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Why Homeless is on Rise?
Resilience is a leading concept in disaster scholarship that has mainly been studied in the context of in situ recovery and reconstruction following natural disasters or in temporary settlements, such as refugee camps, in the aftermath of humanitarian crises.
However, it has not been sufficiently investigated in multi-crisis arrival cities receiving acute refugee inflows. The aim of this paper is to fill this knowledge gap by conceptualising the ‘resilient arrival city’ and further revealing the critical role of homelessness NGOs in resilience-building in multi-crisis arrival contexts, especially through political activation and the integration of refugees and unaccompanied minors.
Drawing on field research conducted in Athens (Greece) in collaboration with a Greek homelessness NGO, the paper argues that homelessness NGOs foster the resilient arrival city through the implementation of refugee housing and integration programmes.
The provision of improved social services, the formation of socially innovative governance arrangements, and the establishment of strategic partnerships with peer NGOs, international organisations, and public authorities to promote cities and housing for all.
Post-disaster resilience scholarship has mainly studied resilience-building processes taking place in in situ recovery following disasters triggered by natural hazards or in the context of displacement (e.g., refugee camps) in the aftermath of humanitarian crises.
The displaced communities themselves largely lead these processes, civic society organisations, built environment professionals (e.g., for profit and non-profit housing developers, architects), and local or national public authorities.
What stays understudied is an understanding of resilience in the context of displacement and relocation of refugees in arrival cities in new national territories, characterised by a multi-layered crisis both for the displaced population (reception and integration crisis) and for the recipient city/country (social, debt, economic, structural crisis).
More attention also needs to be drawn to the role of homelessness NGOs in addressing the crises and fostering the resilient arrival city through their advocacy, networking, and refugee integration and housing programmes.
Homelessness NGOs are considered those non-governmental organisations who fight against homelessness by providing temporary or permanent housing solutions and social services to people who are roofless, houseless, or living in insecure or inadequate housing.
The theoretical insights informing the argument of this paper derive from disaster resilience, social innovation, and migrant integration.
Specifically, the paper is embedded in a critical approach of ‘resilience’, whereby the discursive call for resilience can never be apolitical or power blind.
But a fundamentally debated and politically fraught discourse enwrapped with power relations, discursive hegemony, social innovation, and governance fermentations (Davoudi et al., 2012; Paidakaki and Moulaert, 2017; Teigão dos Santos and Partidário, 2011).
Counterhegemonic
The paper also distances itself from a ‘technocratic’ paradigm of social innovation in which initiatives are considered too reformist and compliant with neoliberal logics (Moulaert and MacCallum, 2019; Paidakaki et al., 2018).
Conversely, it allies with a ‘democratic’ paradigm and an emancipatory tradition of social innovation which puts stress on the political dimension of social interactions and foregrounds dissensus, empowerment, and solidarity in the form of invigorated political capabilities (e.g., formal and informal alliances).
To access necessary resources for needs satisfaction, create counterhegemonic alternatives, and ferment more democratic bottom-linked governance arrangements (Moulaert and MacCallum, 2019; Paidakaki et al., 2018).
Empirically, the paper draws upon evidence from the post-2015 EU ‘refugee crisis’ context in the arrival city of Athens (Greece), providing answers to the following dual key research question: To what extent can homelessness NGOs nurture a resilient (multi-crisis) arrival city through their programmes on social integration and housing provision for refugees
And their political activation and formation of novel, more democratic governance arrangements toward an improved social public policy in the arrival city context?
The city of Athens makes a pertinent case study for this investigation because, since the 2015 Syrian crisis, this metropolis has become an arrival city for refugees from the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, who used Eastern and Central Mediterranean Sea routes to seek asylum to Europe.
Indicatively, Greece reported 856 723 refugee sea arrivals in 2015; a number corresponding to 8.2% of the country’s permanent population, while Italy being the second highest European state with a recorded 153 842 arrivals that equals 0.25% of its population (ELSTAT, 2021; ISTAT, 2022; UNHCR, 2016). Moreover, since 2019, one in five unaccompanied minors (UAMs)
in Europe, a highly vulnerable subgroup of the refugee population, applied for asylum in Greece (Eurostat, 2020) and has been housed by homelessness NGOs through different housing arrangements, such as protected ‘safe zones’, hotels, shelters, and Supported Independent Living (SIL) apartments (European Commission, 2015; Greek Council for Refugees, 2020).
