This document discusses common spaces and autonomy through commoning practices. It argues that common spaces are social relations between groups and their environments, not just physical things. Commoning practices shape emerging collective identities and produce shared values. Threshold commons that belong to all and none could emancipate by inventing institutions open to negotiation between open identities. Commoning initiatives today prefigure more just societies by transforming lives and rethinking politics through practices of sharing and cooperation. True autonomy is a process where new social organizations emerge that are independent of the state.

1. Common spaces as potential spaces
of autonomy: learning from Athens
Stavros Stavrides
School of Architecture
National Technical University of Athens

2. Societies in movement?
• A society in movement: “a fight to encode/decode flows, or social
relations in movement” (Zibechi, Dispersing Power p.87)
• “Societies in movement, articulated from within quotidian patterns,
open fissures in the mechanisms of domination, shed the fabric of
social control, and disperse institutions…Expose social fault lines.”
(p.11)
• In societies devastated by autocratic regimes and/or austerity
policies forms of mutual support and solidarity develop
between people in their everyday struggle for survival.
• Knowledges and skills developed through everyday collective
experiences and struggles shape societies in movement.

6. “Tahrir had become a living and breathing microcosm of a civil sphere, the idealized
world of dignity, equality and expanded solidarity” (Alexander, 2011: 56).

7. Rethinking the commons
• The common is not “a particular kind of thing” but “an unstable and
malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group
and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or
physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood” (Harvey
2012: 73).
• Comunalidad (commonality):“the juxtaposition of commons and polity”
but also “a collection of practices formed as creative adaptations of old
traditions to resist old and new colonialisms, and a mental space, a
horizon of intelligibility: how you see and experience the world as a We”.
(Esteva 2012).
• If commoning is based on practices which give form to sharing processes,
then those practices are characterized both by the means they employ
and by the subjects who participate in them. Commoning practices
produce what is to be named valued, used and symbolized as common.

8. Institutions of commoning?
• We need to develop, through struggle, forms of threshold
commons: Forms of commons which belong to everybody and
nobody, forms of commons that are not identified with any
existing stable and recognizable communities which claim
their land, goods and arts as belonging to them and only to
them.
• Emancipating processes of commoning invent institutions
with a threshold character: Institutions open to negotiations,
actively corroborating comparisons between always open
identities and connected to collectively decided periodicities
of action. Institutions which express and organize liminality:
liminal practices corresponding to emerging liminal subjects
of collective action (limen in Latin means threshold).

9. Institutions which sustain and expand commoning
• The sharing between equals and, at the same time, the opening of
the circles of sharing towards “outsiders”, necessarily imply creating
institutions that can manage difference and tolerate
unpredictability.
• Establishing a process of comparability means creating
opportunities of negotiation and exchanges between emerging
collective identities
• Establishing a process of translatability means creating forms of
communication and sharing between emerging collective identities.
• Institutions of expanding commoning need to be institutions that
establish, above all, the form of sharing that makes possible and
guarantees all other kinds of sharing: the sharing of power.

10. Commoning solidarity
initiatives
• Neighborhood assemblies
• Everyday support for the victims of austerity
(collective kitchens, self-managed medical centers)
• Urban and peri-urban gardens
• Social centers (initiatives connected to alternative culture, education,
leisure etc.)
• Immigrant support initiatives (usually connected to social centers and to
everyday support initiatives focused on health, food and education)

11. Refugees in Athens.
Initiatives of support
create ad hoc common
spaces (2015-6)

16. Common space
• Common space is a set of spatial relations produced by commoning
practices.
• Spatial relations may be either organized as a closed system which
explicitly defines shared space within a definite perimeter and which
corresponds to a specific community of commoners, or they may take the
form of an open network of passages through which emerging and always
open communities of commoners communicate and exchange goods and
ideas.
• Common space shaped through practices of selective exclusion ends up
being a form of spatial enclosure (as f.e. the outdoor space of a gated
community)
• Common space produced as an expanding network of passages explicitly
expresses the power commoning has to create new forms of life-in-
common and a culture of sharing.

17. Subjectivation
• Political subjectivation through commoning is characterized
by the rise of new collective subjects which are inherently
multiple and which escape from the dominant classifications
of political action.
• Singularities are not dispersed and incompatible monads but
emergent and open to transformation nodes in networks of
cooperation and interaction.
• Commoning, i.e. practices of sharing and cooperation,
potentially creates an overflowing from preexisting identities
and a confluence of different actions and refusals.
• “The political process of subjectivation … continually creates
‘newcomers’ new subjects that enact the equal power of
anyone and everyone…” (Rancière, 2010: 59)

18. Rethinking Prefiguration
• “‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to a political action, practice,
movement, moment or development in which certain political
ideals are experimentally actualised in the ‘here and now’,
rather than hoped to be realised in a distant future” (Van de
Sande 2013: 230)
• Collective initiatives explicitly oriented towards transforming
crucial aspects of society today, in the present time directly
affect the lives of those involved in them. At the same time,
such expressions hint towards a rethinking of politics,
towards a retesting of the rules of equality and justice in and
through commoning practices.

19. Rethinking autonomy
• Spaces of potential autonomy will have to be porous and
expanding. Thresholds to an emerging future of human
emancipation.
• People who consider themselves as participants in this
“autonomous world”, at war with the rest of society, tend to ignore
that even the most egalitarian relations of sharing can reverse the
meaning of commoning by erecting barriers of enclosure.
• Autonomy is a the multileveled and often contradictory process
through which new forms of social organization emerge which
neither depend on the State nor imitate the State’s organizational
logic.