Quiet claims to the city: migrant women and everyday resistance in Thessaloniki

Source abstract

This piece explores how migrant women in Thessaloniki, Greece, make discreet, powerful claims to the city through everyday acts of resistance. Moving beyond formal notions of the “right to the city,” it examines how migrant women’s experiences reshape urban spatial norms and challenge gendered exclusions. Drawing on feminist geographic perspectives and ethnographic fieldwork, the piece highlights how subtle practices, such as avoiding certain routes, adjusting language use in public, or occupying public space despite experiences of comments, stares, or exclusion in everyday encounters, constitute forms of spatial negotiation and agency. These seemingly mundane actions are read as quiet interventions that reclaim presence within a city marked by historical displacement and ambivalent hospitality, where narratives of philoxenia coexist alongside everyday exclusionary encounters. Thessaloniki’s liminal position – between North and South – renders these negotiations particularly visible. The paper argues that these acts are essential to understanding how migrant women co-produce public space and urban life. By foregrounding lived experience and affective geographies, it redefines resistance not as overt protest but as everyday survival and spatial creativity. In doing so, it expands critical urban debates to include the quiet, embodied, and often invisible ways migrant women assert their right to belong in the city.