In recent years, overcrowded shelters forced some UAMs to abandon these facilities and sleep outdoors, leaving them exposed to heightened risks of exploitation.
In 2023, over 41 000 UAMs sought asylum across the EU – the second-highest number recorded since 2015 – highlighting the growing pressures on national reception systems (FEANTSA, 2024).
Procedural inefficiencies (e.g., slow administrative processes, bureaucratic legal hurdles, unjustified rejections) and limited access to essential services have continued to worsen their vulnerability and undermined their prospects for integration (FEANTSA, 2024).
Another reason for the selection of Athens as a pertinent case study for this research investigation was its multi-crisis context.
NGO
In this context of post-disaster social transformation, institutional adaptation, and the call for structural changes, various actors and social groups – underpinned by different value systems and visions for the resilient city – seize the opportunity to increase their capabilities to influence change (Paidakaki and Moulaert, 2018).
This heterogeneity has elevated ‘resilience’ from a single capacity of a system to resist shock and bounce back or bounce forward in a linear, monodirectional way, to a highly politically sensitive, continuously changing, socially transformative process, with various ‘bounce-forward’ imaginations and trajectories (e.g., pro-growth or pro-equity) steered by a heterogeneity of recovery agents (for-profit and non-profit housing providers) (Paidakaki and Moulaert, 2018).
More recently, resilience has also been investigated from a migratory perspective in the context of urban transformations (Vains, 2017; Visvizi et al., 2017) and refugee camps (Paidakaki et al., 2021).
The latter are considered socially resilient when, on the one hand, they offer a sturdy public camp infrastructure and social infrastructure for social life and recreation and, on the other hand, are governed by a heterogeneity of stakeholders (hegemonic and alternative), who have an equivalent voice and equal space to experiment with their own perceptions of humanitarian aid (Paidakaki et al., 2021).
However, to date, notably few—if any—studies exist scrutinising and critically analysing resilience in the context of new national territories receiving populations displaced by natural or human-induced disasters.
It remains rather understudied how several ‘recovery’ actors in recipient cities/countries view a humanitarian crisis as an opportunity to foster the resilience of the arrival city.
How do these actors help the arrival city bounce forward into the direction of an equity based urban development and governance by collectively reflecting on the city’s pre-existing, underlying, and structural socio-spatial inequalities and ill-defined social urban policies, acting upon and addressing the root causes of long-lived social vulnerability, and working on improved migrant integration and housing for-all programmes?
# In this paper, ‘arrival city’ refers to the ‘virtual arrival city’ as explained by the journalist Doug Saunders to address the general places where migrants settle and integrate on a city level.
For Saunders (2010, p.18), arrival cities are conceptualised as places that “function to propel people into the core life of the city and to send support back to the next wave of arrivals.”
In the scientific discourse on migrants’ arrival settlements, the prevalent focus has been on fixed, homogeneous, and clearly delineated enclaves with poor residents and inexpensive dwellings (Meeus et al., 2020).
Greek Borders
To ensure a lasting impact of their initiatives, social innovators are embedded in bottom-linked governance structures with the aim to force decision- and policy-makers to “ create new mechanisms for the provision of resources, imagine new ways of conceptualising and approaching policy problems, and engage with and empower a wider range of policy implementers and civic actors to develop socially innovative practices” (Pradel et al., 2013 in Paidakaki et al., 2018, p.14).
Thus, bottom-linked governance, as a new and dynamic governance arrangement between top-down receptive decision- and policymakers and bottom-up social innovators aiming for human need satisfaction, public policy co-construction and the formation of participatory decision-making mechanisms, becomes a transversal institutionalisation of social change (Paidakaki et al., 2018; Paidakaki and Lang, 2021).
According to Moulaert et al. (2010), the following three main forms of change should be achieved – alone or in combination – for social innovation to eventually have a ‘successful’ and lasting impact: the satisfaction of human needs (material and immaterial); the empowerment of marginalised social groups through protection of their rights, enhancement of capabilities, and the (re)creation of visions/culture/ identity; and changes in social, power, and/ or governance relations within the community, and between the community and society at large.
The goal of social innovation also extends to providing inventively improved conditions that further foster social cohesion (Van Dyck and Van den Broeck, 2013).
Social innovation literature can thus provide an instrumental framework with socio-political, ideological, and ethical properties (Moulaert and MacCallum, 2019) to complement resilience discourses and thoroughly unravel post-disaster transformations (Westley, 2013) and social processes that lead to new/post-crisis governance cultures.
