Where the square still is. Care, security, and infrastructure in Exarchia, Athens

Urban life has long condensed itself around squares: spaces of encounter, circulation, celebration, exchange, and conflict, where everyday routines intersect with extraordinary events and collective life becomes visible. This is also the case of Exarchia Square in Athens. Exarchia is a dense innercity neighbourhood, historically known as a political, cultural, and social reference. Its square has functioned not only as a meeting place or a site of political mobilisation, but as a lived environment shaped by informal practices, affective attachments (Navaro-Yashin 2009), and layered memories (Kenti Kranidioti 2023). Over the past decade, Exarchia has been increasingly exposed to overlapping and contested processes of touristification, real-estate pressure, and large-scale urban regeneration – processes whose outcomes remain uncertain and whose effects on the neighbourhood’s material fabric and social composition are still being actively fought over (Pettas, 2019, Pettas et al. 2022). The construction of Line 4 of the Athens metro – and, more specifically, the decision to construct a station in the Square – has emerged as a highly contentious infrastructural intervention. For many inhabitants, this project has not appeared as a neutral improvement of urban mobility, but as part of a broader attempt to reorder the square according to a precise spatial and moral imaginary, one privileging legibility, control, and regulated forms of use over informality, openness, and political unpredictability. Exarchia Square thus stands at the intersection of competing visions of urban life, where different urban futures are projected and disputed: futures articulated through infrastructural promises of security, regeneration, and aesthetic order, and futures grounded in lived practices, persistence, and attachment. It is within this collision of material transformations, memories, and imaginaries that the square has become a site of struggle, revealing the political stakes embedded in contemporary urban environments.