevelopment enclaves creates a highly fragmented urban geography, where spatial proximity does not necessarily translate into social, not even functional integration. This paper explores the contemporary transformation of the western entrance of Thessaloniki through the lens of socio-spatial fragmentation and just transition. Drawing on ongoing research and planning processes developed within the ClimaGen and ReGenWesT projects on regreening and climate resilience, the paper examines how property-led and isolated development patterns interact with green transition policies reshaping the area’s spatial identity and development dynamics. Particular emphasis is placed on the tensions between metropolitan-scale redevelopment strategies and the everyday realities of local communities and vulnerable urban landscapes. The paper argues that the western entrance of Thessaloniki represents a crucial urban frontier where economic restructuring, climate transition, and socio-spatial inequality intersect. Understanding these fragmented layers and the ways they influence the transformation of a large urban expansion area, developing without an integrated overarching planning framework, may help identify new approaches for the strategic urban planning, and more socially inclusive forms for urban regeneration in the Greek context.

The study analyses the physical and dynamic processes which produce the actual urban form. Urban tissue has a double role as an element of fundamental importance in shaping the structure of the city. First, it assembles all the physical elements and social fabrics in the intermediate urban scale. Secondly it can adapt or even transform through the continuous changes of urban planning policies, building regulations or even everyday human decisions at the micro-scale. As formations and transformations of the urban tissues are explored the question arises: What are the dynamic processes of production, evolution and transformation of urban form and what are the corresponding transitional morphologies? A city’s urban form is a complex, overlapping substratum that cannot be fully understood at first glance. In-depth analytical and exploratory research is required to reveal the levels of morphological processes, social and developmental forces that directly concern the design of urban space. Within this framework, the investigation of the urban tissue is organized at two scales: the intermediate scale of the urban parts and the micro-scale of urban blocks. These scales represent an unexplored level of analysis of the existing urban tissues especially in Greek cities. They become an ideal tool in order to research the complex nature of urban form and for understanding the ways in which built space is composed in a smaller scale. At the centre of the research are two case studies in Thessaloniki with different characteristics but of a historic and socio-cultural significance: Ano Poli and Kato Toumba, both refugee settlements of the 1930s. By analysing their evolution in space and time, we explore specific finds on the evolution and dynamics of residential built space in Thessaloniki and other greek cities.

Within the broader context of climate change, aging infrastructure, excessive urban density, and mounting housing pressures, the exploration of interventions in urban open spaces—aimed at enhancing sustainability and resilience—emerges as a critical approach for renewing urban identity, restoring ecological balance, rearticulating collective memory, and fostering new forms of social interaction. In this framework, the post-war district of Neapoli, situated at the western gateway of Thessaloniki—a highly compact urban area characterized by a scarcity of open spaces and among the highest urban densities in Greece—has been examined through a strategic perspective of spatial restructuring and urban repair, grounded in its network of open and residual spaces. Urban elements such as streets, sidewalks, parks, schoolyards, bus stops, squares, pedestrian routes, sports facilities, and even the smallest vacant or leftover spaces are reinterpreted as integral components of a cohesive spatial strategy. This strategy is rooted in the existing urban fabric, collective memory, and lived experience, while projecting towards the future through the formation of an interconnected network of public and common spaces capable of redefining spatial, perceptual, ecological, and social relationships. The study was conducted by a multidisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners, commissioned by the Municipality of Neapoli–Sykies between 2023 and 2025. It seeks to expand the discourse on the significance of strategic planning across multiple spatial scales, the centrality of public space design, participatory decision-making processes, and the institutional and procedural frameworks governing the production, commissioning, and implementation of large-scale urban studies within the context of economic austerity in Greece.

Thessaloniki is undergoing a rapid housing transformation, yet some of its most consequential elements remain only partially visible. In the historic centre, the western entrance and other selective pockets of reinvestment, rent gaps are being closed through serviced apartments, student rentals, professionalised short-term rentals and tourism-led redevelopment. Yet rising rents, touristification, real estate investment and severe unaffordability are largely discussed as market trends rather than power imbalances. What remains invisible are the everyday relations through which these processes are experienced, justified and contested: repeated moves, non-renewal of contracts, informal evictions, arbitrary rent increases, abusive clauses, poor housing quality, dependence on family support and household displacement. Thessaloniki’s housing crisis remains unmapped not only for lack of data, but because dominant property narratives obscure rent as a field of exploitation and political conflict. Unlike contexts where corporate landlordism has produced visible antagonists and strong tenant mobilisation, as in the Catalan case, Thessaloniki’s rental crisis unfolds through dispersed relations of small and medium property ownership, marginal financialisation, tourism-oriented investment and entrenched family-based rent-seeking imaginaries. Through their local organisation, ENIATH, landlords present themselves as the vulnerable next-door neighbour, while tenants remain largely individualised. This makes the crisis harder to politicise. Yet Thessaloniki also shows signs of institutional and social innovation: the country’s first social rental agency, the first post-war tenants’ union and a municipal party that has placed housing on the city’s agenda. Drawing on my research on the Greek housing property regime and my involvement in tenant organising, I propose rent relations as an entry point into the city’s socio-spatial restructuring. Mapping this crisis requires more than mapping actors, transactions or investment flows. It requires making visible the moral narratives, legal arrangements, social imaginaries and everyday antagonisms that organise access to housing in a city still governed by the common sense of property.

