Greece Beyond the Crises, an Enhanced Resilience

Although Greece has been brought to the forefront of international attention over the last 10 years, much is still to be learned from this badly understood country. Far away from standard clichés opposing sunny beaches, ruined monuments, and Mediterranean cooking vs. corrupted people, oversized bureaucracy, and polluted urban landscapes, we will address Greece’s changing geography through the angle of crises and resilience. Well beyond the financial collapse and Troika experience, crises cover a wide array of events in Greece, from earthquakes and wildfires to extreme climate variability, environmental pollutions, war disasters, demographic collapse, and pandemics. Against these threats, AthensAthens has shown a remarkable capacity to change, adapt, and adjust through innovation and inventiveness. Geography is an excellent gateway towards a better understanding of how the country managed to develop its resilience to repeated shocks. Through a natural cross-disciplinary ability and in connection with complexity science, geography opens up new avenues for discussion on the Greek “black box.” Greece’s geography is made of acute landscape contrasts, multi-scalar event combinations, fierce resistance of local forces against global interests, and enhanced interconnectedness through its diasporic networks abroad. Chaos theory, nonlinearity, and dynamic systems are among the key concepts that will allow us to change the overall outlook and to extricate ourselves from the catastrophe logic that gained too much momentum in public opinion.