Reclaiming Spatial Justice: The Emancipatory Power of Commoning

In this Just City by the Med Public Lecture, co-organised with the University of Glasgow's Urban Studies and Social Policy Seminar Series, Stavros Stavrides will discuss the role of urban commons in producing just urban futures through community action.

The seminar will be chaired by David Featherstone (Human Geography Research Group, University of Glasgow), and joined by Andy Inch (Urban Studies and Social Policy, University of Glasgow) as the discussant.

Abstract: Emergent urban communities may develop 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 organisation 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 reclaim spatial justice. Common spaces produced by the development of new urban habits and deviant urban rituals are to be understood as spaces in which spatial justice is performed and redefined. By using concrete examples from Europe and Latin America, this talk will argue that explicit and implicit efforts for collective self-management may construct emancipatory futures through commoning.

Bio: Stavros Stavrides is an architect, activist, and Emeritus Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He has done extensive research and fieldwork in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico, focused on housing-as-commons and on urban struggles for self-management. He is a member of the NTUA Lab for the Architectural Design and Communication as well as of the independent Laboratory for the Urban Commons. His recent books: The Politics of Urban Potentiality: Spatial Patterns of Emancipatory Commoning (2024), Housing as Commons (co-edited with Penny Travlou, 2023), Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (2019), Common Space. The City as Commons (2016), and Towards the City of Thresholds (2010).

The event is free, but ticketed. All welcome.