Drawing from van Gennep’s theory, Victor Turner has focused exactly on this threat: transformation already contains the seed of dissent, the seed of deviation. People experiencing changes connected with social identity transformation, people passing through an intermediary period during which they are being prepared for their new social duties, can possibly discover ways to challenge dominant identities. Especially in the process of abandoning former identities, often expressed by the creation of an in-between community of equals with no differentiating characteristics. In this space, communitas in Turner’s terminology (1977, 169–170 and 1982, 26–27), there exists a threatening spark of collective rule transgression. In the experience of communitas, initiands become aware of the fact that power may suspend the rules of identity. They are not-anymore but simultaneously not-as-yet. Their social obligations and rights are suspended, but with this their awareness of the social order may arise. They will be able to see identities are social constructions and people can communicate and act together without them or by exploring ones different from those for which they are being prepared. Emergent identities are identities to be learned. That is why so often initiation through rites of passage is connected with impersonation and disguise.9 Novices often dress as animals, wear masks, or paint their bodies to distinguish themselves from customary behavior and appearance. As they are obliged by ritual to strip themselves of any recognizable identity, they also have to prove that they are ready to attain a new identity status. Rehearsing identities is a strictly regulated procedure.
People inevitably acquire a very important social dexterity: to be able to become other, to be able to be in someone else’s place. It is here that the power of inhabiting thresholds as in-between space-times lies. To be able to experience changes in identity, to be able to rehearse, test, check, and visit otherness potentially means acquiring the power to negotiate with otherness. For Turner (1982, 27), these initiating visits to otherness expose learned habits and can open identities to unexpected changes.
Recognizing, opening, creating, and inhabiting thresholds is an important characteristic of emergent emancipatory spatialities. Opportunities for encounters with otherness—which activate comparisons, negotiations, and inventive transformations—are necessary for any attempt to go beyond existing social taxonomies and values. Throughout this book, the idea of a city of thresholds will be explored. It will be argued that we can describe a process of spatiotemporal creation through which emancipatory experiences may arise. Can we perhaps recognize glimpses of such a process in current urban mobilizations and demands? And, can we locate the potential or actual characteristics of urban movements that would support this view?
The fragmented and ambiguous experiences of protests that oppose the growing tendency to fence and control open public spaces in Athens might offer us the opportunity to answer these questions. Local authorities and the government aim to prove that Athens is safe for its inhabitants and visiting tourists. This was particularly evident in the context of preparing the city for the 2004 Olympic Games. In a localized version of an international security mania, allegedly “uncontrollable” public city parks were surrounded by tall fences, restricting access through gates that closed at night.10 In the case of the Philopapou cliff, where some important ancient ruins are located, this was presented as an effort to protect them. The fences were mainly used to establish entrance prices to what was formerly open public space. Pedion tou Areos, a park in the center of Athens, was presented as a dangerous area needing to be controlled, while in fact it is a place where public life is rich and varied. Policing the park meant chasing stigmatized minorities, such as poor immigrants or homosexuals, out of the area.
Many local residents both in Philopapou and Pedion tou Areos demonstrated against the fences. In many cases people gathered outside parks and collectively destroyed the newly built structures. Through acts of urban civil disobedience, people joined together to oppose the transformation of public spaces into controllable and discriminating enclaves. They equally refused to accept the privatization of parts of those public spaces (an arbitrarily growing athletic center in Pedion tou Areos or the large areas of Philopapou colonized by restaurants and coffee shops). The interesting thing about these mobilizations is not only the unpredictable acts of actually demolishing fencing constructions but also the diversity of people involved. No political party initiated these demands or acts, and neighborhood assemblies were organized with no formal or institutionalized support. In the Philopapou area, a few residents took the initiative to call for a neighborhood meeting. Five hundred people responded and in three cases (on November 3, 2002; March 10, 2003; and September 12, 2003) the assembly collectively voted to tear down the fence and promptly did so. Eventually, a loose network was formed out of various similarly mobilized groups aiming to coordinate efforts.
In these acts we see how an urban movement can form spontaneously in response to major governmental interventions in a neighborhood. An urban movement “makes urban demands which challenge existing policies and practices” (Pickvance 1995, 198). In these cases, the demands are not limited to a neighborhood enclave of outdoor public space but rather aim to ensure unrestricted public use of similar spaces all over the city. To quote from the declaration of the People’s Committee for the Protection of Pedion tou Areos: “We want the park to be a free public space, accessible to all Athenians, easy to use, safe and beautiful.” This statement condenses an approach to public space that does not limit itself to the protection of neighborhood green enclaves to be used by those who live nearby but invites all city-dwellers to enjoy them.
These mobilizations explicitly oppose the model of tourist-oriented public space that has already forced residents to leave gentrified areas around the city center, as with the Plaka and in Psiri. Instead of contributing to local demands for security, policing the streets and eventually supporting homogenized collective urban identities, these movements create—consciously or not—thresholds in public space. Their forms of organization support the public coexistence of differentiated identities that aim at mutual recognition. Their action are focused on defending the essentially porous character of the perimeter of the spaces they aim to keep open to all.
From the city of enclaves to the city of thresholds
Might not we consider these anti-enclosure movements as part of a multifarious and sometimes even contradictory effort to oppose the partitioning of city space? The measures taken during the 2003 Greek Presidency of the Council of the European Union or during the 2004 Olympic Games pushed the policy of fencing and controlling public space to its limits. The city center of Athens had become a highly controlled area, with temporary fences in many cases made permanent while police blocks proliferated.
By actively refusing to accept the erection of temporary nogo zones (red zones), protesters expressed their opposition to the ongoing partitioning and surveillance of public space. These multicolored blocks of young activists of “alter-globalization” movements expressly show that public space should be where different identities are allowed to communicate, meet, exchange ideas and longings, and interact. A city of thresholds sometimes emerges when public space is occupied, organized, and made porous by all these different people. Both symbolically and practically, these groups create an open-to-all public urban space.
If a new form of governance is tested in the temporary-permanent construction of red zones, a new form of emancipating culture is spontaneously tested in public space. In the migratory and ephemeral practices of social movements oriented towards urban demands, this potentially emancipating culture is ambiguously performed. The more these acts of essentially urban protest spread in the city, the more we can hope for passages to replace metastatic checkpoints. Perhaps instead of the “bourgeois utopia” of completely secure urban enclaves (Davis 1992), or the fantasy of identity-conferring ghettoes, we can see the emergence of porous public spaces: the heterotopias. An open city is a city of thresholds (Stavrides 2002, 2007).
Perhaps, in the renewed project of social emancipation, we can replace the rhythms that define checkpoints with those that define turning points. At these thresholds a new concept of time will emerge. A new epoch is thus marked by a critical rupture in social time. Walter Benjamin calls this “messianic time.” As we will see in chapter