The emergence of computer-mediated social networking amplifies concepts of shared and diffused agency. It seems that much is accomplished not so much by individuals standing out against the crowd, but by crowds of people forming, re-forming, interacting and sharing through highly responsive electronic media. So-called ‘smart mobs’ are apparently capable of generating meaningful outcomes by collective action through mobile phones, social networks such as Facebook, and shared open-source enterprises as in open software development. Contemporary theorising in the fields of human-computer interaction and digital media promotes concepts of ubiquitous, egalitarian, democratic, grass-roots, collective agency above concepts of hierarchical, heroic and individual creation, a shift thought by some to challenge accepted ways of designing and occupying space.

Through an examination of the public art project Garden Service, in this text we explore possibilities of and obstacles to practices of agency. The project was commissioned by the art institution The Common Guild in Edinburgh for the exhibition Jardins Publics, which took place in connection with the Edinburgh International Festival in summer 2007. It was based on the participation of a community and the communication between different actors, from institutions and associations to individual local residents, communication which included solving conflicts as well as building partnerships.

This paper sets out to introduce the notion of self-organisation in spatial, social and political terms, as a form of spatial agency in response to issues of subjectivity and the politics of urban space. Self-organisation – a complex notion, with multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings and implications – has gained increased relevance in contemporary political and urban discourses. In this sense, self-organisation can be understood as ‘a collective process of taking on political functions and addressing tasks that have been excluded from the field of real politics or pushed out of public space’. This reading is representative of the view taken here, particularly in its (perhaps unintentional) conflation of the political and the spatial. Indeed, the political functions that it speaks of are also, for this paper, spatial functions; and the field of politics, is also the field of architecture and urban planning.

‘It was the happiest moment of my life, I didn't know’, begins Orhan Pamuk in his novel The Museum of Innocence, translated into English in October 2009. The Museum of Innocence is the most recent novel by Pamuk, Turkish novelist and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature (its Turkish title is Masumiyet Müzesi, 2008) [1].

In early 1949, Eugéne Claudius-Petit, the new Minister of Reconstruction and Urbanism, had announced a campaign to build 20,000 dwellings a year for forty years, a measure of his determination to shift priorities from post-war reconstruction to the longer-term goals of renovation and modernisation of France's cities. For Claudius-Petit, the State had a duty to offer assistance not just to the sinistrés de la guerre but, as he put it, to the sinistrés de la vie, to the long suffering victims of France's inadequate housing conditions. To do so France had to build more housing and to do so more quickly. Since the Liberation there had been general agreement that the only way to achieve this was to transform the way that housing was built and that ‘industrialisation’ in one form or another was critical to doing so.

Le Corbusier – The Art of Architecture is the vague and loaded title given to a marvellous but somewhat random collection of Le Corbusier material that has been touring Europe, until recently housed in Lutyens' crypt in Liverpool Cathedral before landing in London this spring at the Barbican, where it feels at home in Brutalist surroundings. The exhibition has provided the inspiration for a festival of Le Corbusier events and talks, competitions and workshops across the country. The question, however, is why?

By any measure Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a landmark in recent influential ideas. The very term ‘paradigm shift’, now common parlance, derives from this 1962 work. Structure redirected its own domain, the philosophy of science, from a logical positivist orientation in its evaluation of scientific progress to one that accommodates a complex mix of sociological, linguistic and psychological factors. Perhaps because of this interdisciplinary inclusiveness, Kuhn's insights have informed theory in many disciplines. A survey of the recent literature includes works in anthropology, comparative literature, criminal justice, art history, education and feminist studies.

This paper springs from some reflections in the context of the design studio on the meaning of miniature representations (such as drawings or scaled models, for example), in art and architecture. In the pre-reflective understanding of the world which characterises direct human experience, the size of things is an integral and deeply meaningful aspect of their phenomenal reality. Our primary perception of the size of things is, of course, a function of our embodied condition and is inseparable from their essential nature. Things seem great or small to us from the point of view of our moving body and its ability to act upon and manipulate objects of that scale. A mountain is large, difficult to see all at once from close by, and requires a great physical effort to climb. The size of a doll's house provides us with a marvellous power to see and control the life within, a power which is one of the reasons why the miniature pervades our daydream world. The size of a bacterium makes it invisible to the naked eye and immune to the manipulation of our hand, and this condition endows it for us with a degree of mystery and unreality in our daily life. The phenomenon of size, like most things we perceive, is given to us as situated in our experiential world.