In recent years, urban uprisings, insurrections, riots, and occupations have been an expression of the rage and desperation of our time. So too have they expressed the joy of reclaiming collective life and a different way of composing a common world. At the root of these rebellious moments lies thresholds—the spaces to be crossed from cities of domination and exploitation to a common world of liberation.
Towards the City of Thresholds is a pioneering and ingenious study of these new forms of socialization and uses of space—self-managed and communal—that passionately reveals cities as the sites of manifest social antagonism as well as spatialities of emancipation. Activist and architect Stavros Stavrides describes the powerful reinvention of politics and social relations stirring everywhere in our urban world and analyzes the theoretical underpinnings present in these metropolitan spaces and how they might be bridged to expand the commons.
What is the emancipatory potential of the city in a time of crisis? What thresholds must be crossed for us to realize this potential? To answer these questions, Stavrides draws penetrating insight from the critical philosophies of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Henri Lefebvre—among others—to challenge the despotism of the political and urban crises of our times and reveal the heterotopias immanent within them.
Table of Content
Introduction: Spatiotemporal thresholds and the experience of otherness
PART I
Chapter 1: Exemplary metropolitan rhythms and the city of enclaves
Chapter 2: Inventing rhythms, inhabiting exception
PART II
Chapter 3: Walter Benjamin’s thresholds
Chapter 4: Navigating the metropolitan space: walking as a form of negotiation with otherness
Chapter 5: Theatricality: the art of creating thresholds
PART III
Chapter 6: Heterotopias: appropriating Foucault’s geography of otherness
Chapter 7: Identities and rebellion in Zapatista heterotopias
Chapter 8: The December 2008 youth uprising in Athens: glimpses of a possible city of thresholds
PART IV
Chapter 9: Squares in movement
Chapter 10: Emerging common spaces as a challenge to the city of crisis
Chapter 11: Urban commoning and the city of thresholds
About the author
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.
More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
160,712 Ebooks in this category
