Why can’t we stand our cities?

“We at City are tired. Everyone we know is tired. Exhaustion has become one of the fundamental features of urban life. When an experience becomes sufficiently widespread, it makes sense to ask if it’s an indicator of a deeper condition.”

This is how the famous article "Tired city: on the politics of urban exhaustion" begins, which, since its publication in 2022, has opened up another way of approaching urban issues. Its author, David J. Madden, Associate Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics, will be the keynote speaker at the event "Why can’t we stand our cities? Conditions for another everyday life", organised by the Heinrich Böll Foundation - Thessaloniki Office at Bios (84 Pireos Street, Athens) on Saturday 14 December 2024.

In the first part, David J. Madden will critically explore urban exhaustion as a result of specific political choices, will refer to the permanent and multiple crises that usually result in the conservatization of societies, and will present as an alternative a pattern of polydiversity based on the meaningful participation of citizens and the specific characteristics of each place.

In the second part, the panel will discuss the preconditions for building a different everyday life that aims at the well-being of urban dwellers. The discussion will focus, among other things, on participatory urban planning, the gender perspective that urban interventions can and should have, the deepening of local democracy and the role that local government can play, as well as the ways in which these urban transformations can be financed from broader national and European frameworks.

The participants are Eva Grigoriadou, architect and co-founder of the URBANA research group, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, professor at the Department of Political Sciences of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Loukas Triantis, assistant professor at the Department of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and the secretary of KOSMOS and former MEP Petros Kokkalis. Sofia Tsadari, Dr. architectural engineer & urban planner of NTUA, member of the collaborative interdisciplinary design team Commonspace moderates the discussion.

The speech will be in English and the discussion in Greek.

Admission is free. Registration with a zero value ticket here.