Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation

Stavros Stavrides is Professor of Design and Architectural Theory at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

'With intense commitment and creative scholarship, Stavrides provides us with concrete experiences of how urban solidarity exists and can constitute the basis of emancipatory societies. In engagements with popular movements in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Spain, and through the potentialities inherent in composing spaces of residence and work, commoning is demonstrated to be an incisive practice of reaching out to the larger world and creating a more dynamic and just public realm.'AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Visiting Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London'Exciting stuff. Forget the state, think cities, think shared spaces of living and interacting, potential and present emancipation. Spaces that challenge enclosure, spaces that cross thresholds, open out. Think space as potential and follow it into self-organised neighbourhoods, into architecture, into Zapatista communities, into urban and rural territories in resistance. Stimulating, full of detailed studies, great.'John Holloway, Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y humanidades in the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico

• Introduction and acknowledgements1 Space as potential2 Commoning architectures 3 Territorialities of emancipation4 Reclaiming public space as commons: the squares movement and its legacyInterview with Zeyno Perkunlu5 Commoning neighborhoods: resisting urban renewal in Barcelona’s peripheryInterview with Stefano Portelli6 Commoning neighborhoods: the mutual help practices of Brazilian homeless movementsInterview with Pedro Arantes7 Commoning neighborhoods: building autonomy in Mexico City8 Objects in common: objects for commoning9 Emancipating commoning?Index