“The Crisis and the Emergence of Communal Experiments in Greece” is a working paper that was presented by Nicholas Anastasopoulos, a Greek architect and researcher, in the ICSA2013 conference held in Scotland with the aim to investigate the communal pathways to sustainable living. According to Nicholas, “the Greek crisis is only a speck, albeit a pivot alone, within the current crisis that Europe and the world experiences at this critical moment in history and Athens, poorly prepared for this, has been at the epicentre of a maelstrom.” Therefore, the author argues that Greece is of great importance as a subject of further study concerning social changes and trends that develop. Nicholas observes a shift in sectors of the private sphere of society into collective forms which embody solidarity:

“It is at a time such as this that many re-address an entire value system and their notion of the commons. The social, political and ecological background of some of these individuals and groups thus enables them to take more radical and innovative steps. For many, resilience becomes synonymous with survival, but several collectives choose to go beyond that by adopting active, sometimes genuinely proactive ways of dealing with the situation. Through contact with people and groups, a different story unravels from the one told by the official media – which indicates the emergence of a communitarian movement in the form of various initiatives, collectives and eco-communities, a repopulation of the countryside.”

In all, this paper, through various case studies to be discussed in a next blog-post, discusses the effects of the crisis on the Greek society and the role it played in the emergence of communal ethos.