Spatial proximity and social distances: vertical social differentiation in an appartment block of Athens

Besides tangible differences, the Greek residents’ stories express cultural processes of social distancing. On an early afternoon during one of the discussions on the third floor, cooking odours enter the flat from the kitchen’s window: ‘their food smells bad’ the discussant emphatically said referring to her neighbours below. While the man living in the adjacent flat mentioned that ‘[he dislikes] the immigrants who live here’, the one from the bright and quiet 65sqm last floor said that he would accept social proximity with Philippinos in a labour commitment: ‘as [his] gardeners’, for example. Nevertheless, beyond inter-ethnic dynamics broader concerns about the weak nowadays social bonds were expressed: ‘each of us lives on his/her own, we do not spend time altogether’; and ‘there are not families here anymore’, an opinion that seems to overlook one Greek and two Philippino nuclear families. Regarding the everyday interaction within the building, there appears a perhaps ‘polarised’ pattern: Greek households indicated contacts that are strongly limited amongst themselves, thus on the highest floors, and without links with the building’s foreign ethnicities. Similarly, the Bangladeshi residents of the lowest floors showed the own ‘cluster’ through their in-group interaction and activation of the common spaces, namely the main entrance (see Figure 2). Practical issues, such as linguistic barriers, were mentioned regarding inter-ethnic communication while an exploration of the Philippino side would considerably enrich the image. Nevertheless, merely ethnicity does not automatically result in social proximity: for instance, the Greek man of the basement is excluded from the upper-floor daily interactions; he appears in the ‘native’ discourse as ‘the drunken one’ and ‘who has issues with the police’.

Figure 2: Interaction among residents of the building at Arktinou street: floor, nationality and concentration

In this stratified social space, Greek residents are located almost exclusively on its summit, namely the upper-floor apartments of improved living quality. From there they possess the power to shape a discourse that distinguishes themselves and defines the ‘other’. The least privileged positions in the spatial hierarchy belong mainly to migrant households who live on the lowest floors. Limited housing qualities, tenancy status and low occupational categories characterise this part of the polykatoikia. Migrant residents do not compose a uniform group though as differentiations appear in terms of housing quality, domestic space per capita and household type. The overall by-floor spatialisation seems to be generally correlated with, and an expression of an ethnic group’s presence in the city, and consequently of the individually and collectively possessed social capital. Yet any general ‘image’ is challenged by the ‘native’ presence in the basement: the man’s unfavourable social and spatial positioning exceeds any taken-for-granted ‘integration’ that may derive from homeownership, and reveals a possible class-based exclusion within the overall ethnic-based exclusion.

The described social space though can be interpreted through the symbolisms it creates and reproduces especially when linked to actual space, the latter offering the ground for the condition’s ‘naturalisation’. Via processes of ‘social spatialisation’ (Shields 1991), dominant groups may signify material space in a way in order to establish specific, and often explicitly desired, perceptions within a system of social hierarchies; it is the same system which the world will be afterwards understood through. The vertical social differentiation of the Athenian polykatoikia may have to suggest something more than a mere coexistence between Greeks and non-Greeks. The building’s spatial stratification can prescribe a specific vocabulary and imagination of the hierarchy: some are placed ‘above’ while others are placed ‘below’. Accordingly, the ‘verticality’ of cities becomes often an allegory of power relations (Hewitt & Graham 2015). As if in an Athenian version of sci-fi movies (such as Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’), the Greeks’ stories of the polykatoikia in Arktinou street show that their ‘otherness’ may not only be of different skin colour or nationality: it can also be the one ‘from below’, ‘of the basement’. And the owned apartment, when combined with ethnicity, further clusters —materially throughout floors, symbolically through relationships— ‘native’ residents. Nevertheless social proximity cannot be adequately guaranteed by ethnicity and homeownership as these lines of division intersect with that one of class too, as the case of the basement’s Greek resident indicates. Like a material demonstration of those who are placed ‘above’, a Greek flag is visible on the last floor’s balcony: it marks an imagined ‘native territory’, shaped on the building’s upper part. This territory is located ‘above’ foreign nationals, tenants or even Greek homeowners of lower social classes, expressing dimensions of social status and symbolic exclusion. The socio-spatial positioning —and distancing from the upper-floor community— of the Greek household in the basement may nowadays signify a ‘native counter-territory’: one that is being shaped ‘below’ and ‘belongs to’ an emerging underclass that still possesses benefits of a family-based ‘welfare system’ (such as homeownership).

To conclude, there exists a multiplicity of ‘moral geographies’ (see Cresswell 2005) that may be constructed within the vertical social differentiation of the Athenian polykatoikia, especially when the phenomenon is so widespread in central neighbourhoods. Departing from the actual space and the included complexity of interrelations and inequalities, the verticality of a coexistence between Greeks and migrants is subject to specific significations. Class, ethnicity and floor of residence intersect within the building’s social space and orachestrate a dominant vocabulary. In the collected ‘native’ discourse some appear to ‘belong’ to lower floors while others to higher, a view that can contribute to broader perceptions about ‘who belongs where’ in the vertical social hierarchy. It is this very ‘belonging’ in the polykatoikia’s material space and its correlation with the ‘belonging’ in the imagined social verticality that we need to investigate. For the in-between area of the two spheres legitimises actions that establish and reproduce ideologies and beliefs that section the city vertically; constantly in between allegory and reality.

[1] The study was conducted in the summer of 2013, as part of the author’s master thesis for the University of Vienna, under the supervision of Jesus Leal (Universidad Complutense de Madrid).