Urban knowledge as social practice. Athens in-between the rhetorical and the visual

What is central for the rapid changes brought about by a socio-economic crisis, what holds all alterations in a legitimate togetherness, is a major, often radical shift in the overall cultural system. Shifting perceptions, beliefs and meanings constantly represent and signify a revised society. A dominant ‘culture of crisis’ – socially diffused through political discourse and the media – enciphers specific ways of seeing (Berger 1972) and ways of acting in response. In the in-between space in which politics lays, ‘reality’ is imagined in novel ideological terms, which dictate our knowledge of it. Places are inevitably and actively involved in such processes since they become the locations where crisis articulates itself. Merging the conceptual with the physical, places are created through what Rob Shields (1991) has called ‘social spatialisation’. Specific processes, orchestrated by specific social groups, construct locations and channel the related social imaginations through specific ways. Imaginations will then invite corresponding actions. In social spatialisation, places turn into ‘place-myths’ which ground the cultural system of ideology and practice. Discourse thus shapes places and gives birth to ‘opposite’ places, according to binary relations that privilege certain ideological sides and cultural practices vis-à-vis others. This article deals with how the city of Athens is ‘known’ by socially spatialising it. Specifically, we zoom in on a peculiar location and investigate how the knowledge of a place is selectively constructed and visually practiced.