In this context, a post-disaster/crisis socially innovative governance shift creates an opportunity for the design of a new, more just political economy, and for a reinvented role of the state within a bottom-linked governance form (Paidakaki and Parra, 2018).
In such productive governance environments, bottom-up initiatives and voluntary organisations find fertile ground to claim for a more fair provision of goods and services (Paidakaki and Parra, 2018).
Due to the intrinsic bottom-up and solidarity-based character of socially innovative practices, the main leaders of social innovation amidst crisis times are mainly nongovernmental/non-profit organisations, including those belonging in the homelessness sector (Paidakaki, 2021).
These actors not only implement social policies to tackle (urgent) social problems but also organise themselves discursively and actively in their aim to address the root causes of social vulnerabilities and influence the recovery profile of a post-disaster city (Paidakaki and Moulaert, 2017).
EU Rapid Refugee
One of the immediate actions taken by the EU to manage the rapid refugee inflow in 2015 was the establishment of ‘hotspot’ structures that hosted the first reception and identification services.
Increasing needs for accommodation infrastructure, administration and aid services, transportation to urban centres, and asylum facilities emerged and had to be covered by the recipient states in collaboration with European and international organisations.
This urgent management of refugee reception coincided with a socio-economic crisis period in Greece shaped by a series of austerity policies (2010-2017) to counter the Greek Government’s debt in the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis.
Among others, the austerity measures imposed by the EU on the Greek Government in 2009 were spending cuts on public services and a reformation of the healthcare system (Rady, 2012).
Combined with a loss of competitiveness in the international market, the austerity measures led to a steep rise in unemployment rates and poverty levels (unemployment rates rocketed from 7.8% in 2008 to a peak of 27.5% in 2013), significant loss of income, a widening of income inequality.
A sharp increase in the number of uninsured citizens, an increase in taxes for housing and consumption products (Benmecheddal et al., 2017; Statista, 2021; Stylianidis and Souliotis, 2019), and a 25% increase of people experiencing homelessness in Greece (Melander, 2011).
According to Parsanoglou (2020, p.460), this welfare crisis also led to “the retreat, if not collapse, of the welfare state in austerity Greece”.
Within this multi-crisis arrival context, the 2015 refugee reception crisis was gradually transformed (starting in 2019) into a refugee integration crisis, further aggravating the pre-existing multi-crisis milieu. A few years later in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic added another layer to the pre-existing context of intertwined crises.
To contain the outbreak of the virus, the Greek Government implemented further restrictions on movement in and out of the hotspots and temporarily shut down the asylum service centre, leaving asylum seekers without proof of application.
However, obstructing their access to the healthcare system, financial assistance, and labour market, and schools, putting the education of refugee minors on hold due to lack of access to the Internet and digital equipment (Kovner et al., 2021).
The multi-layered crisis landscape in Greece was further sketched by a housing affordability crisis – especially in Athens – partly due to overtourism and a steep increase in the number of Airbnb rentals—going from 132 in 2010 to 126 231 in 2018 (Maloutas et al., 2020; former local politician, interview, 4 March 2021).
This in turn led to the intensification of housing unaffordability for vulnerable groups including both migrants/refugees and Greek citizens (homeless, middle- and low-income groups, youth) due to skyrocketing rent prices and raised property occupation taxes (former local politician, interview, 4 March 2021).
To house the most vulnerable refugees since 2015, two programmes were launched: the “Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation” (in short, ESTIA) administered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) until 2020, and the “Hellenic Integration Support for Beneficiaries of International Protection” (in short, HELIOS) administered by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Both programmes were temporary in nature, offering short-term accommodation solutions and limited long-term perspectives for migrant integration and autonomous living (Kourachanis, 2019a; Kovner et al., 2021). Local authorities, the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, and NGOs were actively involved in the management and implementation of ESTIA and HELIOS.
Homelessness NGOs, some of which are also Greek members of the European Federation of National Organizations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA), such as the case study homelessness NGO , PRAKSIS, and Solidarity
Now, were main partners in ESTIA, with Solidarity NOW also being part of the implementation of the HELIOS programme.
Homelessness NGOs, thus, emerged as main protagonists of social and housing programme implementation for refugees further facilitating the search for short-term and long-term accommodation for their beneficiaries.
