Metro-logistica. Un’etnografia affettiva su infrastrutture, assemblaggi e mobilità multiscalari (d)a Exarchia, Atene

This research ethnographically examines the transformations of Exarchia, a central Athenian neighborhood long framed—by institutional, touristic, and academic narratives—as the city’s “anarchist stronghold.” Such representations have simultaneously overexposed and weakened the historically embedded networks of solidarity, care, and mutual aid that residents continue to sustain, repair, and reinvent. The thesis investigates the political life of infrastructures—conceived not only as material artifacts but also as relational and conceptual formations—within these processes of urban and social change. It argues that infrastructures stratify and interweave into socio-technical assemblages where physical and digital systems, practices of use and counter-use, acts of maintenance and sabotage, discourses, and power relations intersect. Through these unstable and generative configurations, locality is continuously re-signified, while global processes become “indigenized” (Appadurai 1996) in what the research defines as a “collapse of scales.” Fieldwork focuses on the neighborhood’s only square, now entirely occupied by the construction site of the future Line 4 metro station. Taking infrastructure “as lens and as method” (Cowen 2020), Exarchia is approached relationally: diachronically, through the long temporalities of its material and symbolic construction, and spatially, as a porous and contested node embedded within the wider city. This “logistical” perspective highlights the circulations of people, capital, and imaginaries that traverse the neighborhood, while seeking to de-exoticize Exarchia and its spatial-political legacy, too often portrayed as exceptional. Ethnography, understood as an immersive, situated, and implicated practice, combined with an interdisciplinary and “patchy” approach (Tsing 2015), illuminates the multiscalar, affective, and more-than-material dimensions of infrastructural space.