The Politics of Urban Potentiality - (In Common) by Stavros Stavrides (Hardcover)

About the Book

"An original exploration of the emancipatory potential of urban commons, drawing on research in Latin American urban movements, activist participation in urban struggles in Greece, and citizen initiatives developed in Europe, to demonstrate how an emancipatory urban future may be achieved"--

Book Synopsis

This volume examines how urban potentiality emerges in performances that reclaim the city, acting as an emancipatory force when dominant patterns of urban behaviour are thrown into crisis. It can result in establishing new habits of inhabiting city space, collective experiences shaping practices of urban commoning, re-inventing community relations, and freeing collaboration from capitalist expropriation. Instead of problematizing such radical change through the modernist belief in heroic unique acts, we need to explore the power dissident performances acquire when repeated. In search of an emancipatory politics of urban potentiality, commoning thus has the ability become a collective ethos based on mutuality and equality rather than merely a relatively fair way of sharing urban infrastructures.

In this book, the leading social and urban theorist Stavros Stavrides draws on a wide range of classic and historical thought on the urban question and social transformation. Drawing from research in Latin American urban movements, from activist participation in urban struggles in Greece, and citizen initiatives developed in Europe, this book expands the discussion on the potentialities of urban commoning to demonstrate how an emancipatory urban future may be achieved.

Review Quotes

"In The Politics of Urban Potentiality, Stavros Stavrides reflects on how powerful capitalist forces impose their divisive classification on the built environment and asks how we might resist them through the creative actuation of our habitually restless commonality and sense of place. He focuses an eclectic array of philosophical and anthropological ideas on this encompassing theme, which he nourishes with edifying examples of resistance and reshaping from communities in Latin America, Southern Europe, and the Middle East." --Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University, USA

"The politics of urban potentiality is a great book that expands and deepens the theoretical foundations of commoning in the context of metropolitan life. Based on his rich archive of lived experiences in metropolitan territories across the world, Stavros Stavrides explores the emancipatory potentialities of a wide variety of metropolitan struggles through commoning practices and the collective re-invention of the urban. A book that gives hope for egalitarian and cooperative futures in uncertain times." --Christian Schmid, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

"Against the idea of stable geometries of power, that need to be completely reinvented, Stavros Stavrides presents a strong argument of the role of everyday acts of survival and resistance performed by the oppressed and marginalized in shaping new, more emancipatory, futures. A bean of hope - practical, theoretical - in our hectic times." --Raquel Rolnik, University of São Paulo, UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing

About the Author

Stavros Stavrides is Professor of Architectural Design and Theory at The National Technical University of Athens. He is the author of Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (2019), Common Space: The City as Commons, (2016), Towards the City of Thresholds (2019) and co-editor with P. Travlou of Housing as Commons (2022).