Guide to Common Urban Imaginaries

This book focuses on emerging collective practices that operate across divided territories, contributing to the urban turn of peace building processes. These collective practices claim a role in the urban political by offering innovative approaches to transform ethnic conflicts into urban controversies geared towards commoning practices. They are an assemblage of strategies and tactics, creating common urban imaginaries for the contested territories of Famagusta in Cyprus; Famagusta is a city intensely loaded with divisive narratives and burdened with conflictual memories. By virtue of the material and immaterial technologies devised by the "Hands-on Famagusta" initiative, the instigator for the emergence of such collectives, architecture and urban design acquire agencies that transform divisive representations of contested territories into territories-of-common-concern. The Guide consists of interwoven stories by "Hands-on Famagusta" and articles from relevant literature by Potte-Bonneville, Condorelli, Gaffikin and Sterrett, Stratis, and Yaneva. On the one hand, the stories are about narratives of emerging collectives concerned with the future commons of Famagusta. They unfold through textual and visual material in regard to the spatial organization and materialization of the collectives. On the other hand, the articles provide linkage with the international debate of architecture and urban design as politics. This Guide provides resources for communities that dare to envision methods that transform hostilities embedded in contested urban spaces into environments of co-production for commons.