BEST PRACTICE EXAMPLE • Emerging Urban Diversities and the Walking Realm: Learnings from Eleusis 2023

An Article written by
Dimitra Kanellopoulou
19 July 2024
15 mn

When first visiting the city of Eleusis, the small team of architects arriving from France had only one ‘tool in hand’, walking with the city's inhabitants, searching to explore the elements with which the modern identity of Eleusis is about to be formed. Visiting the workshop site for three consecutive years (2021-2023) and questioning the variety of ways of experiencing public space but also searching for ways in which inherent diversity of the city could lead to emerging new spaces and opportunities of public life, was a bet that the team spontaneously wanted to take. Walking, talking with diverse minorities among the population and local actors and proposing various acts of appropriation of off-center, abandoned spaces, the team of Revisiting the landscapes of Eleusina aimed to understand how investing and federating around the emergence of diverse landscapes and practices in public space can form a new collective narrative of the city’s life and becoming.

1. The question of diversity in urban environments

The question of diversity has long been in the vogue of discussions in politics, urban planning and humanities’ studies. In Arts, diversity has become a celebrated issue for claiming minority groups’ rights and highlighting various marginal conditions. Other than a prominent subject in performing arts or staged actions, diversity is a structural element of human communities and has become an upper line matter in contemporary urban environments' evolution. The difficulty of finding a proper definition of the concept is added to the difficulty of achieving diversity as a fundamental condition for human communities. While the concept of diversity is imminently linked to human species it is often examined through physical appearance, economic social status and body’s expressions. As it concerns the physical space, diversity is mostly negotiated in public space through the variety of urban forms and the multiple ways of practising the city depending on our social status, ethnic or age group. The concept of diversity is linked - since the dawn of modern metropolises - to the quest of social, cultural innovation and progress. Consequently, talking about diversity leads professions related to the Urban, to talk about ways of inclusion and involvement of different groups of people in debates and Best practice example actions concerning the transformation of urban environments. It would not be therefore exaggerated to argue that the diversity concept is eminently linked to community and collectivity. Since the 1960s, Art has been going outside in city’s squares, piazzas, streets 1. An apparent diversity of social life in the city, hidden growing hierarchical differences in power making the living experience of the city an exposure to difference and injustice (2). The sociologist Richard Sennett talks about difference and diversity as primordial qualities of urban realism and invites us to have a closer look at marginal and left over spaces in order to celebrate their structural role in social and cultural life (3). Although diversity is recognised as a highly valued quality for city life and urbanity, it also becomes an endangered characteristic in nowadays globalised world of homogenised trends in living and design principles (4). Arts play a major role in cultural expression and can provide in fact an efficient ‘vehicle’ in promoting cultural pluralism (5). Cities are spaces of high heterogeneity and production of systematic powers of domination, exclusion, and segregation. Debates are flourishing on the potential of certain environments to have a restorative role facing social marginalisation and city fabric’s enclosures. Different scholars suggest that problems of lack of diversity are in fact the result of lack of urban cohesion especially between public spaces. The debate is still open on how cities' diverse territories can offer new narratives on community life, citizenship empowerment and emergent public spheres in a context of recurrent economic and environmental crisis. 

walk in the shipwreck area  at the west coast of Eleusis, guided by Alexandros Mistriotis. Among the participants, students from the department of Seine Saint Denis. Credits : author, 2023

