The Hidden Abode of Space Production in Post-Crisis Greece
The Hidden Abode of Space Production in Post-Crisis Greece
Monday, 7 July 2025: 01:15
Location: ASJE021 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
Oral Presentation
The construction site of Hub26 expected to rise as exemplary net-zero office spaces in the relegated west side of Thessaloniki is financed with green bonds,
vaunting its high environmentally friendly construction standards, hinged on the green steel and ‘green’ concrete that will hold it together and its LEED Platinum certificate. I focus on the actors and factors involved in the construction of this new urban landscape and I juxtapose their richly rewarded green discourse with the widening net of precarity in the value chain of construction materials that converge on the construction site (iron, concrete, aluminum, bricks) but also the disorganization of labor in state echelons responsible for space production (urban planners, procurement, licensing). Tracing the steel billets holding concrete together at this site mushrooming in the west side of the Greek metropolis, I am led back to the steel making furnace burning the remnants of dissolved space, leftovers of debt and then to the ordeal of the marginalized communities of scrap collectors.
vaunting its high environmentally friendly construction standards, hinged on the green steel and ‘green’ concrete that will hold it together and its LEED Platinum certificate. I focus on the actors and factors involved in the construction of this new urban landscape and I juxtapose their richly rewarded green discourse with the widening net of precarity in the value chain of construction materials that converge on the construction site (iron, concrete, aluminum, bricks) but also the disorganization of labor in state echelons responsible for space production (urban planners, procurement, licensing). Tracing the steel billets holding concrete together at this site mushrooming in the west side of the Greek metropolis, I am led back to the steel making furnace burning the remnants of dissolved space, leftovers of debt and then to the ordeal of the marginalized communities of scrap collectors.