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MIG-AMBIANCE
Migrants’ right to urban ambience: Fearscapes, ethnoscapes and commonscapes in Athens and Thessaloniki
MIGAMBIANCE intends to explore aspects of migrants’ embodied practices, relations and encounters in urban areas through the looking-glass of urban ambiance, which both determines migrants’ presence on the urban space and is transformed because of it. Its empirical perspective is organized along different “landscapes” of urban ambiance in relation to migrants’ presence: “fearscapes”, referring to spaces marked by xenophobic reactions, racially motivated violence and police harassment; “ethnocscapes”, relating to the infrastructures created by the migrants themselves such as shops and associations; and “commonscapes”, accounting for solidarity initiatives producing common spaces for locals and migrants. The project is innovative in combining critical geographic literature from urban and migration studies with recent works on urban ambiances, enrich thus the scholarly debates on migrants’ contribution to the production of space and the right to the city. The project will explore the above through an innovative combination of quantitative and especially qualitative methodologies, which give voice to migrant subjects and incorporate their perspectives in the research process itself, allowing for the production of critical cartographies of migrants’ (right to) urban ambiance(s) in Athens and Thessaloniki.
The concept of ambiance(s) (also termed ‘ambience’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘atmosphericity’) refers to sensory perceptions of place, shaped by emotions and lived experiences as well as the material environment (Anderson, 2009; Griffero, 2019; Thibaud, 2022). Given a longstanding recognition of migrants’ contribution to the production of urban space, including their active claims to the right to the city, research and conceptualization of the interlinkages between urban ambiances and migrants’ emplacement is strikingly absent. Hence arise the main questions MIG-AMBIANCE intends to address: How do established spatial ambiances may be allowable, accessible and viable for newly arrived migrants? And in which ways the latter’s practices and desires may alter them and give birth to new ones?
The research project’s key objective is thus to explore different (even though sometimes overlapping) dimensions of urban ambiance in relation to migrants’ presence and practice, focusing particularly on newly arrived migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. More specifically, the research aims to:
(a) examine whether, to what extend and in which ways established urban ambiances may involve spaces of fear, violence and exclusion, or safe spaces allowing for settling in, encounter and community, or collective spaces of meaningful contact, solidarity and common struggles;
(b) investigate migrants’ own acts and mundane embodied practices, relations, senses and emotions though which they navigate established urban ambiances or produce new ones in everyday life;
(c) compare and contrast formal policies, institutional practices and grassroots initiatives in making space for migrants’ right to urban ambiances.
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Panos (Panagiotis) Arion Hatziprokopiou
Panos (Panagiotis) Hatziprokopiou is PI in the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation research project “Migrants’ right to urban ambiance: Fearscapes, ethnoscapes, and commonscapes in Athens and Thessaloniki” (MIG-AMBIANCE). Panos is Associate Professor at the School of Spatial Planning & Development, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has studied economics, sociology and human geography in Greece (BA Macedonia) and the UK (MA Essex, DPhil Sussex). He has previously been Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP), the University of Surrey’s Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (CRONEM) and the Social Policy Research Centre at Middlesex University. He has more than 20 years of research experience in a wide array of topics related to migration, with a special focus on labour market aspects, on housing and spatial dimensions of migrants’ settlement, and on the relationship between migration, diversity and the urban space. He has participated in various research projects, including comparative European ones, as co-investigator, researcher, or consultant, and coordinated a DG-HOME AMIF project on migrants and volunteering (vai-project.eu) and led the Aristotle University research team in a HORIZON2020 project on protracted displacement and transnationalism (trafig.eu). He has published a monograph and over 50 articles in refereed journals, chapters in edited volumes, as well as research reports and working papers.
email: pmchatzi@plandevel.auth.gr
Latest Publications
Profiles
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Eva (Evangelia) Papatzani
Eva (Evangelia) Papatzani is a postdoctoral researcher, holding a PhD in Urban Studies/Social Geography and Migration Studies, from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, National Technical University of Athens, Greece. She has extensive experience of coordinating and implementing international and national research projects at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) in Athens, the University of Virginia (UVA) in the USA, the School of Spatial Planning and Development (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), and the Department of Geography (University of the Aegean), among others. She recently served as an Adjunct Professor of sociology of space at the Technical University of Crete. She has received scholarships and competitive research funding, published in international academic journals in which she has also served as a reviewer. Her research interests include the geographies of migrant and refugee settlement, displacement, refugee reception, urban encounters with difference, interethnic relationships and micro-segregation, institutional and everyday racism, gendered geographies, housing and urban policies, touristification, and urban transformations.
email: evaliapap@yahoo.gr
Latest publications
Papatzani, E. (2024). Reproducing displaceability in the Greek asylum accommodation system and its margins. International Journal of Housing Policy 25 (3): 477-498. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2024.2367832
Papatzani, E. (2023). Migrant settlement and sociospatial negotiations of interethnic encounters in Athens. In Kalandides, A., Mantouvalou, M., Micha, I., Stratigaki, M. (eds.) Gendered aspects of urban studies. Conversations with the work of Dina Vaiou, pp. 247-268. Athens: Nissos (in Greek).
