‘Agency’ is a beguiling word. It has the immediacy of a call-to-arms and the remoteness and anonymity of a bureaucratic function. Agency, as action in the world, underpins revolutionary social change, and the representation of someone else's interests – usually at a distance – in a governmental or business context. It is implicated in both the agitprop of the Reclaim the Streets network, or Brazil's Homeless Workers Movement, and in state bureaucracies such as the UK Border Agency, or commercial franchises such as the Western Union. The term encapsulates two quite distinctive forms of action: one individuated, collective and immediate; and the other systemic, anonymised and bureaucratic. It is no accident, then, that in academic literature ‘agency’ is often paired with ‘structure’, and in the binarised form, structure/agency, is used to refer to the tension between the creative actions of individuals and the social, political and economic structures that supposedly constrain them. The fact that architects are expected to exercise agency in both of these senses – as creative actors and as representatives of their clients' interests – gives the theme further significance.

This edition of arq assembles a selection of papers presented at the Conference ‘Agency’ organised by the research group called ‘The Agency’ initiated in 2007 in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. We offered to host the 5th AHRA International Conference, giving it the theme of ‘Agency’ and hoping that the submissions would energise the relationships between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society.

‘As it stands, the concept of popular culture is virtually useless, a melting pot of confused and contradictory meanings capable of misdirecting inquiry up any number of theoretical blind alleys’ […] popular culture is in effect an empty conceptual category, one which can be filled in a wide variety of often conflicting ways, depending on the context of use.

Tony Bennett [quoted] and John Storey in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

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.

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.

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.

‘Building Initiative’ is both the name adopted by a collaborative group of architects, urbanists and artists, and also the term they use to describe the ‘mode of agency’ chosen to inform and realise citizen-led urban regeneration in Belfast [1]. The necessity and forms of this praxis evolved in response to the city's spatial, social and policy environment, and the inability of conventional mechanisms of architectural practice to engage adequately with this context. Building Initiative explored and pursued specific modes of agency, which it termed ‘initiatives’, within a variety of sectors including architectural, planning, educational, academic and media, and at a range of scales from local to international. This created the opportunity to work with a diversity of partner organisations and to develop a correspondingly wide range of strategies. We will look briefly at the context of Belfast and Building Initiative's response to it, focusing specifically on the methods of working that were developed, before concentrating on one project to illustrate these methodologies and processes in application.

‘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].

Recent criticisms in architectural pedagogy suggest that schools of architecture tend to privilege a narrow section of designers with limited skill-sets, neglecting individual differences. In order to encourage architectural pedagogy to become more inclusive, this paper revisits the value of multiple skill-sets in architectural design – following an original suggestion by Vitruvius – exploring it through the framework of multiple intelligences developed by cognitive psychologist Howard Gardner.

The Ulster Museum is destined to remain a building that stands somewhat outside time and remote from its society. The building is in two parts that are merged into one: the first Classical, designed by James Wyness and built only in part by 1929, and the second, a transformative concrete extension designed by Francis Pym for a 1963 competition judged by Leslie Martin and opened in 1972 to the most violent year of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The extension is, as Paul Clarke, of the University of Ulster has written, ‘an icon to a period when architecture addressed at the very centre of its responsibility, the optimism of modern life, culture and public space’. Now, after decades of inept alterations and unimaginative curation, its doors are closed for a refurbishment that will disassemble its central ideas together with all the optimism that Clarke alludes to – and this at a time when Northern Ireland has the chance to build the open civil society that it never had and that the museum competition project symbolised in that brief period of opportunity for change forty-six years ago.