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. 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.