Digital Anchors of Displacement

[Re]claiming Space on the Unsettled Grounds of Athens

Abstract

This paper examines how digital platforms have functioned as spatial anchors for forcibly displaced people in Athens following the ‘long summer of migration’ in 2015, when the ability to claim or inhabit space was often precarious, temporary or denied altogether. Drawing on my fieldwork in Athens, it traces how migrants and grassroots collectives have used digital means to assert presence, build connections and make claims to space in a city that became a threshold for migration.

The physical geographies of displacement in Greece shifted significantly after the 2019 parliamentary elections, when the new centre-right government escalated the eviction of informal housing spaces for migrants. These changes, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, further destabilised initiatives with already fragile infrastructures. In this climate, ‘hybrid spatialities’ that were formed through the interplay of physical and digital practices became integral to political claims. Digital engagement acted as an extension, and at times a substitute to material space where access to the urban realm was restricted by legal, economic and political constraints.

Rather than idealising the digital as inherently emancipatory, this paper frames it as a complex terrain which facilitates visibility and connection while being prone to exposure and bound by conditions of precarity. It probes practices of solidarity anchored digitally in the context of forced migration when both literal and political ground is unsettled, and considers how such hybrid spatialities reveal modes of relating to space that exceed the physical. Focusing on three projects in Athens—a city shaped by overlapping crises and contested spatial claims, this paper contributes to debates on architectures of displacement, urban precarity and digital geographies. It argues that the digital is increasingly a contested field of reclaiming space, and examines how such spatial claims are articulated and sustained when material access is constrained.