IN-PERSON Lisbon Livable Cities. Section A

Abstract

The notion of the “uncanny”, as articulated by Freud in his famous essay and reread by other scholars, has been valued by many disciplines, mostly by critical cultural theory and urban studies, and used as an interpretive model. It represents a feeling of anguish and discomfort (even fear) generated from something once familiar that is not familiar anymore (defamiliarization). For the critics of modernity, the uncanny has been used to describe the experience of the modern metropolis and the alienation/estrangement of the individual when confronted with heterogeneous crowds, as well as modern nostalgia for an idealized pre-industrial birthplace (Vidler offers insights into this literature). In post-modern discourses, the uncanny has been reappropriated from theorists studying contemporary urban environments and has been associated with modern ruins or “terrains vagues” (vacant or uncertain spaces). In this paper I will attempt to trace elements of contemporary urban experience in Athens (Greece) that arouse a clear sense of uncanny to its inhabitants; other metropolises of Southern Europe may share similar experiences. The uncanny dwells in the ruins of the recent crisis that still haunts the city landscape; in the growing number of homeless people and other visible evidence of deprivation; in public spaces made inhospitable or inaccessible, as a consequence of the climate crisis or of urban regeneration projects that rapidly transform the urban environment; in the gentrified and touristified neighbourhoods that are becoming unhomely for their inhabitants; in the vanishing older building stock and other “dark” sides of the city’s lived experience.