Papatzani, E., Hatziprokopiou, P., Vlastou, F., Siotou, A. (2022). On not staying put where they have put you: mobilities disrupting the socio-spatial figurations of displacement in Greece. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48 (18): 4383-4401. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2090158
Papatzani, E., Psallidaki, T., Kandylis, G., Micha, I. (2022). Multiple geographies of precarity: Accommodation policies for asylum seekers in metropolitan Athens, Greece. European Urban and Regional Studies 29 (2): 189-203,DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09697764211040742
Papatzani, E. (2021). Encountering Everyday Racist Practices: Sociospatial Negotiations of Immigrant Settlement in Athens, Greece. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (1): 61-79, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12984
Balampanidis, D., Papatzani, E., Pettas, D. (2021). Airbnb in the City: An Opportunity or a Threat? Athens: POLIS (in Greek).
Profiles
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Haris (Charalampos) Tsavdaroglou
Haris is a scholar in critical urban studies whose work focuses on migrants’ urban and housing commons, mobile commons, refugee camps, and newcomers’ right to the city. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation (HFRI) project “Migrants’ Right to Urban Ambiance: Fearscapes, Ethnoscapes, and Commonscapes in Athens and Thessaloniki” (MIG-AMBIANCE) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Swedish Research Council program “Housing as a Digitalized Service” at the University of Amsterdam.
Haris earned his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in 2016. Between 2017 and 2025, he was the Principal Investigator in the HFRI research program “Refugees’ Solidarity City: Institutional Policies and Commoning Practices in Athens, Mytilene, and Thessaloniki” (RECITY) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has also worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in several international projects, including the Horizon 2021–2027 program “Prototypes for Addressing the Housing-Energy Nexus” (PREFIGURE) at the University of Amsterdam, the Horizon H2020 program “Arrival Infrastructures as Sites of Integration for Recent Newcomers” (ReROOT) at the University of Thessaly, and as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. In addition, he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Urban Studies Institute, University of Antwerp, and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Thessaly, the University of the Aegean, and the National Hellenic Research Foundation.
His research interests include critical urban theory, the autonomy of migration, intersectional, decolonial, and affective geographies, the right to the city, urban atmospheres, common spaces versus spatial enclosures, and urban social movements.
email: tsavdaroglou.ch@gmail.com
Latest publications
Tsavdaroglou, C. and Kaika, M. (2025). From camp to commons: Infrastructures of decolonial solidarity in Europe. In Roy, A. and Zablotsky, V. (eds.) Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion. (pp. 155-175). Durham and London: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478060949-010
Tsavdaroglou, C., Giannopoulou, C., Frangopoulos, Y., Hatziprokopiou, P., Kyriazidou, I. and Valiantzas, Z. (2024). Bye bye Moria: Escape commons vs policies of military campization. Ethnic and Racial Studies. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2024.2399729
Tsavdaroglou, C., Arvanitidis, P. and Valiantzas, Z. (2024). Migrants in the old train wagons borderland in Thessaloniki: From abandonment to infrastructures of commοning. Urban Planning, 9, 6967. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17645/up.6967
Tsavdaroglou, C. and Kaika, M. (2024). The second displacement of refugees: Urban regeneration against commoning practices in Belgrade’s waterfront. Antipode, 56(1), 328-352. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12971
Profiles
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Zachos (Zacharias) Valiantzas
Zachos is a PhD student in Human Geography at the Spatial Planning and Development department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His PhD topic of interest is «Migration, otherness and the «right to the city»: practices of inhabitance and the lived ambience of urban space». He also holds the Master’s degree «Spatial planning for sustainable and resilient development» with a master thesis entitled «Urban ambience: Dominant uses and heterogeneities in the port of Thessaloniki. A socio-spatial and ethnographic analysis». Recently he has also been part of Horizon 2020 funded research program «ReROOT | Arrival Infrastructures as Sites of Integration for Recent Newcomers», as well as in HFRI funded research program «Refugees’ Solidarity City – Institutional policies and commoning practices in Athens, Mytilene and Thessaloniki” (RECITY)», in both as a field researcher. Zachos’ recent research explores the collective practices of inhabitance and the creation of lived ambience in the urban fabric, as well as on issues of critical geography, migration, commons and the right to the city.
email: zvaliantz@auth.gr
Latest publications
Beeckmans, L., Salamé, D., Bovo, M., & Hogan, M. (2025). Integration Otherwise Inspiration Kit. https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461666758
Valiantzas, Z. (2024). Ambiences of otherness. Transcending neoliberal urban enclosures through affective atmospheres in Thessaloniki metropolitan area. In Boubezari et al. (Eds.) Sensory Explorations, Ambiances in a Changing World: Proceedings of the 5th International Congress on Ambiances 2024, Lisbon (pp. 938-948)
Tsavdaroglou, C., Giannopoulou, C., Frangopoulos, Y., Hatziprokopiou, P., Kyriazidou, I., & Valiantzas, Z. (2024). Bye bye Moria: escape commons vs policies of military campization. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2024.2399729
Tsavdaroglou, C., Arvanitidis, P., & Valiantzas, Z. (2024). Migrants in the old train wagons borderland in Thessaloniki: From abandonment to infrastructures of commοning. Urban Planning, 9. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.6967
Valiantzas Z., Arvanitidis P. (2024) Housing Commons- Alternatives to housing through urban commoning, Sens Public, http://sens-public.org/articles/1654/
Profiles
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Antigone Elefsinioti
Antigoni is a PhD student in Social Geography at the Spatial Planning and Development department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her PhD ongoing Thesis is «Migrant entrepreneurship and urban transformations: Collage of everyday lives in the center of Athens». Her research revolves around migration presence and activity in the context of everyday life and explores the creation of «homes» through practice based placemaking. She is a Spatial Planning and Development Engineer, having participated in numerous urban and spatial planning studies and is experienced in Representational Cartography methods and Geographic Information Systems.
email: aelefsin@plandevel.auth.gr