Tesserae dialogues #7 - Stavros Stavridis and Andrea Mubi Brighenti

Reclaiming the city as commons: re-inventing urban communities and the power of mutual help practices

Tuesday September 20, 9pm CET

Can we learn from the everyday experiences of people struggling to survive in big cities as well as from the ways urban movements shape communities of struggle? Is there an inherent potentiality for emancipatory commoning in struggles for the right to the city? And how this relate with the concept of commonality as in Elias Canetti? These are few of the questions we will discuss with Stavros Stavros Stavridis and Andrea Mubi Brighenti on Tuesday 20 September at 9pm, during our next online conversation of the Tesserae Dialogues series.

Stavros Stavrides, architect and activist, is Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he teaches graduate courses on housing and urban design, as well as a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience. He is currently the head of NTUA Lab for the Architectural Design and Communication as well as the 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 urban struggles for self-management. His recent publications include Housing as Commons (volume co-edited with Penny Travlou, London 2022)) Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (Manchester 2019), Common Space. The City as Commons, (London 2016, Istanbul 2016, Athens 2019, Lisbon 2021, Milano 2022, Seoul and Belgrade forthcoming) and Towards the City of Thresholds (Trento, 2010, Madrid 2016, Istanbul 2016, N. York 2019).

Andrea Mubi Brighenti is Professor of Social Theory and Space & Culture at the Department of Sociology, University of Trento, Italy. Research topics broadly cover space-power-and-society. He is the founder and editor of the independent online web journal lo Squaderno (www.losquaderno.net). Among his recent publications: – as Author, (forthcoming) Elias Canetti and Social Theory. The Bond of Creation; (with Mattias Kärrholm) Animated Lands. Studies in Territoriology (University of Nebraska Press, 2020); Teoria Sociale. Un percorso introduttivo [Social Theory. An Introduction] (Meltemi, 2020) – as Editor, The New Politics of Visibility (Intellect Books, 2022); (with Mattias Kärrholm) Territories, Environments, Politics: Explorations in Territoriology (Routledge, 2022); (with Mattias Kärrholm) Urban Walls. Political and Cultural Meanings of Vertical Structures and Surfaces (Routledge, 2018);