AKINHTO / IMMOBILE ATHENS
ATHENS BIENNALE, 2016-2017, OMONOIA
AKINHTO/ IMMOBILE aims at the creation of an ‘imobile’ co-owned property in Athens which will not be able to return back to the market again.
The word AKINHTO refers to the Greek legal term of a real estate or landed property as defined in relation to the fixed/immobile connection to the ground (in German: lmmobilie, in Italian: immobile). Under this title the project tries to redefine difsunctionality and complexity of Greek multi-‐ownership as an anti-‐capitalist model. At the same time AKINITO understands immobility as a core component of new structures and practices of co-‐ownership and co-‐habitation against land speculation and gentrification.
It is interesting that Greece and especially the city of Athens was not created through big urban developments and planning but through an economical model based on exchange called antiparochi, which allowed the individual collaboration of land/house owners with constructors, for the creation of individual apartment buildings (the typical polykatoikia) that form the city. Two laws came to support this exchange model, the first one is the law for individual horizontal properties, and the second one is the law for undivided shares or else tenancy in common. Both Greek laws on ownership in connection to the family structure resulted to a very complex situation where multi-‐horizontal-‐ ownership and undivided shares created fragmented property that makes it almost impossible for those buildings to return to the real estate market since it would only be done through common agreement of all those different owners. In this sense, the complexity of co-‐ownership of the Greek model can be seen as an anti-‐capitalist model, that blocks the commodification of housing. Considering housing a common good we can look at multi-‐ownership in Greece as a shared power between the citizens fighting against property speculation. Paradoxically it is the public property in Greece that is being privatised and sold out, while the fragmented individual private property still stays out of the market.
It is interesting to see that this very model of complex co-‐ownership and mis‐communication is used in anti-‐gentrification house projects in various cities such as Leipzig or Zurich, in which many people are involved in complex and often controversial processes of buying a building, protecting it from its future sale and return to the market. Another interesting element is how such housing projects initiatives introduce themselves as anarchist movements, using capitalist tools such as the buy out of property. AKINITO aims as a first step to document and preserve this model of complexity in Athens viewed through the potentiality of shared power, individual and collective ownership and the blocking of housing commodification.
As a response to the Functional City of 1933, the Disfunctional City of today’s cities like Athens could possibly introduce a new model of complexity which combined with citizens tactics can become De Certeau’ s ‘creative resistances’.
*De Certeau Michel, ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley 1984
The first phase of the project AKINHTO took place on Sunday 29 May 2016 at Bageion, 18 Omonoia Square: http://athensbiennale.org/en/uncategorized-en/project-akinito-2/