Chewing Gum and Graffiti: Aestheticized City Rhetoric in post-2008 Athens

The post-2008 austerity measures imposed on Greece made public space in the city of Athens the prime target of economic development and city marketing. These processes are based on aesthetic strategies of ‘cleaning up’ and imposing a certain visual order while disposing signs of deprivation and exclusion in the streets. Referencing the works of Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière and illustrating a series of cases, we demonstrate how this exclusionary ‘police order’ of neoliberal consensus confirms and reinforces the borders between the visible and invisible, acceptable and unacceptable. This is, however, contested by a more democratic aesthetics of redistribution, based on difference, which emerges as soon as the implemented order meets the world of complexity, boundaries and resistance.