This study explores the gendered everyday production of public space and urban encounters, focusing on migrant women's experiences in public spaces. Engaging with the literature on migration, feminist geography, and urban planning, the research identifies critical gaps in understanding migrant women's experiences through both universal frameworks and individual identities. Drawing on Lefebvre's theory of the production of space and the theoretical framework of intersectionality, the study aims to examine the geographical, social, and planning dimensions of migrant women's interactions with public urban spaces in Thessaloniki, Greece. By integrating intersectionality with the production of space, this approach offers a nuanced exploration of everyday, often overlooked encounters that shape migrant women’s experiences in the city. These encounters are situated within the complex power dynamics of public spaces that influence how migrant women navigate urban environments and negotiate their identities. The study emphasizes how these spaces, both physical and social, can serve as sites of exclusion, appropriation or resistance, revealing the broader societal impacts of urban planning and offering insight in policy. Adopting a qualitative methodology, including walking/go-along interviews and the story completion method, the research collected and analyzed data to provide a comprehensive understanding of these lived experiences. This early-stage study lays the groundwork for further analysis and contributions, offering new insights into the intersection of gender, migration, and public space, and contributing to discussions on urban policy, inclusivity, and spatial justice for marginalized groups. It aims to understand the geographical, social, and planning dimensions of migrant women's experiences in contemporary urban public spaces in Thessaloniki, Greece.

This contribution develops a feminist urban geopolitics of Thessaloniki by examining how informal labour and care, housing precarity, and energy insecurity intersect within a context of austerity, tourism-led redevelopment, and deepening inequalities. It explores how these dynamics shape everyday life and urban space, while opening up sites of negotiation and contestation. Drawing on Pain’s (2021) concept of geotrauma, the paper uses it as a lens for understanding the cumulative, spatialised entanglement of intimate and structural forms of violence. It situates geotrauma within ongoing political-economic transformations, such as tightening rental markets, the expansion of short-term rentals, and uneven energy transitions, that produce new forms of urban dispossession. In this way, the paper connects geotrauma to the housing–energy–wellbeing nexus, highlighting how infrastructures and markets become key sites through which these processes are lived and mediated. Rather than centring trauma as a defining condition, we foreground how these processes are navigated, contested, and reworked in everyday life. The analysis builds on five in-depth narrative interviews with migrant women, five expert interviews with municipal actors and NGOs, and a focus group conducted through a mobile urban living lab in a central public space. These engagements foreground everyday practices through which women navigate housing and energy constraints, mobilise informal networks, and engage in mutual aid and neighbourhood organising. The paper highlights how women shape and sustain their lives under conditions of uncertainty. It shifts attention from vulnerability as a fixed identity to situated agency through which urban life is sustained and reconfigured and argues that housing and energy constitute key terrains of feminist territorial politics, where questions of staying, caring, and belonging are actively negotiated. In doing so, the paper advances a repoliticised understanding of geotrauma and contributes to debates on urban inequality, social reproduction, and feminist geopolitics in Southern European cities

This paper examines the role of migrant women as everyday actors in the production of urban space in Thessaloniki, through the lens of feminist geography. In a city undergoing uneven and often “unmapped” socio-spatial transformations, it focuses on lived geographies that remain marginal to dominant urban narratives. Drawing on creative interviews and participatory mapping, the research foregrounds the lived geographies of care, desire, and survival that shape migrant women’s everyday experiences. These practices form informal infrastructures of care and solidarity which, although often invisible, are crucial for sustaining urban life and navigating socio-spatial inequalities. The paper argues that feminist counter-mapping redefines the question of “who produces the city” by shifting attention from formal planning processes to embodied experience and everyday practices. In doing so, it challenges dominant representations of the city and makes visible the ways in which urban space is continuously produced “from below.” By tracing these practices, the paper contributes to debates on contemporary socio-spatial transformations in Thessaloniki, highlighting how migrant women actively rework the urban fabric through situated, relational, and often overlooked forms of agency. It thus positions care and everyday spatial practices as key to understanding the city’s emerging, yet largely unmapped, geographies.