Plantzos, Dimitris. Athens Demapped: Archaeology, Heritage, and Urban Transformation. Coimbra: Coimbra University Press (Humanidades Series), 2025.

 

I have lived most of my life in Athens, a city that refuses to settle into one of its many selves. Every day, as I walk through its centre – down Aiolou Street, across Monastiraki Square, through the gentrified wounds of Psyrri and Koukaki and the touristified chaos that is Adrianou Street – I move through what some of us have come to call an archaeology of the present. The city feels as though it has just been unearthed: its pavements cracked by the roots of modernity, its air thick with marble dust and diesel, its façades covered in murals and mould. Athens Demapped emerged from these walks, from the quiet, stubborn insistence of a city that has never ceased to be both ancient and provisional.

When I began writing, I wanted to understand how a place so often – and so misguidedly – celebrated as the “cradle of Western culture” could also embody the periphery of that very idea. For two centuries, modern Athens has been mapped, restored, monumentalised, and then erased again – its surfaces rewritten by archaeologists, developers, and policy-makers. But beneath the cartographies of heritage and tourism lies a deeper story: the everyday life of a city repeatedly forced to remember itself in selective fragments. The “demapping” of my title names this process of erasure and re-inscription: the unmaking of social space and collective memory in the name of progress, growth, or simply survival.

Why Athens? Because Athens stands at the intersection of archaeology and crisis. To study its ruins is to study the politics of time itself. From the 1830s plan of Kleanthes and Schaubert – imagining a neoclassical capital over Ottoman foundations – to the Olympic reconstructions of 2004 and the Airbnb boom of the 2010s, the city has been shaped by an obsession with purification: the fantasy that the classical past can be extracted from the messy present. Yet it is precisely in the cracks of this fantasy that contemporary Athens becomes legible – as a city of the Global South trapped inside a Northern ideal, a Mediterranean capital that performs Western modernity while constantly betrayed by it.

When I wrote the opening pages of Athens Demapped, I began not with an ancient monument but with a deserted draper’s store on Aiolou Street, its neoclassical façade protected by rusting metal fences. I used to buy suiting fabric there; now the shop stands as a ruin within the living city. On its walls, two street artists painted a mural of fractured classical faces. That image condensed what I wanted to say: the survival of antiquity as street debris, the coexistence of aesthetic nostalgia and urban decay, the persistence of beauty within neglect. I realised that my own work as an archaeologist is not far from theirs: both of us trace the afterlives of form, the ways in which history leaks into everyday surfaces.

^{Deserted shop on Aiolou Street, Athens. © Dimitris Plantzos (2019)}

Writing about Athens after the “crisis” years 2008-2018 also meant confronting my own complicity. Archaeology, after all, has long served as a state apparatus for producing national time: the science of making the past visible for others to consume. During the austerity decade, as unemployment soared and the city hollowed out, antiquity itself was mobilised as a moral argument – Greeks must endure, the narrative went, because they are heirs to Pericles and Plato. In that sense, the crisis was archaeological: it unearthed the structures of dependency and self-exoticisation that had sustained modern Hellenism since its inception. To write an archaeology of the present was to recognise that the tools of my discipline – the gaze, the map, the grid – could also be instruments of control.

Yet the Athens I inhabit today is not merely a victim of its own myth. It is also a laboratory of resilience and invention. In the years after 2010, as the formal economy collapsed, informal cultures flourished. Squats, art collectives, and migrant communities re-imagined the city as a space of solidarity and experimentation. Walking through Exarcheia or Kypseli, one could sense an alternative mapping at work – graffiti archives, food-sharing networks, improvised sanctuaries for those excluded from the glossy image of “European” Athens. These practices reminded me that demapping can also mean liberation: the refusal to appear on the official chart, the right to occupy the blank spaces of the plan.

To me, this double movement – erasure and re-inscription, mourning and resistance – places Athens firmly within the broader cartography of the Mediterranean, and of what we now call the Global South. Across this sea, cities wrestle with similar contradictions: heritage as commodity, tourism as survival, memory as both resource and burden. From Naples to Beirut, from Alexandria to Lisbon or Barcelona, the politics of visibility defines who may claim the past and who must remain invisible. Athens participates in this condition not as an exception but as a mirror. The marble skyline that once symbolised Europe’s origins now frames struggles over migration, gentrification, and precarity that connect it to the global circuits of inequality.

The Mediterranean, then, is not a geography of sunlight and leisure; it is a theatre of uneven modernities. To write about Athens is to write about a region where history itself has become a form of labour – constantly mined, restored, and sold. Athens has long subscribed to the fallacy of growth through tourism, believing that the city’s salvation lies in perpetual exposure. Yet this economy of visibility breeds exhaustion: heritage turned spectacle, neighbourhoods turned Airbnb inventories. The supposed regeneration of Athens often conceals new forms of dispossession, where prosperity arrives only for those able to leave.

In this sense, Athens Demapped is less a book about ruins than about economies of visibility: who gets to appear as heritage, and who disappears into the shadows of redevelopment. The demapped city is the city that no longer belongs to its residents, where the right to the city becomes a right to something that, as David Harvey once warned us, no longer exists. And yet, as I insist in the book’s final pages, the mere act of walking, looking, remembering, already reclaims a fragment of that lost right. When I think of Athens now, I think of Derrida’s phrase (as translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas), “Athens, still remains”. The city endures not because it preserves its past intact, but because it refuses to be finished. Every demolition exposes another layer of habitation; every restoration invents a new ruin. This endless palimpsest is both exhausting and seductive. For those of us who live here, it becomes a way of thinking: to dwell among temporalities, to navigate heterochrony as daily experience. Perhaps this is what binds Athens to other Mediterranean cities – the sense that time here does not flow forward but gathers, sedimented and restless, like dust on marble.

Writing this book changed how I see the city that raised me. I no longer look at the Acropolis as a symbol (if I ever did), but as an interface – a site where global desires meet local fatigue. I no longer think of archaeology as a science of the past (which I certainly did once), but as a politics of the present: a practice of witnessing, of attending to what survives in spite of erasure. Most importantly, I learned that the stories we tell about heritage are never neutral; they shape who we imagine ourselves to be. Athens taught me that remembrance can be both a form of violence and a gesture of care.

As I finish this reflection, I recall an image from The Daughters, the theatre piece that opens my book: two women, modern Korai, standing amid broken marbles, arguing about beauty and survival. One wants to escape to the shops on Ermou Street; the other clings to the family’s “heritage” – the inherited Acropolis. Between them unfolds the dilemma of a city and perhaps of an entire region: how to live with the weight of the past without suffocating under it. Their quarrel is our own. And perhaps that is why Athens still matters – because within its contradictions we recognise our shared condition, the predicament of all cities that live between remembrance and forgetting, between the myth of civilisation and the reality of financial growth that is always promised but never becomes materialised.

In the end, Athens Demapped is not a love letter, nor an indictment, but a record of cohabitation. It asks how we might inhabit the ruins without romanticising them, how we might practise archaeology not as possession but as responsibility. The city remains – still – and so must we, learning to read its fragments anew, to trace our own precarious maps upon its ever-shifting ground.

 

WORKS CITED

Derrida, Jacques. Athens, Still Remains. The Photographs of Jean François Bonhomme. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010.

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London and New York: Verso, 2013.