The research project ‘UnSettle: Intersecting processes and experiences of urban displacements in Greece’ aims to study the multiple and simultaneously manifesting processes and experiences of displacement in the city of Athens, Greece. UnSettle's objectives include, first, theoretically reconceptualizing displacement by bringing into dialogue perspectives from urban geography and urban studies with approaches to displacement from refugee and forced migration studies. Second, UnSettle explores how different and intersecting processes of displacement are reproduced through institutional policies and practices of different actors. These include policies related to urban and housing restructuring and touristification, and migrants’ reception and accommodation, as well as official and informal practices reproducing – or contesting – displacement. Third, through ‘narrating’ and ‘mapping’ displacement methods, UnSettle aims at exploring both migrant and non-migrant residents’ experiences of displacement, the everyday ways of coping, and how they contest displacement. Fourth, the project adopts an innovative methodological approach related to knowledge production, through the active engagement of the displaced subjects in the process of ‘writing (about) displacement’.

UnSettle focuses on the city of Athens, examining the period 2016-2026, and responding to two urban and social challenges that reproduce displacement today, in different ways but simultaneously: First, displacement that emerges from processes of urban restructuring and housing financialisation, touristification and gentrification trends in different parts of the city. Such processes impact increasing parts of the population, and manifest through housing precarity, the inability to access affordable housing, the forced relocation to different areas of the city – or the threat thereof – due to rent increases and the transformation of the neighborhoods’ character, and through the loss of place and rupture of belonging. Second, UnSettle examines the ongoing displacement of already displaced subjects, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, due to the migration governance in the aftermath of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ and the particularities of the accommodation system that result in continuing displacement even in countries and cities of ‘reception’. This may include asylum seekers’ forced placement in camps, the forced relocations between different asylum facilities, and the evictions of recognized refugees that rupture relationships with place. Also, practices of prejudice in accessing the rental market and everyday racism in appropriating urban space play a role in reproducing displacement for the already displaced in the city. 

In UnSettle, displacement is understood as an open, dynamic and non-linear process of ‘un-homing’, the main feature of which is the rupture of the connection between people and places, the ‘uprooting’, the unsettling and the abolition of connections and histories of place. Displacement is approached as a process deriving from, manifested in, and affected by different levels (macro-, meso-, micro-level), a process unfolding in multiple scales with relational temporalities and spatialities, and a process referring to different subjects beyond exclusively the ‘migrants versus locals’ dichotomy, going thus beyond the ethnic lens.

UnSettle research project is implemented in the framework of H.F.R.I call “4th Call for H.F.R.I.’s Research Projects to Support Postdoctoral Researchers” (H.F.R.I. Project Number: 28207) and is hosted at the National Centre for Social Research, for the period 2026-2028.