The Politics of Urban Potentiality

Reviews / Votes

In The Politics of Urban Potentiality, Stavros Stavrides reflects on how powerful capitalist forces impose their divisive classification on the built environment and asks how we might resist them through the creative actuation of our habitually restless commonality and sense of place. He focuses an eclectic array of philosophical and anthropological ideas on this encompassing theme, which he nourishes with edifying examples of resistance and reshaping from communities in Latin America, Southern Europe, and the Middle East. -- Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University, USA The politics of urban potentiality is a great book that expands and deepens the theoretical foundations of commoning in the context of metropolitan life. Based on his rich archive of lived experiences in metropolitan territories across the world, Stavros Stavrides explores the emancipatory potentialities of a wide variety of metropolitan struggles through commoning practices and the collective re-invention of the urban. A book that gives hope for egalitarian and cooperative futures in uncertain times. -- Christian Schmid, ETH Zurich, Switzerland Against the idea of stable geometries of power, that need to be completely reinvented , Stavros Stavrides presents a strong argument of the role of everyday acts of survival and resistance performed by the oppressed and marginalized in shaping new , more emancipatory, futures. A bean of hope - practical, theoretical - in our hectic times. -- Raquel Rolnik, University of Sao Paulo, UN Special Rapporteur on adequate housing