Contested Landscapes Of Poverty And Homelessness In Southern Europe

The book uses Athens as a case study to identify the key features of urban anti-poverty policies in Greece and to discuss them in relation to policy developments in the crisis-ridden countries of Southern Europe. The idea of contested landscapes shapes the focus of the book on urban poverty and homelessness. Contested landscapes refer to the complex dynamics between visible and invisible poverty and to competing strategies on how to address them. The book takes a path-dependent view on the development of post-welfare arrangements, devolution, and pluralism that are being shaped by both neoliberal mentality, solidarity and communitarian practices. The authors draw on their own research and advocacy background in New York and Athens to shape their conceptual and methodological tools; however, rather than uncritically ‘importing’ North American and North European concepts to Greece, the book highlights the significance of distinctive Mediterranean features for analysing homelessness and anti-poverty policies. This will be a useful read for academics policy makers in areas of urban studies, sociology, social policy, human geography and anthropology.

As the European Union continues to struggle to establish a common agenda on tackling social problems, this compelling book presents a set of comparative sociological studies in southern European countries from leading scholars working in the region. It widens the debate by looking at the specific social problems of southern Europe and highlights the shared trends and critical regional disparities that may improve our understanding of Mediterranean welfare states.

This handbook provides a comprehensive global survey and assessment of the law and policy relating to homelessness prevention. Homelessness is regarded internationally as one of the most pressing issues facing humanity and one of the greatest social challenges of our times. This has been further amplified as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Across the globe, there is an enormous divergence in both experiences of and responses to homelessness from governments and state actors. This handbook examines how different jurisdictions from across all five continents of the world have encountered, framed and responded to homelessness. Written by expert scholars and leaders in their field, the book engages in a multidisciplinary and comparative analysis of homelessness as an issue of acute social concern. Understandings of homelessness are geographically, culturally and historically situated, making analysis of each jurisdiction’s approach by a national expert deeply insightful. The collection examines legal and extra-legal policy interventions targeted at reducing or preventing homelessness from across the globe. Drawing on diverse perspectives, differing cultures and welfare regimes, it thus constitutes a timely evaluation of current approaches to homelessness internationally. This book will appeal to students and scholars of homelessness, sociology, social policy, anthropology, and urban sociology, as well as international and national policymakers.

This open access book offers a cross-disciplinary view of challenging mobility issues for migrants and refugees in Europe and particularly Greece during the last decade when the economic and refugee crises coincided. It offers new analyses and data on a diverse range of topics concerning new emigrants as well as refugees and mobilities in Greece. The book covers themes which are not only related to refugee and immigrant integration and governance challenges, but also describes host attitudes, solidarity, political and protest claims in the public sphere, as well as the changing emigration environment in Greece within a European context. With contributions from the fields of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, geography and linguistics, this book provides a unique resource for students and scholars, but also for policy-makers and social scientists working on migration-related issues within and beyond Europe.

This open access book explores the formation and socio-spatial trajectories of large housing estates in Europe. Are these estates clustered or scattered? Which social groups originally had access to residential space in housing estates? What is the size, scale and geography of housing estates, their architectural and built environment composition, services and neighbourhood amenities, and metropolitan connectivity? How do housing estates contribute to the urban mosaic of neighborhoods by ethnic and socio-economic status? What types of policies and planning initiatives have been implemented in order to prevent the social downgrading of housing estates? The collection of chapters in this book addresses these questions from a new perspective previously unexplored in scholarly literature. The social aspects of housing estates are thoroughly investigated (including socio-demographic and economic characteristics of current and past inhabitants; ethnicity and segregation patterns; population dynamics; etc.), and the physical composition of housing estates is described in significant detail (including building materials; building form; architectural and landscape design; built environment characteristics; etc.). This book is timely because the recent global economic crisis and Europe’s immigration crisis demand a thorough investigation of the role large housing estates play in poverty and ethnic concentration. Through case studies of housing estates in 14 European centers, the book also identifies policy measures that have been used to address challenges in housing estates throughout Europe.

Exploring the social implications of dense and compact cities, this enlightening book looks at micro-scale segregation through several lenses. These include the ways that the housing market constantly reconfigures social mix, how the structure of the housing stock shapes it, and the ways that policies are deployed to manage these effects.

Since 2015, the ‘refugee crisis’ is possibly the most photographed humanitarian crises in history. Photographs taken, for instance, in Lesvos, Greece, and Bodrum, Turkey, were instrumental in generating waves of public support for, and populist opposition to “welcoming refugees” in Europe. But photographs do not circulate in a vacuum; this book explores the visual economy of the ‘refugee crisis,’ showing how the reproduction of images is structured by, and secures hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and ‘race,’ essential to the functioning of bordered nation-states. Taking photography not only as the object of research, but innovating the method of photographìa— the material trace of writing/grafì with light/phos— this book urges us to view images and their reproduction critically. Part theoretical text, part visual essay, Reproducing Refugees vividly shows how institutional violence underpins both the spectacularity and the banality of ‘crisis.’ This book goes about synthesising visual studies with queer, feminist, postcolonial, post-structuralist, and post-Marxist theories. Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi offer theoretical frameworks and methodological tools to critically analyse representations, both those circulated through hegemonic institutions, and those generated from ‘below’. They carve a space between logos and praxis, ways of knowing and ways of doing, by offering a new visual language that problematises reified categories such as that of the ‘refugee’ and makes possible disruptive, alternative, resistant perceptions. The book contributes to the fields of migration and border studies, critically engaging visual narratives drawn from migration movements to question dominant categories and frameworks, from a decolonial, no-borders, queer feminist perspective.

This book offers a detailed analysis of the efforts made to reduce poverty and social exclusion in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece.