Urban potentialities and emancipatory futures | Stavros STAVRIDES

            The 2024-2025 StadsSalonsUrbains Lecture Series explores the evolving role of urban welfare infrastructures in contemporary cities. It examines how access to social spaces and community resources—beyond basic services like education, healthcare, and utilities—shapes people's ability to live fulfilling lives. With the pressures of privatization, austerity, and shrinking public spaces, traditional welfare systems are increasingly under strain. However, cities also serve as hubs for innovative solutions, where community-based initiatives, new models of governance, and collaborations across civic, public, and private sectors are creating alternative social infrastructures. These spaces not only address practical needs but also foster collective well-being, progressive politics, and social justice. The lecture series delves into these dynamic and critical issues from diverse theoretical perspectives.
          

Urban potentialities and emancipatory futures

Emergent urban communities may reinvent commoning as a practice of sharing based on relations of equality and mutual support. This is a multileveled and often contradictory process through which new forms of social organization emerge. Urban commoning acquires an emancipatory potentiality when it challenges the everyday routines of social reproduction. Either by permeating everyday life or by creatively interrupting it during urban struggles, urban commoning practices activate urban potentialities. Common spaces produced by the development of new urban habits and deviant urban rituals are to be understood not as temporary enclaves of otherness but as thresholds which communicate and multiply. By using concrete examples from Europe and Latin America this presentation will try to show that explicit and implicit efforts for collective self-management may construct emancipatory futures through commoning.

Stavros STAVRIDES

National Technical University Athens

Stavros Stavrides, architect and activist, is Emeritus Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he presently teaches a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience and research methodologies.

He is member of the NTUA Lab for the Architectural Design and Communication as well as of the independent Laboratory for the Urban Commons.

He has done extensive research fieldwork in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico focused on housing-as-commons and on urban struggles for self-management.

His recent publications include The Politics of Urban Potentiality (London 2024), Housing as Commons (co-edited with Penny Travlou, London 2023), Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (Manchester 2019), Common Space. The City as Commons, (London 2016, Istanbul 2016, Athens 2019, Lisbon 2021, Milano 2022, Bucharest 2024, forthcoming in Belgrade and Seoul), Towards the City of Thresholds (Trento, 2010, Madrid 2016, Istanbul 2016, N. York 2019), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (Athens, 2010) and From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (Athens, 2002 National Book Award) as well as numerous articles on spatial theory and the urban commoning culture.

He has lectured in European and North and South American Universities on urban struggles and practices of urban commoning.

Personal homepage: https://stavrosstavrides.com/