From Thresholds to Emancipation
From Thresholds to Emancipation
Stavros Stavrides
Could we see in today’s urban movements the seeds of an emancipatory future? And could their experiments in collective life teach us that another city and world are imminently possible?
In more than thirty short, aphoristic texts, architect, activist, and theorist Stavros Stavrides explores the “thresholds” of the urban commons in the present. Drawing primarily on three years of documentation from Athens during and after COVID—originally written as monthly contributions to Stavrides’ commissioned column “Thresholds to Emancipation” for Desinformémonos – Periodismo de abajo—these essays examine how practices of commoning shape subjectivity, space, and political imagination.
Stavrides focuses on affective solidarity, “polyrhythmic” urban life, resistance to the domestication of nature and behavior, and the collective cultivation of what he calls “emancipatory habits.” Across these short texts, the city emerges as a site of struggle and experimentation, where everyday practices can open pathways toward autonomy, radical imagination, and democratic life in common.
This new Common Notions edition is a pocket-sized, interventionist volume, with several texts appearing here for the first time. Situating the project in dialogue with thinkers from Benjamin and Barthes to contemporary media theorists—and with Stavrides’ own earlier work on cities as thresholds—the book balances theoretical framing with political urgency. From Thresholds to Emancipation offers both a conceptual entry point to Stavrides’ work and an open field for the experimental and performative directions the essays pursue.
Product Details
ISBN: 9781945335785
Published: January 12, 2027
Format: Paperback
Size: 5 x 8 in
Page count: 208
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Stavros Stavrides, architect and activist, is Emeritus Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he taught graduate courses on housing design (social housing included) and urban design. He still teaches postgraduate courses on research methodology and on the meaning of metropolitan experience.
Until recently he was the head of NTUA Lab Architectural Design and Communication and director of the NTUA postgraduate Program Research in Architecture: Architectural Design — Space — Culture. He has done extensive research fieldwork in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Mexico focused on housing-as-commons and on urban struggles for self-management.
Stavros has written extensively on the urban commons for decades. Some recent publications include: The Politics of Urban Potentiality (London 2024) Housing as Commons (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, forthcoming in Bucharest, Belgrade and Seoul), and Towards the City of Thresholds (Trento 2010, Madrid 2016, Istanbul 2016, New York 2019), as well as numerous articles on spatial theory and the urban commoning culture.
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Part I: Images
Innocent images?
Repeat or cite?
Graffiti acts
Too near, too faraway
Beyond the frame traps
Masks of absence, masks of presence
Those beautiful ones
“Mothers are right”
Reclaiming historyPart 2: Spaces
Cities in despair — Cities of hope
Stay home?
Whose city?
Safety or security?
Territory as commons
Land commoning
Reclaiming ornamentation
Geometries of the futurePart 3: Practices
Flexibility
Connectivity
Affective solidarities
The taming of nature
“Be creative!”
Collectors
Emancipatory habits
Mimesis can be poetic
Mutual care
The chosen ones
Overcoming racism and assimilationPart 4: Possibilities
Hating democracy
Harmony as a craftsman’s practice
Redeeming modernism
Equality built in common
Threshold institutions
Nostalgia of the possible
Freeing the future
Concrete utopias
Emancipatory time
Learning from the Zapatistas once more…
