Emerging common spaces as a challenge to the city of crisis

This paper explores potential links between the project of emancipating autonomy and urban commoning by tracing the development of experiences connected to the creation of common spaces in crisis-ridden Athens. It is maintained that for commoning to remain an active force against social and urban enclosures, commoning has to remain ‘infectious’ and to expand by overspilling the boundaries of any defined community. Threshold spatiality shapes common spaces which support expanding commoning. Moreover, institutions of expanding commoning remain correspondingly open and osmotic by ensuring that collective actions become comparable, translatable to each other and controlled by mechanisms which obstruct any form of accumulation of power. City space, thus, is not only transformed and reclaimed through practices of expanding commoning but also actively contributes to the shaping of commoning institutions.