Owing to its particular sociopolitical history and its status as a semi-peripheral country, Greece has followed a pattern of economic and urban development radically different to that of most northern European countries. A central characteristic of that pattern is informality. Parting from an understanding of informality not as spontaneity or absence of state control, but as an alternative normativity that stems from deliberate state action or inaction, I approach informality not as an anomaly peculiar to the Greek political formation, but as an extra-institutional mechanism of redistribution, and I examine the four main pillars of informal welfare in Greece: clientelism, the informal sector, familialism and homeownership. I then propose an interpretation of the institutional reforms that followed the sovereign debt crisis starting in 2010 as a concerted attempt to dismantle this informal system of redistribution and to extend the reach of the state in previously informalized areas of social and economic life, without, however, reinforcing a formal system of welfare.
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