Everyday Environmental Politics Along the Coast of Thessaloniki
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13133/2532-6562/19057Keywords:
urban waterfronts, environmental politics, urban nature, ThessalonikiAbstract
This paper explores urban waterfronts as sites where competing «ecological imaginaries» (Gandy, 2007) unfold and collide. Formal planning discourses, aligned with global mandates of urban competitiveness, sustainable development, and climate resilience, often conceptualise the coast as a purely natural asset, devoid of social meaning or everyday use value for local residents poised to realise its development potential and thereby contribute to urban resilience. In contrast, resident-led movements are grounded in different ecological imaginaries – ones that view the coast as a common good and as a hybrid socio-natural terrain rich with embedded meanings and material qualities. Adopting this understanding of the waterfront as a
contested terrain – where dominant imaginaries of ‘ecological modernisation’ coexist and collide with diverse, lived ecological imaginaries of the everyday
– the paper examines the case of Thessaloniki’s waterfront. The case study focuses on environmental politics as they manifest along the Eastern, less developed part of the city’s coastline.
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