Stavros Stavrides - Common Space: The City as Commons

In Common

The architects of our lives are divided. There are those who insist that there is still no alternative to neoliberalism. Despite the many crises it has provoked, they continue to push for competition in every sphere of life, to widen the wealth gap, to ignore climate change and to pursue the steady dispossession of our rights and commonwealth.

Then there are those advocating change, those who seek to persuade us that capitalism can be saved from itself. They conceal capitalism behind a human face. They tell us that environmental disaster can be averted through technological solutions. They say that deeply rooted social injustices can be cured with a little more economic growth. That well be safer with more police on our streets.

And yet, we know that capitalism is dying, that its lies have been unmasked, that its grip on our world and our lives is maintained only through expropriations, dependency and commodified desires. In Common is a collection of works that see an end to capitalism without apocalypse. It provides us with techniques for building another world, and it narrates practices of alternatives and theories of hope. It is a glimpse into our shared present, for a future in common.

In Common is published by Zed Books, under the creative commons license. You are free to share this material, transform and build upon it for non-commercial purposes.

Series editor: Massimo De Angelis

About the author

Stavros Stavrides is an architect, activist and associate professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, where he teaches courses on social housing design, as well as a postgraduate course on the social meaning and significations of metropolitan experience. His publications on spatial theory include The Symbolic Relation to Space (1990); Advertising and the Meaning of Space (1996); The Texture of Things (with E. Cotsou, 1996); From the City-Screen to the City-Stage (2002, National Book Award), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (2010) and Towards the City of Thresholds (2010).

Common Space

The City as Commons

Stavros Stavrides

Common Space: The City as Commons was first published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE115RR, UK

www.zedbooks.co.uk

Copyright Stavros Stavrides 2016

The right of Stavros Stavrides to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This book is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0. International Creative Commons license ( CC BY-NC 4.0).

Typeset in Minion by Sandra Friesen
Index by Rohan Bolton
Cover designed by Dougal Burgess

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78360-328-2 hb
ISBN 978-1-78360-327-5 pb
ISBN 978-1-78360-329-9 pdf
ISBN 978-1-78360-330-5 epub
ISBN 978-1-78360-331-2 mobi

For Eugenia and Zoe

Contents

Acknowledgements

, Expanding commoning: in, against and beyond capitalism?, includes parts of the article Common Space as Threshold Space: Urban Commoning in Struggles to Re-appropriate Public Space, in Footprint , 16 (2015), 920, as well as parts of the article Re-inventing Spaces of Commoning: Occupied Squares in Movement, in Quaderns-e (Institut Catal dAntropologia), 18(2) (2013): 4052.

, Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life , London: Routledge (2007).

, Housing and urban commoning, includes a version of the article Housing and the City: Re-inventing the Urban Commons, in Binna Choi and Maiko Tana (eds.), Grand Domestic Revolution Handbook , Utrecht: CasCo Projects (2014).

, Metropolitan streets as contested spaces, is a reworked and extended version of the chapter published under the same title in Greek in K. Giannacopoulos and G. Giannitsiotis (eds.), Contested City-Spaces , Athens: Alexandreia (2010).

.

, Practices of defacement: thresholds to rediscovered commons, is an extensively reworked version of the paper Defacement and the alternative politics of urban memory presented at the ISA Forum of Sociology, Barcelona, in September 2008 ( RC 21: Rethinking Cities and Regions in a Troubled World, Session 3, New Urban Cultures: Public Space, Public Art, Performance and Popular Cultures).

, Representations of space and representations of emancipation, includes parts of the chapter Espacialidades de emancipacion y la ciudad de umbrales (in Spanish), in J. Holloway, F. Matamoros and S. Tischler (eds.), Pensar a contrapelo. Movimientos sociales y reflexion critica , Buenos Aires: Herramienta Ediciones (2009).

Foreword

by Massimo De Angelis

The debate on commons and commoning has grown exponentially in the twenty-first century. In the 1990s it was virtually non-existent, apart from the neo-institutional contribution of Elinor Ostrom and her affiliates, which was nevertheless mostly unknown to radical scholars and activists. The contemporary radical literatures were just beginning to tackle new interpretations of the notion of original accumulation, enclosures and, later, accumulation by dispossession (to name different interpretative varieties), that is, the strategies used by capital and the state to destroy commons. At the same time, social movements in the global north were starting to wake up after the big defeats that accompanied the establishment of neoliberalism, and a new generation began to realize that the period of neoliberal TINA (there is no alternative) was instead a period of TAMA (there are many alternatives), practised in full self-awareness by peasant and indigenous movements in the global south and by many other individuals and groupings in the global north.

Alter globalization movements coupled with the World Social Forums have further opened the cracks of hope first made unexpectedly for many of us by the unknown indigenous groups of the Zapatista Liberation Army, entering the world stage with their taking of San Cristobal de las Casas, in Chiapas, southeast Mexico, on 1 January 1995, the day the North America Free Trade Agreement came into force, which, incidentally, proposed the privatization of the ejidos , the land held in common by Mexicos indigenous people.

Twenty years and several wars after those eye-opening events, we find ourself with a burgeoning critical literature on commons and commoning, commonwealth and the common. Even the mere mention of these nowadays gives us a momentary break from the grip of fear and insecurity brought by our times of war and austerity. On Friday 13 November 2015, I was writing this foreword when news broke of the Paris attacks. These were perpetrated by youths from a forgotten banlieue , turned fanatics for lack of alternative practices of hope and 450 euros a month by youths who killed mainly young people doing some very innocent socializing at restaurants, a football game and a gig. Daily life stuff for global middle-class citizens. The response from the socialist president of France was not a measured reflection on the previous reactions of the global north on similar occasions. No, it was the same as that of the neoconservative US president in Afghanistan and Iraq following the 11 September 2001 attacks, a response that escalated deaths by terrorist attacks in the global north and around the world by 4,500 per cent and caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in US-led interventions. The French fries are thus back in US restaurants, and there is further bombing of Syria, murdering yet more civilians, while in Paris the state of emergency is intensified and the authorities are ready to close roads to demonstrators in view of the approaching climate change talks. Daily life space becomes a space of war and security.