If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and aesthetics are still catching up with each other. In the 21st century, since the revolutionary unrest of the 1960s, participation in art and architecture has lost its utopian glow and become the focus of a fierce debate: does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it?

Contemporary critics see in participation only technocratic control, while others embrace it as a viable politics in an era of global capitalism. This innovative book breaks the impasse by looking at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimized or liberated from it. From artists hijacking Google Earth to protesters setting up a museum of the revolution in Cairo, art, architecture and daily life are explored in their participatory dimension.

Marking out a knowingly complex field of contemporary scholarship on 'participation' in art and architecture, this volume is testament not only to the multiple valences of the term - artistic, social, political, civic, urban, economic, and more - and the distinct contexts in which participatory acts and forms of agency have appeared or been strategically mobilized, but also of the term’s rich and ongoing potential as a critical and artistic lens. Inviting us to continue to 'think' through participation, it will be a welcome addition to contemporary debates on the ethical and political dimensions of art and architecture. * Felicity D Scott, Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Program in Critical, Curatorial & Conceptual Practices in Architecture, Columbia University, USA *

Intervening in vibrant debates on participation in the public sphere, Participation in Art and Architecture ranges widely over continents and cases: Sarajevo under siege, Sao Paulo between moving bodies and opened urbanism, the Acropolis and architectural erotics, Google Street View, Cairo, Mexico, and various European and American heterotopias. Tactics are
examined in exhilarating historical detail, as theatrical and performative possession converts the spaces of the state into sites of contestation, and as design from the bottom up, immaterial labor, and theaters of memory are mobilized by users on the ground. This provocative collection hybridizes the disciplinary concerns of art and architecture, enriching them both.

Martino Stierli is Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, USA. He was previously SNSF Professor for the History of Architecture & Art at the Art History Institute, University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Mechtild Widrich is Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. She was previously Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the Department for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.