An urban hotspot: Eleonas camp, between migration and urban governance

From the summer of 2015 until the fall of 2022, Eleonas camp[1] was one of the main Athenian reception facilities, embodying many of the transformations which have characterized the evolution of the governance of the “refugee issue” in Greece during the last decade. As such transformations concerned changes in the role of the central and local government, international organisations and civil society, it is argued that an analysis of the Eleonas camp trajectory, concluded in 2022 through a complex eviction and the “regeneration” of the site, shows a convergence of urban and migration governance, a convergence which appears to be a distinctive trait of the Greek “Multilevel Governance” of migration.

Χάρτης 1: Camps in 2022

Phase 0. The long summer and the creation of Eleonas camp

The so-called “refugee crisis” started with the arrival of over 800.000 migrants on the Greek shores by the end of the summer 2015 (UNHCR, 2024), and was soon followed by the closure and militarization of the borders along the Balkan route by March 2016 (Anastasiadou et al., 2017). As the Aegean islands and the main cities witnessed the passage of hundreds of thousands of people on the move and the presence of tens of thousands trapped by the closed borders, the Greek parliament was facing the failure of the national debt negotiations, the resignation of the first Tsipras government and the management of new elections. In the absence of a coherent reception policy, the “long summer of migration” was therefore characterized by the initiative of Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs), local and international NGOs, municipal actors, solidarity movements and, above all, the migrants themselves. In Athens, adding to dozens of informal encampments scattered around the city parks and squares, shelter was provided with via a set of emergency structures located in large facilities which could host large numbers of people, as the main building of the abandoned airport of Elliniko, three large Piraeus port warehouses and several post-olympic sports facilities. Nominally managed by institutional actors, but kept in function thanks to the efforts of their temporary inhabitants, NGOs and solidarians, these structures lacked a unified administration and, depending on each different facility, were classified either as “First-line”, “Second-line” or  “temporary” reception (ECRE, 2016).

The exception was Eleonas camp: opened on the 16th of August of 2015 at the initiative of the first Tsipras government with the support of UNHCR, the camp was the first “official” reception structure to operate under the supervision of the First Reception Service [2]. The camp was managed by the General Secretariat of Migration Policy [3] and the Ministry of Interior and Administrative Reconstruction, and run by Mahmoud Abdelrasoul in the role of camp manager. Notably, Abdelrasoul had graduated in medicine, was 29 years old, had Sudanese origins and had become a Greek citizen in February of that same year. An important role was also played by the municipality of Athens, led by the center-left mayor Giorgos Kaminis, through the municipal company EATA, which provided both technical personnel and social workers. Other organizations active in the camp were the Hellenic Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the Asylum Service, the army, the IOM, the UNHCR, MSF, and at least 4 local NGOs.

Situated on an abandoned municipal site and the only one close to the city centre, to which it was linked by several bus lines and a metro station, the structure was intended for the temporary reception of “vulnerable” subjects. Nevertheless, its location followed a tradition of containment and convergence of “unwanted” populations in disadvantaged areas (Cheshire & Zappia, 2015) as Eleonas, once a dynamic industrial area, had long been labelled an “urban void” [4]. By October the camp consisted of 90 housing containers for a capacity of 750 people (European Commission, 2015) [5], and by December it had hosted 9.725 people (Cupulo, 2015). By March 2016 it officially hosted 712 migrants, mostly Afghans and Iranians, while an extension of another 600 places was almost completed (IOM, 2016: 16).

Phase 1. The EU-Turkey Statement and the new governance

The EU-Turkey Statement, approved in March 2016 and implemented by the second Tsipras government through Law 4375/2016, marked a new course for the governance of migration. While keeping a mostly tolerant attitude toward squatting and other practices of “self-settlement”, the law recast the “First Reception Service” into the “Reception and Identification Service” (RIS), aiming at unifying and centralizing the administrative practice. Not only this law introduced the “geographical restrictions” and the “repatriation” to “safe” third countries, but it laid the foundation of the still existing camp system. The law  defined a new type of refugee camps serving as hotspots in the Aegean island, the “RICs” (Reception and Identification Centers), while also establishing the system of mainland “reception structures” through which what I call the extra-urban confinement of migrants would be implemented, classified either as “Temporary Reception Facilities for Asylum Seekers” (Δομές Προσωρινής Υποδοχής Αιτούντων Διεθνή Προστασία), as was the case of Eleonas camp (HBA, 2017), or by the title “Open Temporary Accommodation Facilities” (Δομές Προσωρινής Φιλοξενίας) if destined to host persons subject to return procedures or whose return has been suspended. As these new and camp-liked structures opened, the residents of the “Phase 0” reception facilities were transferred there and by 2017, 5 hotspot camps, with a capacity of over 8.000 places and more than 30 mainland camps (8 of which were located nearby Athens), with a capacity of over 30.000 places, were operational (AIDA, 2017: 22, 98-99), even if by the same year arrivals had decreased to 36.310 (UNHCR, 2024). Except for the radical fringes of the solidarity movement, the actors who had promoted the reception initiatives during the “crisis” were included in a process of ‘top-down’ and ‘downward’ devolution (Guiraudon & Lahav, 2000), marking the beginning of a ‘Multilevel Governance’ (MLG) of migration in the Greek context [6].

