How Athens Confronted Government Distrust by Connecting Citizens to Each Other

If you took a walk around parts of inner Athens in the years following the 2007-8 financial crisis, you might have been forgiven for assuming the city was in the process of being evacuated. Empty shops and dilapidated buildings gave an impression of abandonment, of people giving up. In fact, at grassroots level, the opposite was true. Crisis may have hit the city hard, but in the immediate aftermath the Greek capital fizzed with hundreds of citizen projects that served in ways large and small to make life just that bit more liveable, whether it was lawyers offering free advice to people at risk of eviction or empty buildings being used as impromptu refugee shelters.

The variety of activities undertaken was highly encouraging, but they remained disconnected, both from each other and from a municipality about whose efficacy many Athenians had become deeply skeptical. So how could the city find a way to link all these initiatives up in a way that created a more resilient civil society?