The Politics of Urban Potentiality
Spatial Patterns of Emancipatory Commoning
Professor Stavros Stavrides author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:27th Jun '24
Should be back in stock very soon
An original exploration of the emancipatory potential of urban commons, bringing together non-Eurocentric political theory and research into social movements from Latin America and Europe.
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.
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
ISBN: 9781350413948
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
200 pages