Towards the City of Thresholds

Stavros Stavrides is an architect and professor teaching at the National Technical University of Athens on housing and public space design as well as on the meaning of metropolitan experience. Stavrides’s work on political autonomy in contemporary crises-governed cities provides timely urban theory to theorize forms of emancipating spatial practices and urban commoning, illuminated by an experience and knowledge of protest and rebellion in Athens since 2008. In addition to Towards the City of Thresholds, he has published six books and numerous articles. His recent books include: The Symbolic Relation to Space, Advertising and the Meaning of Space, The Texture of Things, From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage, Suspended Spaces of Alterity, Common Space: The City as Commons, as well as the forthcoming Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation.

Through a careful reading of urban struggles and by putting social and urban theory in the service of the most profound questions of collective transformation, Stavros Stavrides demonstrates the ‘spaces of possibility’ present in our cities and our daily lives.—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist StruggleGrabbing back for the common the spaces taken by capital and the State, which aims to turn them into spaces of order for their various operations, is one of the main achievements of the social movements of the urban peripheries. Thus, they not only place limits on the accumulation of capital and power by the 1 percent, but they turn the territories of the common into territories in resistance, a process that Stravros Stavrides knows and analyzes in depth, from a view that places the tension for emancipation at the center of his reflections.—Raúl Zibechi, author of Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forcesand Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social MovementsThreshold spaces are like portals to new dimensions of sociality and doing, in which subjective experience in enriched by being part of a collective emergent process that pulverizes hierarchies and restores joy and hope into the territory. In this insightful book, Stavros Stavides pushes us to think of the modern city as having many immanent heterotopic threshold spaces which could be bridged to expand the commons and challenge the despotism of late neoliberal urban crises. A must read for organizers, intellectuals, and revelers worldwide.—Massimo DeAngelis, author of Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism and Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global CapitalCombining innovative theoretical arguments with the concrete spatial sensibility of an architect, Stavros Stavrides shows us how people are breaking down urban barriers and opening the city to new and exciting interactions. This book teaches us how to make the metropolis into a common space.—Michael Hardt, coauthor of Assembly and CommonwealthIn a sense, Towards the City of Thresholds has already crossed a threshold: the threshold between us sensing the emancipatory potential of cities and actually realizing this. Through these dark hours of counter-revolutionary waves crashing onto our cities and communities the world over, it is imperative to keep this message alive: that a common world of liberation is still within reach. Towards the City of Thresholds is a must-read.—Antonis Vradis, coauthor of New Borders: Migration, Hotspots and the European Superstate and Athens and the War on Public Space: Tracing a City in Crisis

• Introduction: Spatiotemporal thresholds and the experience of othernessPART I Chapter 1: Exemplary metropolitan rhythms and the city of enclavesChapter 2: Inventing rhythms, inhabiting exception PART IIChapter 3: Walter Benjamin's thresholdsChapter 4: Navigating the metropolitan space: walking as a form of negotiation with othernessChapter 5: Theatricality: the art of creating thresholdsPART IIIChapter 6: Heterotopias: appropriating Foucault's geography of othernessChapter 7: Identities and rebellion in Zapatista heterotopiasChapter 8: The December 2008 youth uprising in Athens: glimpses of a possible city of thresholdsPART IVChapter 9: Squares in movementChapter 10: Emerging common spaces as a challenge to the city of crisisChapter 11: Urban commoning and the city of thresholds