“Cleaning” Exarchia: Gentrification, Racialization, and Criminalization of Dissent in a Central Athenian Neighborhood

ABSTRACT The article tackles the emerging issue of urban bordering by exploring its racializing and securitizing discourses and practices. These frame minoritized subjects as evictable, contributing to the gentrification of their areas of shelter and refuge. The key processes of contemporary urban governance are examined in the neighborhood of Exarchia in central Athens, Greece, an area of great political and historical significance for anti‐authoritarian struggles, solidarity, and social justice initiatives. In recent years, the area has faced extensive gentrification through touristification and militarization, as well as the eviction of several political squats hosting migrants and antiauthoritarian Greek activists. As part of a research project examining the underexplored political cost of gentrification, this article exposes and analyses dispossession strategies in the area through the production of ‘suspect’ population groups, and the mobilization of ‘race’ and ‘criminality’. It thus aims to contribute to decolonial understandings of mobilization of race within contemporary urban processes beyond the US context, and to recent studies on the criminalization of dissent.