WRT
Book Chapter
NEW YORK: CITY COLLEGE NEW YORK
2019

Displaced, in Place, and in Transit

Full title: “Displaced, in Place and in Transit: Refugee Population in Greece and the Formation of Planning Protocols and Domestic Machines.” Book chapter in: Transient Spaces: Building Shelter in Crisis Contexts. New York: The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York. Platon Issaias and Theodossis Issaias.

Team
Platon Issaias
Theodossis Issaias
Categories
Agency, Architecture, Development model, Domesticity, History, Housing, Movements, Planning, Theory, Typology

Violating the provisions of the Versailles (1919) and Sèvres (1920) Treaties that gave regional autonomy and partitioned the collapsing Ottoman Empire expanding European colonial rule towards the east Mediterranean, the Greek Army invaded Ottoman cities of the east Aegean coast and East Thrace, declaring them de facto parts of Greek sovereignty. Greek military forces under the leadership of disillusioned nationalist politicians fuelled by racist ideologies campaigned further to the east, before being forcefully attacked and overwhelmingly defeated by the organized militia of the Turkish National Front. The Greek-Turkish War lasted until October 1922 with massive military and civilian casualties, resulting in about 2 million displaced individuals from both sides. In the few months between September 1922 and January 1923, mainland Greece received 1,2 million refugees, mostly Greek speaking, orthodox Christian subjects of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. The Lausanne Treaty (Jan 1923) signed between the two countries suspended the right to return for all displaced and de-naturalised individuals, declaring them re-naturalized citizens of their – unknown and unfamiliar – “motherlands”. This is how the history of modern town planning in Greece begins: as a response to the unprecedented humanitarian crisis provoked in cities, towns, and rural areas with the arrival of the refugee population. The planning of settlements, the building of domestic units, the re-distribution of agricultural land abandoned by its original Greek-speaking Muslim owners, necessitated the organization of complex bureaucratic procedures, all administered by the Refugee Settlement Committee, a humanitarian agency initiated and supervised by the League of Nations. An uprooted population, registered, classified, divided according to profession and class organized and domesticated in place, through a system of property liquidation and exchange of re-territorialised lost capital and estimated property values.

The essay has the ambition to critically compare the 1920s experience and struggles with the current refugee crisis and its effects in Greece, its cities and its in place, in transit and displaced population. The deployment of contemporary machines of international humanitarian aid – mainly detention and processing centres, or so-called hospitality centres, i.e. militarized camps – coexists with activist interventions: squatting of abandoned properties, open facilities, and a network of solidarity and care. How do contemporary conflicts intervene within various asymmetries and power relations? What kind of architecture, knowledge and practice of city design could emerge from this new reality? How to confront state or international bureaucracy and violence through alternative spatial platforms?

[link to the book]

About

Fatura Collaborative – Research & Design Practice, was founded in 2009 and is developing projects across a wide range of scales, from intimate objects and performance, to architecture, urban design and planning. We are interested in architecture as social infrastructure, in developing collective equipments, in the design of spaces of care, empathy and welfare. We design and research expanding new problematics about ecology, the domestic, everyday life and the city.

Members

ELISAVET HASA
ARCHITECT

is an architect, researcher and educator based in London. She holds a diploma in architecture from the School of Architecture of the University of Patras, Greece (2015) and was awarded a PhD from the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art (2022). Her thesis dealt with the materiality of grassroots, ad hoc and mutual aid projects by social movements in Europe and the United States, with an emphasis on their relationship with the state. She is teaching in undergraduate architectural design studios and history and theory courses at the London South Bank University and Central Saint Martins. She is also a registered architect in the UK (ARB) and Greece (TCG) and has practiced architecture in London, Madrid and Athens.

PLATON ISSAIAS
ARCHITECT

is an architect, researcher, and educator. He studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds an MSc from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft and The City as a Project research collective. He is Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the co-Head of Projective Cities MPhil programme at the Architectural Association, where he is also teaching Diploma Unit 7 with Georgia Hablützel and Hamed Khosravi. His research interests explore urban design and architecture in relation to the politics of labour, economy, law and labour struggles. He has written and lectured extensively about Greek urbanisation and the politics of urban development.

THEODOSSIS ISSAIAS
ARCHITECT

(he/him) is an architect and educator. He serves as Curator, Heinz Architectural Center, at Carnegie
Museum of Art and Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. He studied
architecture in Athens, Greece, and holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on architecture at the intersection of
human rights, conflict, and the provision of shelter. This interest led to his PhD dissertation
“Architectures of the Humanitarian Front” (2021, Yale University), which examined a period
around WWI when conflict, displacement, and territorial insecurity provoked the reconfiguration
of humanitarian operations –their spatial organization and ethical imperatives.

GIANNANTONIS MOUTSATSOS
ARCHITECT

is an architect based in Lund, Sweden. He graduated in 2010 from the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens and holds an MSc in Energy Efficient and Environmental Building Design from the School of Architecture of Lund University (2015). He has practiced architecture as a freelance architect in Greece and currently in Sweden (eg. Tengbom architects), where he works on a wide range of projects including small houses, larger residential complexes as well as care, educational and industrial facilities.

ALEXANDRA VOUGIA
ARCHITECT

is an architect and an educator. She graduated in 2007 from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds the MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from GSAPP, Columbia University (2008) and a PhD from the Architectural Association – School of Architecture, London (2016). She is currently an Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has previously taught at the Architectural Association and the University of Westminster and practiced as an architect in New York and Athens.

MYRTO VRAVOSINOU
ARCHITECT

is an architect based in Thessaloniki. She graduated from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2015 and holds an MSc in Environmental Architectural and Urban Design from the same institution (2023). Since 2017, she has been collaborating with a group of freelance engineers, working on a variety of residential, workspace, and small-scale digital fabrication projects. Her special interests lie in urban and architectural design practices that promote spatial justice.

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