A migrant’s tale of two cities: Mobile Commons and the alteration of urban space in Athens and Hamburg

While Greece has been in the epicentre of the debate due to the recent socio-economic and refugee crises, little attention has been paid to migrants’ own survival practices and praxes of commoning within this turbulent condition. Germany has faced the refugee crisis on different socio- economic terms but has likewise spurred a debate on how to deal with the exacerbated conditions. This chapter aims to enlighten migrants’ spaces that emerge from praxes of commoning and resistance in contemporary Greece and Germany. The chapter presents paradigms of migrants’ commoning practices concerning housing, sheltering and appropriating the urban space deriving from a field research conducted in Athens and Hamburg. The spatial analysis of such commoning practices brings to light dynamics and potentialities hidden in urban spaces, destabilises fixed categories and dipoles (like those of gender, ethnicity, age or class) and reveals the emerging interactions with the former urban environment and the local population. As the chapter concludes, such practices do not constitute an exception in the production of the urban space but are part of an ongoing commoning process, linked with several social political and economic crises taking different shapes in Greece and Germany respectively.