City as Commons: Berlin Journals—On the History and Present State of the City #4

Commons is not something that just exists out there, nor is it something that is objectively present in certain resources or things. It is a relation of people with the conditions they describe as essential for their existence, collectively,” writes Stavros Stavrides, architect, activist, and author of Common Space: The City as Commons.
Stavrides understands the creation, development, and maintenance of commons as a social practice that radically challenges capitalist values and hierarchical forms of social organization. Constructed in this way, urban spaces differ both from private enclosures and from public space as we know it: common spaces are permanently inviting and continually in the making, spaces which are not simply shared but through which sharing itself is shaped.
This e-book, edited by Mathias Heyden, provides an introduction to Stavrides‘ thinking about the City as Commons. Occupied squares, self-managed facilities and autonomous neighborhoods in Greece and Latin America exem-plify his theory of urban commoning, which, within the context of the global debates and struggles for social and economic justice, points in the direction of a truly emancipated society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: EECLECTIC
• Release date: May 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9783947295050

Book preview

Content

Urban Commoning =

The ‘School’ of we!

Mathias Heyden

Common Space:

The City as Commons

An Introduction

Stavros Stavrides

End notes

Image Credits

Imprint

Urban Commoning =

The ‘School’ of we!

Mathias Heyden

"Comunalidad defines both a collection of practices formed as creative adaptations of old traditions to resist old and new colonialisms, and a mental space, a horizon of intelligibility: how you see and experience the world as a We."1

This quote, from the Mexican philosopher and activist Gustavo Esteva, reflects a central motif of Stavros Stavrides’ text in this volume. An Athens-based architect, engaging in research, teaching, and activism, Stavrides counts among the few practitioners dealing with those spatial resources that should be neither public nor private, and should belong to everyone and to no one. It was on this basis that he was invited to lecture on the City as Commons on September 17, 2016, within the framework of the project Ene Mene Muh und welche Stadt willst Du? Contributions to the Berlin state election 2016 at neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK)2, and it is in the interest of reaching a wider audience that his lecture3 is published here in a reworked version.

Conceptualized as a spatial diagram, the exhibition and accompanying event series challenged institutionalized forms of citizen participation and countered such mainstreaming of participatory processes with the urgent demand for actually taking part in city development. The terms structuring the exhibition space—empowerment, eye level, control of politics (by the general public), and self-management—emphasized that co-determination must be followed by co-decision. In other words, if the increasing calls for the renewal of democracy are meant seriously, then the unobstructed access to power must be guaranteed to all people. This means, in turn, the equal access of all people to societal value creation. The urgent demand for actually taking part in city development goes hand in hand with the debates and struggles for the socialization of material and immaterial goods, since, ultimately, the city belongs to everyone involved in its daily (re)production!

In this sense, Stavrides’ contribution to the field of urban commons and urban commoning is fundamental. He does not advocate for the reform of the existing; unlike much of the recent work in this field, his is marked by the refusal to plead for a bit more citizen participation here and a bit more direct democracy there. Instead, he asserts that the prevailing global societal, political and economic relations lead to a permanent state of crisis. It is against this backdrop that Stavrides identifies and analyzes particular strategies of spatial appropriation in order to emphasize their emancipatory potential: the collective and solidarity-driven, self-empowered, self-organized, and self-managed production and reproduction of urban commons.

In the reading that follows, neither procedures nor instructions are to be found on how to end these relations of domination or, for example, how to prevent speculative real estate projects. Stavrides seeks instead to investigate the principles of spatial commons within social practices—for the creation of common spaces, thereby advocating for the city as commons. Understood in this way, Stavrides’ text can be interpreted as a challenging invitation to a visionary journey, toward a conscious reading of how the world as a shared space might be a place for everyone who is acting in it. Nevertheless, he offers concrete inspiration for agency in the form of activist-procedural movements along the way toward an egalitarian, and therefore just societal framework. Stavrides’ precise rendering of urban commoning—which not only defends the existing urban commons but also brings forth new ones, both developing and maintaining them—makes tangible a radical (re)imagining and (re)shaping of society, reaching down to its very roots. The corresponding feeling, thinking, and doing goes hand in