Climate crisis and the city Green spaces and energy use in Athens
15/01/2026
Climate crisis and the city. Green spaces and energy use in Athens
Organised by: École Française d’Athènes, Environnement, Ville, Société (EVS)/CNRS’Laboratory of Social Transformations of Urban Space (LaSTcity)/EKKE
Climate change is not only a global threat. It has local effects and causes. In fact, urban configurations and local dynamics have a crucial role in the global change that some researchers consider the Anthropocene as an Urbanocene. This workshop, hosted by the École française d’Athènes, gathers geographers, anthropologists, designers, landscape architects and urban planners, to think about socio-spatial aspects of the climate crisis in the context of Athens.
This Athenian metropolitan context is particularly challenging because of the intensity of the local consequences of climate change. The city’s aridity index continues to rise, forest fires are becoming more and more severe, solutions to withstand the heat are costly and reinforce inequalities, while the very specific city’s forms and matters, such as lack of green spaces and vegetation or extensive use of concrete and its Heat Island Effects, remain largely unaddressed. Only recently political interest has emerged for the ecological transition, both at the national and the municipal level.
The aim of the workshop is to better describe the impact of the climate crisis in the local context and the social challenges that emerge, with a specific interest in green spaces, energy use, urban temperatures and their interrelations. Our goal is to shed light on the unevenly distributed impacts of the climate crisis, on the reproduction and reinforcement of existing socio-spatial inequalities and on the controversial aspects of the promoted climate and urban policies.
One of the main objectives of the workshop is to identify common areas of interest between French and Greek researchers that could serve as a foundation for future cooperation and exchange of knowledge in the field of climate change and urban space.
ΕΠΙΣΤΡΟΦΗ ΣΤΗ ΛΙΣΤΑ