Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation

(Hardback)

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Description

This book explores contemporary urban experiences and how they are connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. There is a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and politics of urban commons, and Stavrides uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity emerges today in, against and beyond existing societies of inequality. The concept of space commoning is discussed and considered in terms of its potential to promote emancipation. This is an exciting book, which explores the cultural meaning and politics of common spaces in conjunction with ideas connected with neighbourhood and community, justice and resistance, in order to trace elements of a different emancipating future. -- .

Reviews

'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 Benemrita Universidad Autnoma de Puebla, Mexico

Author Bio

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