Stavrides, S. – To Archeio

Common space as threshold space: Urban commoning in struggles to re-appropriate public space.

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:37 +0000

This paper will explore contemporary practices of urban commoning while attempting to construct a theoretical argument on the inherently emancipating potentialities of common space. Urban commoning will be considered as a set of spatial practices through which space is created both as a good to be shared and as a medium that can give form to institutions of sharing. In order for commoning to remain an open process that continuously expands without being contained in any form of enclosure, it has to invite newcomers. Shared spaces, open to newcomers, are spaces defined neither by a prevailing authority that supervises their use, nor by a closed community that controls them by excluding all ‘outsiders’. Common spaces are thus dependent upon their power to communicate and connect rather than separate. Common spaces are threshold spaces, connecting and comparing adjacent areas at the same time. In practices of common space creation, commoners create areas of encounter and collective self-management. Rules of use are also of a threshold character, constantly in the making. Likewise, subjects of use are threshold subjects: for commoning to remain open and ever expanding, commoners have to consider themselves open to transformative negotiations with newcomers.

This paper will thus attempt to understand urban commoning as a multifaceted process which produces spaces, subjects of use (inhabitants) and rules of use (institutions) that share the same qualitative characteristics. In such a prospect, urban commoning can prefigure forms of social relations based on sharing, cooperation and solidarity. In this way, space becomes not simply a common product but also the means through which egalitarian social relations can potentially be shaped.

Re-inventing spaces of commoning: Occupied squares in movement

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:22 +0000

In the recent occupied squares movement (including the Arab Spring uprisings and the worldwide Occupy movement), space commoning was a process that reinvented space-as-commons through collective action: space both as a good to be shared and as a form of organizing shared practices. This paper explores such processes of urban commoning and the ways in which they are connected to emerging communities in movement as well as to the creation of new kinds of political subjectivation. Subjects belonging to such communities tend to escape dominant classifications of political and social identities and to participate in acts that create urban threshold spaces. Thus, liminality characterizes both the subjects and the spaces of the occupied squares movement.

Squares in Movement

apostolos — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 22:25:15 +0000

What has been called the squares movement is characterized by practices of commoning that reinvent public space as commons. People in the recent square occupations were not only demanding justice and direct democracy but were also creating ad hoc new forms of solidarity and egalitarian organization. Focusing especially on the Syntagma Square occupation in Athens, this essay explores the importance of a decentralization–recentralization dialectics both for the construction of a shared feeling of belonging to communities in movement and for the emergence of new forms of political subjectivation. Analysis attempts to compare discourses and manifestos to acts of coordination and mutual support in an effort to show that the “occupy the squares” phenomenon is multifarious and dynamic and that it challenges many of the certainties of oppositional movement (Left or anarchist).