Common Space: The City as Commons (In Common)

Common Space: The City as Commons (In Common)

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 1783603275

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


How often do we consider the availability of shared, public space in our daily lives? Governmental efforts in place—such as anti-homeless spikes, slanted bus benches, and timed sprinklers—are all designed to discourage use of already severely limited public areas. How we interact with space in a modern context, particularly in urban settings, can feel increasingly governed and blocked off from common everyday encounters.
 
With Common Space, activist and architect Stavros Stavrides calls for a reconceiving of public and private space in the modern age. Stavrides appeals for a new understanding of common space not only as something that can be governed and open to all, but as an essential aspect of our world that expresses, encourages, and exemplifies new forms of social relations and shared experiences. He shows how these spaces are created, through a fascinating global examination of social housing, self-built urban settlements, street peddlers, and public art and graffiti. The first book to explicitly tackle the notion of the city as commons, Common Space, offers an insightful study into the links between space and social relations, revealing the hidden emancipatory potential within our urban worlds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These settlements provided Greek industries and handicraft workshops with low-wage labour. This is why many people considered the refugees a threat to their jobs, and to their well-being. Refugees were demonized as invaders who would destroy the city’s public life. Forced to cross a threshold in a period when it separated rather than connected two neighbouring countries, they were allowed neither to return nor to feel at home in their new destination. These people were actually not allowed to.

Knowledge who already knows what to do: planning interventions based on this imaginary rarely questioned diagnoses and assigned treatments, even though urban bodies were at least as complex and as unpredictable in their reactions to treatments as human bodies are. Planning in both its meanings (design and programming), considered as a project of curing city life through rationalized control of urban ‘functions’, did not profit from the inventive wisdom of everyday medical practice which always.

Pedestrians were to be completely separated from the vehicles. During the years between the First and Second World Wars, Le Corbusier (1970 and 1987) contributed decisively to the clarification of modernist architecture’s vision of the future of cities. In a formulation that would have important consequences in reconceptualizing the role of the streets, he maintained that the modern street is ‘a sort of stretched-out workshop’ (Le Corbusier 1987: 167). In direct correspondence with his view that.

Potential collective practices? One thing that seems to have united those people, no matter how different their country’s context was in regard to the global economic-social crisis, was the collectively felt loss of power’s legitimacy. In myriads of inventive expressions, people mocked power, expressed their anger against power’s symbols and ridiculed individual leaders. Consensus was shown to be in a deep crisis. Both societies of simulated democratic consensus and those that are outright.

Extended his almost obsessive art of wrapping famous buildings or sites all over the world to include Berlin’s Reichstag building. Preceding the building’s renovation in the following years, this act of wrapping was contested as essentially involving a kind of gesturing towards the Reichstag’s role in Germany’s history. And indeed this role is full of important parts as the Weimar Republic was proclaimed there in 1918 and as the site is connected with the Nazi seizure of power emblematically.

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