Emerging common spaces as a challenge to the city of crisis

Abstract

This paper explores potential links between the project of emancipating autonomy and urban commoning by tracing the development of experiences connected to the creation of common spaces in crisis-ridden Athens. It is maintained that for commoning to remain an active force against social and urban enclosures, commoning has to remain ‘infectious’ and to expand by overspilling the boundaries of any defined community. Threshold spatiality shapes common spaces which support expanding commoning. Moreover, institutions of expanding commoning remain correspondingly open and osmotic by ensuring that collective actions become comparable, translatable to each other and controlled by mechanisms which obstruct any form of accumulation of power. City space, thus, is not only transformed and reclaimed through practices of expanding commoning but also actively contributes to the shaping of commoning institutions.

Key words:

• autonomy
• commoning
• thresholds
• institutions of commoning
• enclaves

Notes

1 Parts of this contribution are included in ‘Common Space as Threshold Space: On the Spatiality of Urban Commoning’, which is to be published in Footprint Delft Architecture Theory Journal, 9 (1) (Spring 2015).

Additional information

Stavros Stavrides is Associate Professor of architectural design and theory at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).