One point though that is not mentioned in the text. I can not see any relation between the riots in the French banlieues and the riots in Greece.
Even in Athens, in a metropolitan environment, the subjects that participated in the rebellion are not socially isolated, spatially ghettoized, exiled into the outskirts of the megacity.

No high school students, university students, young workers (precarious or not), unemployed, second generation immigrants (especially albanians), football hooligans or even drug addicts can be considered as outcasts thrown into faraway ghettos. Although class differences have become really sharp and there has been a serious effort from the part of the state to impose a situation of a generalized surveillance and an increase of police repression, no sufficient ghettoization and spatial deconcentration had been attained. After all, Alexis was shot in a neighborhood frequented by young people, artists and politicos, in the heart of Athens.

If there is a slight resemblance, this could be true for some categories of immigrants (Africans or Asians) but certainly they do not live in ghetto-like communities (not yet, at least). Moreover, almost most riots took place in the centre of the big cities, in the very heart of them actually, and not in some remote, cut-off suburbs isolated from the centre though heavily policed hygienic zones. For smaller cities and towns this is even truer.
These differences between France and Greece shed a different light on the importance and consequences of the violence in the rebellion. It was not felt as self-destructive, nihilistic, a dead-end and a desperate explosion going nowhere. On the contrary, it proved to be liberatory in the sense that it opened up space for more creative acts, that could not have happened before if this rupture had not happened.

K.
February 9, 2009