The support of homelessness NGOs, beyond housing assistance, included basic needs satisfaction (e.g., food, hygiene, clothes, healthcare), psycho-social and legal services, recreational activities, sports, workshops, education, employment skills, language classes, interpretation services, and intercultural activities (ACCMR, 2020; The HOME Project, 2020), especially witnessed in their programmes for UAMs.
Despite their critical role in refugees’ housing and integration, NGOs are often characterised by “organisational and financial volatility” due to their financial dependence on donors and the framing of their operation by fixed-term contracts signed with state authorities (Kourachanis, 2024, p.4).
Critical Infrastructure
Such socio-spatial phenomena occur in the form of human settlements with a clear physical demarcation such as slum quarters (e.g., bidonvilles, favelas, shanty towns), ethnic districts or immigrant neighbourhoods, or in the form of less demarcated settlements, such as larger urban territories across which newcomers are spatially spread out and interwoven within the urban tissue (Knox and Pinch, 2014; Saunders, 2016 cited in Meeus et al., 2020).
#Overall, arrival cities are much more than the particularities of the built environment and their socio-cultural inclusion-exclusion implications (Ye and Yeoh, 2022).
As Wilson (2022, p.3459) aptly sees, an arrival city “is far from stable, being continuously reworked by state policy, geopolitics, economic fluctuations or localised events that rupture or destabilise what came before.”
Arrival cities further encompass a set of resources managed through formal and informal mechanisms, and the deployment of networks to underpin social interactions, refugees’ integration, and political representation; all shaping a distinct social and institutional capital (Saunders, 2010).
This, in turn, together with critical infrastructure (administrative, economic, physical, etc.) frame the capacity of the city to operationalise and implement proper policies and measures for refugee integration and bounce forward to the (re)establishment of resilient urban structures.
The arrival city can therefore be described as an infrastructural basis that underpins sharing and exchange of knowledge and resources between local communities, previously arrived migrants, and newcomers (Hanhörster and Wessendorf, 2020).
Sidney (2019) highlights the role of NGOs as elements of ‘arrival infrastructure’ since they are mediating between newcomers and local governments to ease the provision of housing and a series of legal procedures. In this dynamic context, our paper raises the questions: What can then be defined as a resilient arrival city?
And how are homelessness NGOs actively involved in enabling resilience-building processes in the arrival city? To conceptualise ‘the resilient arrival city’ we bridge theories of social innovation with migrant integration literature.
Unfolding the resilient arrival city: Insights from social innovation Resilience thinking is intertwined with governance conceptualisations, as it reflects, on the one hand, on normative guidelines formulated by the state at different policy levels to support disaster recovery, and on the other hand, on bottom-up socially innovative initiatives by communities and voluntary organisations aiming to cover institutional voids and satisfy acute human needs that are often unmanageable by the state.
Crises and disasters trigger necessities that force civil society to self-organise, while the state apparatus may offer institutional mechanisms, through which several socially innovative actors can unfold their potential contribution to resilience-building (Paidakaki and Parra, 2018).
Can social innovation, however, have a socio-political transformative impact in a post-disaster context? According to post-political scholars (e.g., Metzger 2011; Mouffe, 1999; Swyngedouw and Wilson, 2014), social innovation can only have limited potential for socio-political transformation because of ‘caring neoliberal’ views of social innovation whereby the welfare state is shrunk in budget and social responsibility and pre-selected civic society groups (NGOs, business groups) provide low-cost social services (Paidakaki et al., 2018).
In governance terms, according to Paidakaki et al. (2018, p.12), “this paradigm translates into a-political, techno-managerial and consensus-oriented elitist governance arrangements that cultivate politically modest social service providers and pre-define linear and mono-directional urban development trajectories that ultimately sharpen inequality in urban society.”
However, scholars of radical social innovation who belong to the broader tradition of critical studies (Eizaguirre et al., 2012; García et al., 2015; Moulaert et al., 2013; Oosterlynck et al., 2013a; b; Pradel et al., 2013) stress the political nature of innovative initiatives taken by civil society organisations, and put emphasis on solidarity, empowerment, and criticism against the socio-economic inconsistencies and disrupting (social, cultural, environmental) consequences of neoliberal urban development (Moulaert et al., 2007 in Paidakaki and Moulaert, 2018).
According to this scholarship, socially innovative organisations trigger transformational change by starting micro-initiatives based on solidarity that sets up new collaborations between organisations and sectors, forms new arenas, and works out alternative strategies for socio-spatial development (Paidakaki et al., 2018).
