Picts. 3 and 4. “Advanced marginality” in Korogocho, Nairobi.
Pict. 5. Red zone in front of French embassy in Tunis, 2013.
Pict. 6. Urban porosity: immigrants on the streets of Yenikapi in Istanbul.
Pict. 7. “A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday.” A social housing terrace in Athens.
Pict. 8. Immigrants inventing their own ad-hoc public stage (Athens).
Pict. 9. Beauty salon or urban threshold? (São Salvador de Bahia, Brazil).
Pict. 10 Theatricality of encounter (Havana, Cuba).
Pict. 11. Creating an everyday public stage (Nicosia, Cyprus).
Pict. 12. Celebrating heterotopia at the end of a large antigentrification demonstration (Berlin).
Picts. 13 and 14. Heterotopias of dignity. The construction of a self-managed childcare center by the Movimiento Popular La Dignidad in Villa 21, a Buenos Aires slum.
Pict. 15. Heterotopias of struggle. Teachers on strike occupy the central square of Oaxaca, Mexico (2016).
Pict. 16. Heterotopias of struggle. Teachers on strike block the highway outside San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico (2016).
Pict. 17. Celebrating the inaugural opening of a Zapatista School in La Culebra, Chiapas, Mexico.
Pict. 18. “We choose colors,” a poster by the Coordination of Occupied Schools, December 2008 uprising.
Pict. 19. Hooded ballerinas dance in front of the occupied Opera building during the December 2008 uprising; unknown photographer.
Pict. 20. Walking as invention—occupied Navarinou Park, Athens; photo by Ioannis Papagiannakis.
Pict. 21. The assembly at the Syntagma Square occupation, 2011.
Pict. 22. Tent city at the Syntagma Square occupation, 2011.
Pict. 23. Occupied City Plaza Hotel: a self-managed common space in Athens.
Pict. 24. Occupied City Plaza Hotel: refugees welcome.
Pict. 25. Reappropriating the power of creativity in common in Havana, Cuba.
Acknowledgements
The idea of a city of thresholds has been central to my research and involvement with urban movements for many years. Appearing sometimes as an inspiring image or promising concept, this idea has sustained a probably ambiguous, always precarious, and undoubtedly unfinished effort to think about the emancipatory potential of existing, emergent, and possible spaces.
This book aims to expose important facets of a theoretical argument in the making. Parts I, II, and III comprise the book as it was first published by professionaldreamers in 2010. Part IV includes three more recent texts that serve to connect my work on urban commons developed in Common Space: The City as Commons (Zed Books, 2016) and Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (Manchester University Press, 2019). They indicate how my ideas about the social meaning of thresholds can be integrated with a theorizing of urban commons that understands commoning as a threshold-creating process.
Chapter 1 contains selections from a paper presented at the Seminars of the Aegean (Organized by NTUA, AUTH and Harokopio University at Naxos, 2003). A reworked version was published as part of the book Suspended Spaces of Alterity (Athens: Alexandria, 2010). For the present publication the text has been further developed.
Chapter 2 contains parts of two texts published in the corresponding catalogues of the Greek participation in the International Exhibition of Architecture – Venice Biennale: 10th Exhibition, 2006 (“Living in Exile in the Archipelago”) and 11th Exhibition, 2008 (“Inhabiting Rhythms”).
Chapter 4 contains parts of a paper presented at the Living in a Material World Conference (Brighton, UK 2001) and published in the short-lived e-journal Journal of Psychogeography and Urban Research, which is unfortunately no longer accessible.
Chapter 5 is a revised and developed version of a chapter of my book From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 2002). The chapter’s title is “Distance as a condition and means of approach.”
Chapter 6 is based on a paper published in Utopia 72 (2006) as “The space of order and heterotopias: Foucault as a geographer of otherness.”
Chapter 7 is a revised version of a chapter of my book Suspended Spaces of Alterity, originally titled “Following the traces of a heterotopia: in Zapatista Chiapas.”
Chapter 8 is based on ideas developed during a presentation at an RC21/International Sociological Association Conference in São Paulo, Brazil (2009). The presentation’s title was “The December 2008 Youth Uprising in Athens: Glimpses of a Possible City of Thresholds.” A version of this chapter can also be found in the e-journal Spatial Justice/Justicespatiale no. 2, available online at http://issi.org/06.php.
Chapter 9, “Squares in Movement,” originally appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly 111(3), Summer 2012. Special thanks to Michael Hardt for granting permission to publish it here.
Chapter 10 is based on the afterword to conference proceedings I wrote for Crisis-Scapes: Athens and Beyond, May 9–10, 2014.
Chapter 11 is a revised version of “On Urban Commoning” in Make_Shift City: Renegotiating the Urban Commons (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2014). Special thanks to the editor and publisher for their permission to include this essay here.
The book’s main ideas were and are still being tested in both academic and activist environments. I owe a lot to my students in the postgraduate course “Experience, Representation and Meaning of Space” that I have been organizing for the last eight years. The remarks and criticisms of my students have always been inspiring.
A lot of people have also contributed to the “city of thresholds” idea by commenting on lectures given in the context of specific urban initiatives in various neighborhoods in Athens.
My participation in the interdisciplinary Critical Research Methodology group in Athens—which combines engaged social criticism with a truly collaborative dialogue on social science methods beyond academic formalities—has had a tremendous influence on my research. Sotiris Dimitriou, the soul of this open group—who also inspired so much of my work over many years—unfortunately passed away in 2016. I feel that his existence as an engaged, generous, and antihierarchical intellectual has left its deep mark on my research and thinking.
Eftichios Bitsakis, Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Oliver Clemens, Karen Franck, Costas Gavroglou, John Holloway, Sabine Horlitz, Demetres Karydas, Maria Kopanari, Jenny Robinson, Quentin Stevens, Fereniki Vatavali, the late Annie Vrychea, and Andrew Wernick have in different times and places expressed stimulating opinions and offered helpful suggestions on the ideas elaborated in the book’s original chapters.
Brighenti has also generously and consistently supported this work from