Athens’ Syntagma Square Re-loaded from staging disagreement towards instituting democratic spaces

Since the outbreak of a more-than-economic crisis in the Global North, urban politics and public spaces have undergone profound transformations. On one hand, the dominant response to the crisis revolves around the implementation of austerity policies and the closing down of urban public spaces where political disagreement can be expressed (Swyngedouw 2014). On the other hand, urban public spaces stubbornly retain their role as the stage for processes of re-politicization and massive urban uprisings beginning in 2011. During that “year of dreaming dangerously” (Žižek 2012) the initial insurgencies in Tunis and Cairo soon leapfrogged to Barcelona, Madrid, Athens, and Thessaloniki and moved to North America and the European North, from the heart of London to smaller towns in the south of Germany and beyond. In the following years Taksim Square in Istanbul became the pivot point for an uprising that defended Gezi Park from Erdoğan’s “urban neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics” (Karaman 2013a, Yiğit Turan, this volume), whilst an increase in public transport fares at São Paulo led to extensive urban uprisings in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other Brazilian cities that persisted during Brazil’s 2014 Football World Cup.