2. Walking as method to understand urban environment

Since 19th century’s flaneurs to the seminal work of the american journalist Jane Jacobs, walking is celebrated as a medium of exploring complex urban realities and being related to modernity and urban condition 9. From the wandering experiments of the French situationist Guy Debord to the more structured methods of the american architect and planner Kevin Lynch, walking is progressively developped as a successful tool of exploring urban dynamics. Social sciences have for a long time worked with walking as a method of analysing living conditions, daily practices and social interactions 10 as walking considerably experience differs in relation to urban, social and spatial inequalities. Since the 1960s, walking has been particularly explored in arts (see the work of Richard Long or Hamish Fulton) as a practice of new modes of perception and comprehension of the relationship between space, time, body 11. Numerous books deal with the question of walking as an operational element of understanding a city's function and evolving imaginaries 12. As Andrew Goodman suggests 13 “Walking invites an intimacy and active engagement with the singularities composing an experience that splits the homogenising actions of the city”. The anthropologists Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst invite us to focuson the link between social rhythms, emotions and thinking 14. WalkingLab, an international research-creation project, proposes the creation of collaborative networks around walking methodologies and pedagogy 15. For the artist Claire Blundell Jones walking is an act of placemaking and embodied experience 16. Walk-along interviews have been used as methods of understanding gentrification but also patterns of urbanisation 17. During their experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz (2014, p. 1142) show how walking can activate creativity and reflection on ourselves18. Other researchers argue that moderate intensity ‘natural’ walking relaxes executive functions and opens for a ‘flexibility pathway’ of associative thinking and ideation 19. But walking is also a means through which meanings about places of one's everyday life are produced. The walking practice contributes to feelings of joy or sadness, wellbeing or dis-comfort 20. The French philosopher Michel de Certeau, celebrated walking as a powerful mode of political resistance against planners and architects whose projects often tend to impose order on city spaces 21. In fact, walking can be a quite useful method to gain insights into an urban space, its history, and practices of different groups during the process of heritagisation 22. Furthermore, as Filipa Matos Wunderlich argues, walking rhythmicities produced by the differences of people engaging this ancestral practice, intercourse with places temporalities and transformed urban environments in sensed realities 23.

Walk in the area of the abandonned factory for the production of wine and spirits, KRONOS © Dimitra Kanellopoulou, 2022

The Eleusis experience

When back in 2017 the French architect Patrick Bouchain visited the town of Eleusis (Greece) in the context of preparations of the European Capital of Culture candidacy, the territory deployed in front of his eyes was trickiest with numerous unshelled elements for the ‘eye’ of a visitor coming from abroad. Alas, Bouchain, accompanied with his close friend and director of the circus arts’ institution le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde 25 Eleftérios Kechagioglou, were already familiarised with other experiences in France on immersion methodologies with the objective to better understand an urban environment. Eleusis, this small port town close to Greek capital with a heavy historical past full of tales from Greek mythology, ancient remnants, traces of antiquity activities between classical Athens and the sanctuary dedicated to Demeter, and Kore (Persephone) evolves today as a noisy amalgam of cement buildings, industrial activities, shipwrecks and famous archaeological sites (such as the Eleusinion but also the prehistoric tombs of the "Western Cemetery'' that has been identified as the tomb of "Seven against Thebes”). In a distance of only twenty kilometers from the city of Athens, Eleusis, was until the very recent years a marginalised zone, reputed for its dominant industrial landscape, the constant degradation of the environment, the occupation of the coastal line from port and refinery activities. From the celebrated past of flourishing industry of the beginning of the 20th century some buildings remained until 26 The team was formed thanks to the initiative of Patrick Bouchain, Loic Julienne (from the French architecture firm Construire and Eleftherios Kechagioglou the director of Le plus Petit Cirque du Monde. 27 The workshops were held each year during a period of one week and walking laboratories were conducted basically in the mornings while in the afternoons the team with participants were working on the activation of a public space has been identified as the tomb of "Seven against Thebes”). In a distance of only twenty kilometers from the city of Athens, Eleusis, was until the very recent years a marginalised zone, reputed for its dominant industrial landscape, the constant degradation of the environment, the occupation of the coastal line from port and refinery activities. From the celebrated past of flourishing industry of the beginning of the 20th century some buildings remained until today witnesses of a past glory (such as the Kronos complex, the IRIS building, the ancient oil factory at the seafront...). But this same landscape, celebrated by crowds of Athenians visiting Eleusinian Mysteries in the past and the archaeological site or the Aeschylia Festival nowadays, do not hide its scars, due to extensive exploitation of the landscape for the means of industrial development (like in the marble quarries).

