Advance Praise
“Through a careful reading of urban struggles and by putting social and urban theory in the service of the most profound questions of collective transformation, Stavros Stavrides demonstrates the ‘spaces of possibility’ present in our cities and our daily lives.”
—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle
“Grabbing back for the common the spaces taken by capital and the State, which aims to turn them into spaces of order for their various operations, is one of the main achievements of the social movements of the urban peripheries. Thus, these movements not only place limits on the accumulation of capital and power by the 1 percent, but they turn the territories of the common into territories in resistance, a process that Stravros Stavrides knows and analyzes in depth, from a view that places the tension for emancipation at the center of his reflections.”
—Raúl Zibechi, author of Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces and Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements
“Threshold spaces are like portals to new dimensions of sociality and doing, in which subjective experience is enriched by being part of a collective emergent process that pulverizes hierarchies and restores joy and hope into the territory. In this insightful book, Stavros Stavides pushes us to think of the modern city as having many immanent heterotopic threshold spaces which could be bridged to expand the commons and challenge the despotism of late neoliberal urban crises. A must read for organizers, intellectuals, and revelers worldwide.”
—Massimo DeAngelis, author of Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism and Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital
“Combining innovative theoretical arguments with the concrete spatial sensibility of an architect, Stavros Stavrides shows us how people are breaking down urban barriers and opening the city to new and exciting interactions. This book teaches us how to make the metropolis into a common space.”
––Michael Hardt, coauthor of Assembly and Commonwealth with Antonio Negri
“In a sense, Towards the City of Thresholds has already crossed a threshold: the threshold between us sensing the emancipatory potential of cities and actually realizing this. Through these dark hours of counter-revolutionary waves crashing onto our cities and communities the world over, it is imperative to keep this message alive: that a common world of liberation is still within reach. Towards the City of Thresholds is a must-read.”
—Antonis Vradis, coauthor of New Borders: Migration, Hotspots and the European Superstate and Athens and the War on Public Space: Tracing a City in Crisis
Towards the City of Thresholds
Stavros Stavrides
Towards the City of Thresholds
Stavros Stavrides
This edition © 2019 Common Notions
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.
ISBN: 978-1-942173-09-0
LCCN: 2019936532
Common Notions
c/o Interference Archive
314 7th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
Design and typesetting by Morgan Buck and Josh MacPhee
Antumbra Design | www.antumbradesign.org
Special thanks to Andrea Mubi Brighenti and professionaldreamers of Italy, publishers of an earlier edition of Towards the City of Thresholds which inspired this expanded edition.
professionaldreamers is a small, independent publisher that collects and promotes essays on space and society (www.professionaldreamers.net).
Printed in the USA on acid-free, recycle paper
Contents
Introduction: spatiotemporal thresholds and the experience of otherness
Thresholds as social artifacts
1. Exemplary metropolitan rhythms and the city of enclaves
Rhythms, social practices, and public space