The new “reception system” was characterized by the centrality of “international protection” and “vulnerability” (Spathopoulou et al., 2020; Glyniadaki, 2021), reflected in the complementarity of camps, in the great majority located far away and scarcely connected to urban centers, and urban accommodation programs reserved for “vulnerable” subjects, which had grown to a capacity of 27.000 places by 2018 (UNHCR, 2021). Pivotal roles were played by the IOM, by the UNHCR and by the municipalities, the first as “Site Management Support” (SMS) in most camps, the others as promoters of “humanitarian” projects and accommodation programs (Stratigaki, 2022), mostly grouped by the UNHCR into the ESTIA programme by 2017, while the actual provision of housing and any other kind of “humanitarian” aid passed through the ubiquitous employment of local and international NGOs.

Following the “Statement”, Eleonas camp had been made permanent and had reached a capacity of 2.500 places, with 205 housing containers hosting 2.183 “vulnerable” residents, in majority women and children of Afghan and Syrian nationality (UNHCR, 2016). By 2018, the camp had grown to accommodate 297 housing containers (UNHCR, 2018) and a new manager, Dimitris Georgiadis, had been appointed. Coming from a research career in social sciences (Georgiadis, 2023), Georgiadis had worked as a Career Counselor in a Second Chance School and in a Mental Health Center. As the camp functioned thanks to a large assemblage of humanitarian actors, including new international NGOs, it also grew in popularity, being visited by numerous public personalities, such as the former French president Hollande, and hosting intercultural events (Ministry of Education, 2018).

Phase 2. The consolidation of the camps’ system

New Democracy’s victory in 2019 national and municipal elections, followed by the appointing of Kyriakos Mitsotakis as Prime Minister and his nephew Kostas Bakoyannis as mayor of Athens, marked the beginning of a second phase. With regard to external bordering, from 2020 on a systematic recourse to push-backs was documented, making border crossing more dangerous. With regards to the “reception system”, the government passed several pieces of legislation[7]

through which it created the Ministry of Migration and Asylum (MoMA), changed once more the classifications of the various structures and, most notably, put them under the supervision of ministerial appointed camp directors, centralizing many tasks previously assumed by the IOM and UNHCR (AIDA, 2021). The structures were reorganized as:

• 5 CCACs (Closed Controlled Access Centers) – ΚΕΔ (Κλειστές Ελεγχόμενες Δομές) working as island hotspot camp
• 3 RICs (Reception and Identification Centers) – ΚΥΤ (Κέντρα Υποδοχής και Ταυτοποίησης) in specific strategic locations
• 24 CAFTAAS (Controlled Access Facility for Temporary Accommodation of Asylum Seekers) – ΕΔΠΦΑΑ (Ελεγχόμενες Δομές Προσωρινής Φιλοξενίας αιτούντων άσυλο) mainland camps [8]

Figure 1: Organizational chart of the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum

Source: ΥΜΑ, 2023

Adding to these are 7 PRDCs, also known as PROKEKA (Pre-Removal Detention Centers), even though such structures were never part of the “reception system”(AIDA, 2024: 226). Moreover, it introduced the “NGO registry” (Amnesty International, 2020), limiting the number and the autonomy of NGOs in the camps, and restricted the access to the camps to their staff and residents, allegedly in response to the pandemic of Covid-19. As these restrictions became permanent, fences and gates were erected around the structures. Furthermore, in 2020 the government took over the ESTIA program and soon announced its closure by February 2022, marking a fundamental change from a reception policy based on the complementarity of housing schemes for vulnerable subjects and refugee camps to a system consisting solely of camps.

Accordingly, in Athens both the national and the municipal institutions and agencies explicitly pursued an agenda aimed at reducing the migrants’ presence. As a first step, in 2019 the police evicted dozens of squats, transferring most of their residents into the mainland camps. As a second step, the government planned the construction of bigger island “reception structures”: nevertheless, the project backfired as islanders rioted, leading the MoMA to initiate the so-called “island decongestion strategy”. Alas, the “decongestion” was mostly carried out informally, reducing police surveillance on the “geographical restrictions”, and many of those who arrived in Athens found shelter in self-built encampments. As the authorities relocated hundreds of migrants in Eleonas camp many others followed, inhabiting in self-built shacks and tents or sub-renting places inside the housing containers, while hoping to be re-registered in the “reception system”. More than ever, between 2020 and 2021 the camp functioned as an informal and negotiated, urban hot-spot, selecting, containing and channeling the migrants’ presence in the city. The occupancy rate rose from 87,4% in May  (IOM, 2020a) to 102% in June (IOM, 2020b), stabilizing above 130% in August 2020 (IOM, 2020c). Still in December 2021 many lived in tents and the occupancy rate was at 109%, with 2.023 residents, of which only 763 were registered (IOM, 2021). While women and children were still a majority, most of the residents were now coming from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Afghanistan. Finally, by 2022 the island “decongestion” was over, and the government focused on its original goal: during the last months the last beneficiaries of ESTIA, around 12.500 “vulnerable” subjects, were either transferred to camps or evicted (RSA, 2022), and Eleonas camp faced its evacuation.