Walk in the neighbourhood of Mikrasiatika (refugees from Asia Minor) © Dimitra Kanellopoulou

The bet of hosting the European Capital of Culture under such uncertain conditions with weak public administration staffing and chronic financial crisis of local authorities and Greek state, was certainly a courageous one but worth making. By the success of the announcement of the hosting of European Capital of Culture, a small team of architects arrived on site for the first time in 2021 26 in order to question through outside walking laboratories the plural meanings of the city as expressed and created by the contemporaneous inhabitants of Eleusis. The aim of such a query was double: first, the act of walking was claimed by itself as an act of encountering the contemporaneous identity of the city. By the fact of being present in the city during the walks and associating people from different neighbourhoods, social groups, ages, professions, the team’s will be to search a common shared narrative of what Eleusis could tell today about its story. The ergastiria (greek word for laboratories) were organised in an incremented way for three consecutive years (2021-2023). In the first years, walks were focused on various landscapes of abandonment before deepening the investigation in housing areas. Various forms of methods were tested; walking in small groups on different itineraries exploring the bold way in which cultures of minorities were impregnating housing space and investing on urban fabric form. Two are the important minorities in Eleusis, the Mikra- siates (first wave arrived after 1922) and the Pontians (arrived in late 1960s). Parallel to walks organised inside the spaces of their daily living, the team held out targeted interviews with some representatives of their communities in order to highlight how through history these minorities invested in housing, space and constructed networks of mutual aid. By the act of ‘entering’ on foot the neighbourhood of a community, participants (inhabitants from other areas of the city, members of the hosting teams, architects’s team) were confronted to various forms of diversity, discussed at the closing up debates at the end of the day 27. A first thing that has been highlighted was the many different ways of appropriating public space with little means. Observing the way in which houses were built on a modest but efficient typology of one storey with yard and collective passages at the backyards, offered not only a genius way of occupying limited space of living but also offered various atmospheres during the day ; the small passages were transformed in open living rooms of chatting between neighbourhoods while the common roofs ensured structurally the complex of rudimentary houses built by earth bricks. At a bigger scale, the city's history is bound with the diversity of its populations. Ethnic minorities arriving here for reasons of work shaped the urban environment with the means at hand. For some, proximity to industrial sites was the first factor of installation while for others, their illegal status obliged them to search land (not constructible) at the margins of the city. These various forms of occupying public space show a tremendously adaptive system of city’s evolution. At the present moment, cities have benefited from works on infrastructure that slowly change its landscape (squares refurbishment, seafront promenade, IRIS restoration...) As new public spaces emerge in Eleusis, debate is still open on the becoming of public space in a city where this subject was never in the epicentre of interests (neither for population or politics). However, during the European Capitals actions (mysteries), Eleusis public space revealed much malleable, rich in experiences and atmospheres, capable of welcoming various practices and publics. This malleability was maybe the result of an indeterminate identity and a sequence of unfinished cities which are much more precious in such complex conditions of governance and financing. In the second year of laboratories, a trivial residual space in a fragmented fabric, behind a supermarket, attracted our interest. Walking in urban space was still an act of confronting diversity. The Eleusis experiment showed how various walks function like fissures revealing different normalities of the city but also like stitches bring together fragmented realities. Walking laboratories showed how various populations claim plural narratives of their city living. Moreover, the walks and acts of placemaking highlighted the margins of investment on social capital which by its turn can transform abandoned spaces into emergent community’s life centralities. By the simple act of moving in urban space, the human body becomes the medium of a new reading of urbanity, not by looking at forms and functions but by emphasising on memories and temporality of practices that give both individual and collective meaning in trivial spaces. A bodily engaged environment is coloured by cultural dispositions, ways of belonging, social allegiance. Exposing bodies in public space invites for a common tacit agreement; that of a shared city whose identity is negotiable constantly through the actions of its citizens.

