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This study investigates maps and town-views of two port towns, Stockholm and Ottoman Thessaloniki, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These four centuries of early modern era are very important for the history of these ports and the historical changes made in this period affected the cartographic image of both cities.   The first major aim of this thesis is to examine the maps and town-views as sources for how these two cities were viewed spatially and schematically in the past. The second aim of the thesis is to explore the evolution of these two cities, using the comparative dimension to highlight both similarities and unique features, and again relying on maps and town-views as the major source. The fact that both cities were ports with important roles in early modern empires (the Swedish Empire and the Ottoman Empire respectively), means they offer much scope for comparison.   Defense, religious and financial use of places and buildings and the presence of minorities in streets and neighborhoods will get special attention at several points in this thesis.

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The end of the Second World War found the city of Thessaloniki devastated by the loss of nearly its total Jewish population in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. A few survivals return to their city just to realize that their fortunes have been confiscated either by the local authorities or by their Christian neighbors. Some Jews decide to leave their former homeland and some others take the decision to remain and start their life from scratch. For the following decades, the Jewish history of the city is being carefully and on purpose hidden and the collective memory erases the traces of Jews. In this part of the story, the Jews by themselves kept a low public profile and remained silent, struggling to survive and rebuild their fortunes. It was in 2013, when a heterogeneous group of people decided to launch the Memory Walk “Never Again” for the 50.000 Jews of Thessaloniki who lost their lives in the Shoa (Holocaust). The Memory walk had to deal with the barriers of the strong nationalistic profile of the city and of its local population. However, the Memory walk came to be established as an institution which exists and grows until today. The current paper examines how local digital media approached the first Memory walk taking into consideration the Jewish history, the stereotypes regarding Jews, the antisemitism and the strong nationalist and deeply religious profile of the city. The first part describes the Jewish presence in Thessaloniki under the Ottoman Empire, the consequences of the Hellenization of the city in 1912, the national identity formation process and the mobilizing role of the Orthodox Church in the political and cultural homogenization. In the second part, digital media articles related to the first Memory Walk are being analyzed according to the CDA (critical discourse analysis) and a critical reflection on how media approached the Memory walk is finally presented. The analysis results will be finalized with the conclusions which derive from in person interviews with key stakeholders of the Memory Walk.

The thesis inquires into the entanglement between the unsettlement of the Greek model of social reproduction that heavily relies on self-regulated property ownership and the emergence of vigilant violence on behalf of local property owners against undocumented migrants in the relegated neighborhood of Ksiladika in Thessaloniki’s West End. It probes the extent to which incidents of vigilant violence can be used as indicators of the structural deficiencies in the Greek housing system and property paradigm. 
 First, the thesis points to the distinct historic trajectory of the Greek housing system and property regime that is carved by a strategy of minimal involvement of state authority since the end of the Greek Civil War (1949). In contrast to the (North) European paradigm, the Greek model of social reproduction is marked by a normalized laissez-faire attitude in the domain of housing and by the hypertrophy of the family institution that emerged as a substitute system of social protection vis- a-vis the atrophy of administration. The thesis then points to a political discourse investing in the figure of the householder, sketched as the ‘normal’ Greek subject par excellence, within which self- government connects up with the imperatives of good government, in times when access to housing has become scarce and social insecurity widespread. 
 I focus my study on the neighborhood of Ksiladika in Thessaloniki, where as of late a vigilant campaign of evictions of undocumented migrant squatters on behalf of local property holders was launched. I suggest that this campaign of vigilance is not an act of ‘pure racism’ but is linked with the unsettlement of the Greek model of social reproduction, the scarcity of outright homeownership as a resource of symbolic and material value and the particularity of Ksiladika, that is at once a stigmatized neighborhood and a land of promise. 
 I rely on data collected through micro-ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with local property holders in Ksiladika. I use the conceptual tools of social space, field of power and symbolic power found in the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, as heuristic tools to identify the significance of property and home ownership in shaping perceptions of local property holders towards their neighborhood and in defining their actions. I present my empirical findings clarifying the diversity of choices, expectations and actions of different actors, active in this propertied field of power in the studied area. 
 The thesis draws to an end by using the findings from Ksiladika to contribute to a discussion that revolves around Wacquant’s three basic theses on the emergence of advanced urban marginality as an effect of the neoliberal state crafting on a global scale. First, I argue that in regions where the social state was inexistent, the implementation of neoliberal policies did not happen in a way identical to what can be observed in the North and do not entail a reengineering of the state. Then I suggest that Wacquant's schematization of a Janus-like Centaur state that performs liberalism for those at the top of the social scale and punitive paternalism for those at the social bottom immured in precarity does not hold, due to the expanding zone of precarity. Eventually, I suggest that neoliberal governing is not attained merely by the penal apparatus of the neoliberal Leviathan, but via a governing through subjects who internalize the postulates of the entrepreneurial ideology mediated through homeownership in times when the resource is scarce.