Countermapping Metaxourgeio

What do we mourn, what do we celebrate, what could still be? In Metaxourgeio, a neighbourhood under intense gentrification pressure, we walk, collect, and draw collective memory into maps, blending grief, joy, and imagined futures.

Countermapping Metaxourgeio is a participatory critical cartography workshop and public exhibition developed by ACAN Greece, in collaboration with grassroots groups rooted in the neighbourhood. It is part of the European ACAN network's 2026 Action Week concept, Saving the Future We Already Have, a counter-narrative to wasteful demolition and gentrification across European cities.

Context & Relevance

Metaxourgeio is a central Athens neighbourhood undergoing rapid, largely unregulated gentrification. Short-term rentals, demolitions, and displacement are eroding a place built on layered working-class and migrant history. Official maps register only property lines and permits, never what residents actually value, lose, or imagine.

Early September is also deep tourist season, making the pressures on the neighbourhood, and the case for defending it, especially visible and urgent.

Methodology

The action uses critical cartography as a tool of resistance and remembrance. Mapping is treated not as a neutral, technical act but as a political and poetic practice. The methodology rests on three intertwined lenses, deliberately not kept separate:

Mourn: what has been lost or is being lost: closures, demolitions, displacement.

Celebrate: what survives, resists, and holds the neighbourhood together.

Imagine: what could be: alternative futures for the same sites.

In practice, a single site often holds all three at once : the closed community centre is grief, the reclaimed public park is joy, and what could be of a vacant lot or future community space is the open future. The resulting maps are deliberately layered and subjective rather than resolved.

Programme

5 September: Discuss, Walk & Collect. Introductory sessions and discussions. An open walking route through Metaxourgeio, led collaboratively with grassroots groups operating in the area. Participants pause at sites of memory, loss, and resistance to collect stories, observations, and reactions using simple documentation tools.

6 September: Draw & Exhibit. A hands-on map-drawing workshop at Leonnatou art space, translating what was gathered into hand-drawn, affective maps. Alongside the maps, short vignettes are produced and physically placed back at corresponding sites in the neighbourhood, turning the route itself into a temporary, dispersed street exhibition that the maps point back to.

5–13 September: Exhibition. The maps and vignettes remain on display in the neighbourhood throughout the full Action Week.

Audience

Local residents and grassroots groups in Metaxourgeio, especially those experiencing displacement pressure; built environment professionals and students; local press and the broader public, anyone invested in how the neighbourhood's future is decided and by whom.

Estimated amount of participants: 20