Special thanks to Eleftérios Kecha- gioglou, to the Eleusis 2023 organisation committee: Zetta Pasparaki, Georgia Voudouri, Chryssa Martini, to the whole team of Time Circus, to the architects Amine Slimani and Alexis Gonin and the performing arts curator, Valia Kardi.

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7 Weber AM, Trojan J. The Restorative Value of the Urban Environment: A Systematic Review of the Existing Literature. Environ Health Insights. 2018 . doi: 10.1177/1178630218812805. 

8 Pinto AJ, Remesar A. PUBLIC SPACE NETWORKS AS A SUPPORT FOR URBAN DIVERSITY. Open House International. 2012;37(2):15-23.

9 Chad Bryant, Arthur Burns, Paul Readman, Chad Bryant, Arthur Burns, Paul Readman, Walking Histories 1800-1914, 2016

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11 Hahn, Daniela. “Performing Public Spaces, Staging Collective Memory: ‘50 Kilometres of Files’ by Rimini Protokoll.” TDR (1988-) 58, no. 3 (2014): 27–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24584814.a

12 Walking in Cities: Quotidian Mobility as Urban Theory, Method and Practice by Brown Evrick, Shortell Timothy

13 Andrew Goodman. Walking with the World: Toward an Ecological Approach to Performative Art Practice. In Klaus Benesch and François Specq (eds.) Walking and the Aesthetics of Modernity, 2016

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15 O'Neill M. & Roberts B. (2020). Walking methods : research on the move. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315646442

16 Idem

17 Walking in the European City Quotidian Mobility and Urban Ethnography Timothy Shortell, Evrick Brown

18 Give Your Ideas Some Legs: The Positive Effect of Walking on Creative Thinking

19 Sigmund Loland (2021) The poetics of everyday movement: human movement ecology and urban walking, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 48:2, 219-234, DOI: 10.1080/00948705.2021.1915148

20 Lager, D. R., Van Hoven, B., & Huigen, P. P. P. (2021). Neighbourhood walks as place-making in later life. Social & Cultural Geography, 22(8), 1080-1098 . https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1672777

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22 Svensson, M. (2021). Walking in the historic neighbourhoods of Beijing: walking as an embodied encounter with heritage and urban developments. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 27(8), 792-805. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2020.1821240

23 Walking and Rhythmicity: Sensing Urban Space Wunderlich, FMRoutledge, 2008

24 The name of the city is used in the text in two different ways, Eleusis is the name in ancient Greek while Elefsina is the name used in modern Greek. "Elefyssis", is derived from the noun "Eleusis", according to the Dictionary of the Modern Greek Language. Eleusis, meaning "arrival, coming", because the area was a gathering place for those who participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

25 Based at the city of Bagneux in the Greater Paris region.

26 The team was formed thanks to the initiative of Patrick Bouchain, Loic Julienne (from the French architecture firm Construire and Eleftherios Kechagioglou the director of Le plus Petit Cirque du Monde.

27 The workshops were held each year during a period of one week and walking laboratories were conducted basically in the mornings while in the afternoons the team with participants were working on the activation of a public space.

Dimitra Kanellopoulou is an architect-engineer with a master’s degree in urban planning and a PhD in human geography. Her PhD thesis focused on the public space planning policies and urban practices in the historical center of Athens (Greece). Since 2019 she holds the position of associate professor at the ENSAPM School of Architecture in Paris. Her research focus on urban walking, public space, soft mobility and tourism issues applied to spatial planning using both quantitative and qualitative methods and a variety of perspectives (economic, sociological, psychological) to study this area. Her teaching experience include topics of urban planning theory, urban tourism and fieldwork methodology. In 2018, she creates Politopia - walking cities, a consulting firm specialised in issues related to walkability and participatory design.