Speaker
Description
Up until recently, significant studies have been published on the living conditions of migrants in Greece, notably in state-run camps (Tazzioli 2024), rented apartments from UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) programs (Kourachanis, 2022) and self-managed housing squats (Tsavdaroglou and Kaika 2022). However, the issue of energy in relation to migrants’ housing appears to have been overlooked until now. Yet, energy infrastructure and energy as a social relation are critical to the daily lives of migrants and the sustainability of their houses. Concomitantly, despite several studies (Bouzarovski 2014; Chatzikonstantinou et al. 2022) on households’ energy access, energy poverty and the transition to renewable energy systems in the European and Greek contexts, the energy needs and infrastructures of the migrant population remained under-researched. The few studies published on the energy needs, infrastructures and practices of migrants concern countries outside Europe pointing to a significant research gap or “darkness” (Rosenberg-Jansen, 2025), regarding the energy conditions, needs and activities of migrants in European countries. This paper addresses this research gap. Migrants’ energy needs have not yet been examined, and there is no knowledge of their practices and infrastructures, which are often based on relationships of mutual support, care, and solidarity.
In this context we introduce the concept of “migrants’ housing energy commons” to highlight the self-organised ways, the commoning practices and shared infrastructures that migrants invent and construct to navigate and cope with the energy landscape they encounter in their places of arrival. We approach energy as a social relationship, whose lack results in energy poverty and deprivation but that may also acquire a transformative aspect in migrants’ personal lifecourses and trajectories through collective actions. At the same time, we take into account approaches related to energy commons (Bauwens et al. 2024;), migrants housing commons (Tsavdaroglou and Kaika 2022) and migrants’ infrastructures (Meeus et al. 2019), to develop a framework for examining the self-constructed and self-managed housing energy infrastructural practices of migrants.
The paper focuses on the case of migrants who face homelessness in Thessaloniki (Greece) and seek abandoned buildings like the wall houses in the area of Upper Town as a housing solution. The paper underscores the collective ways in which migrants repair, build, sustain and use energy as a means of covering heating, cooling, insulation, cooking and communication needs and shows that the housing commoning practices and the infrastructuring energy practices are also a means of mutual care, community building and rebuilding life trajectories.
References
Bauwens, Thomas, Wade, Robert and Burke, Matthew (2024) The energy commons: A systematic review, paradoxes, and ways forward. Energy Research & Social Science, 118: 103776.
Bouzarovski, Stefan (2014) Energy poverty in the European Union: Landscapes of vulnerability. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment, 3 (3), pp. 276–289.
Chatzikonstantinou, Evangelia, Katsoulakos, Nikolas and Vatavali, Fereniki (2022) Housing and energy consumption in Greece. Households’ experiences and practices in the context of the energy crisis. IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 1123, 012043.
Meeus, B., van Heur, B. and Arnaut, K. (2019) Migration and the Infrastructural Politics of Urban Arrival. In Meeus, B., van Heur, B. and Arnaut, K. (eds.) Arrival infrastructures. Palgrave MacMillan.
Kourachanis, Nikos (2022) Implementing refugee integration policies in a transit country: The HELIOS project in Greece. European Journal of Homelessness, 16 (1), pp. 273–292.
Rosenberg-Jansen, Sarah (2025) Voices in the Dark. The Energy Lives of Refugees. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Tazzioli, Martina (2024) Infrastructural clashes: Induced scarcity and governing refugees through depletion. Political Geography 108, 103035.
Tsavdaroglou, Charalampos and Kaika, Maria (2022) The refugees’ right to the centre of the city: City branding versus city commoning in Athens. Urban Studies, 59 (6), pp. 1130–1147.
| Keywords | housing, energy, migrants, Thessaloniki, commons |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
