Common Space

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).

• ForewordIntroductionPart I: Commoning Space1. An Urban Archipelago of Enclosures2. Expanding Commoning: In, Against and Beyond Capitalism?Part II: Inhabited Common Spaces3. Shared Heterotopias: Learning From the History of a Social Housing Complex in Athens4. Housing and Urban Commoning5. Metropolitan Streets as Contested Spaces6. Occupied Squares, Societies in MovementPart III: Envisaged common spaces7. Practices of Defacement: Thresholds to Rediscovered Commons 8. Thought-images and Representations of the City as Commons9. Representations of Space and Representations of EmancipationConclusion: Reinventing the City through Commoning

How shall we understand the pulse and power of commoning, the subtle force that is constantly shaping the spaces and experiences of modern cities? Stavros Stavrides provides a rich, erudite exploration of this neglected topic and the potential for human emancipation.