The book, published by MIT press in 2006, was edited by Basar and Miessen, both PhD candidates at Goldsmiths' Centre for Research Architecture. The book also feature many other members of the centre. The selection by the INDEPENDENT was announced on May 2008. The introduction includes the following lines: "The newly established Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London, is in a sense a pedagogical manifestation of the impetus of the book you are now reading. As participants in this experimental program dedicated to the identification of 'spatial practices' at large, it gives us great pleasure to confess that several of the contributors that follow are fellow colleagues. In a modest way, the synchronisation of the book’s release with the completion of the Centre’s first year should chime as a unified statement of eager intent."

see the announcement on the selection here:
http://independent.net-genie.co.uk/House_home/48833/the_ten_best_archite...
A scan of the INDEPENDENT article is also attached below.

This is the book's introduction:
Did we mean participate or Did we mean something else?
Markus Miessen & Shumon Basar

Flattness?
Since the end of the “End of History” - in the wake of 9/11 - the relationships between space, politics and power have come to the fore in almost all zones of cultural activity. Today, the need to identify and instrumentalise “spatial practices” becomes relevant due to the unprecedented visibility of what one might call “globalization at work”: from Iraq to Nepal, Dubai to Mumbai, a new atlas is being re-drawn for the 21st century. According to Thomas Friedman in his book The World is Flat, the beginning of this century will be remembered for inverting the discovery made by Columbus several centuries ago. Globalization links every (non) place potentially with every other (non) place in symmetrical or asymmetrical ways – “outsourcing“ being one of the most palpable examples. Friedman’s conclusion is that this world we now live in is actually flat again, as though Columbus had never set sail. Proven hierarchies become threatened, and world order is questioned. Inspired by this recapitulation of world-picture, Did Someone Say Participate? re-draws the map of participatory, spatial practice that is a function of such shifts. Rather than being yet another publication dealing with the state of contemporary architecture as a crisis of style or shape, this book attempts to dismantle the idea of “the architect” being the one in charge of space.

Control?
What was once seen as the defensive preserve of architects – mapping, making, or manipulating spaces – has become a new “culture of space” produced and shaped by an ever increasing number of disciplines. Did Someone Say Participate? showcases a range of forward-thinking practitioners and theorists who actively trespass – or “participate” – in neighbouring or alien knowledge-spaces. Deviating from the majority of architectural publications that doggedly return to the architect-author in the centre of spatial production, this book embraces a distinctly inclusive view. It argues for a re-evaluation of architecture beyond the traditional definitions of built substance into the possibility of an architecture of knowledge that is being built up, importantly, by architects eschewing conventional practice and non-architects participating in space: thus becoming what is termed here “spatial practitioners”. They share an essential interest: the understanding, production and altering of spatial conditions as a pre-requisite of identifying the broader reaches of political reality.

Empowered?
By the late 1990s, one saw an explosion of self-initiated cultural production that recalled the DIY ethic of the Punk era in the mid 1970s. Enthralled and empowered by affordable technologies of media production and dissemination, a new young generation published magazines or websites that licentiously layered high culture with low: fashion designers put on catwalk shows that museums wanted to show, and artists embraced the commodification of their identities without a hint of irony or shame. Similarly, today’s spatial practices not only utilise experimental research related to the transient conditions of urban society, but also apply physical and non-physical structures in order to change and alter specific settings. While the differences engendered may appear marginal, its has an undeniable asset: that of concrete impact.

Consensus?
As a counter to existing models of participation based on the “culture of consensus” and the ethos of compromise, Did Someone Say Participate? presents and discusses today’s need for actors operating from outside existing disciplinary networks, leaving behind conventional expertise whilst inventing new species of knowledge-space. An alternative model of participation within spatial practice is thus rendered. Such a model is based on participation through critical disciplinary distance. The future spatial practitioner could arguably be understood as an outsider who, instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus, enters existing situations or projects by deliberately instigating conflicts between often-delineated fields of knowledge. In this context, the spatial practitioner is presented as an enabler, a facilitator of interaction that stimulates alternative debates and speculations. Through the act of confronting the world with a re-reading of existing realities, these practitioners are doing what Hans Ulrich Obrist calls the “breaking of the consensus-machine.”

Atlas?
The word “atlas” implies the attempt to visualize a totality of territory. Rather than understanding this book as the next “atlas” of practice that presents an incontrovertible world-picture, it represents an early mapping exercise. Early atlases – such as those from the Medieaval period, or, indeed, the one presented as the frontispiece to this publication – have inspired us to make the initial marks in marking out the territory of emerging knowledge, practice and politics. Like those early cartographers, Did Someone Say Participate? may get much of the world wrong. But, early failures have always been the basis upon which progress and the slow drifts towards cohesion take place. In this sense, the shape of the contents – designed and interpreted by the innovative graphic designers Åbäke – chart emerging knowledge-continents.

Participants?
There is no intention to “map” a particular generation here. It is the case that the “spatial pracititioner” may well be in their early 20s or indeed in their 50s, sharing common discoveries through entirely unrelated contexts. The traditional distinction between “research” executed in the academy, and “practice” done in the real world is one of those binaries that should be pulverized into dust. The newly established Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London, is in a sense a pedagogical manifestation of the impetus of the book you are now reading. As participants in this experimental program dedicated to the identification of “spatial practices” at large, it gives us great pleasure to confess that several of the contributors that follow are fellow colleagues. In a modest way, the synchronisation of the book’s release with the completion of the Centre’s first year should chime as a unified statement of eager intent. Others, such as Rem Koolhaas, Brett Steele, Eyal Weizman and David Grahame Shane have provided inspiring insights on the need to step in and out of the academe.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is an almost overly obvious choice to begin the publication with: a curator whose reputation has been built around an ability to stride art, architecture, film, science and philosophy through participating an endless list of others in dialogue and collaboration. A number of researchers offer conceptual points of orientation that structure the boundaries of knowledge-practice. Stephen Graham and Eyal Weizman both describe the motives and mechanics involved in the planning and execution of war, the former through Fallujah as case-study, the latter through the Gaza evacuations of 2005. Architectural historian Wendy Pullan focuses on a single day around the Gate of Damascus in Jerusalem, and asks if conflict is the pre-condition to conceive of peace, rather than its assumed opposite. Justin Frewen’s first person account as a U.N. aid worker in Iraq reveals the dynamics of unstable geography from the ground up. John McSweeney calculates the multi-dimensions in the management and meaning of water in Nepal’s political turmoil. Curator Francesca Ferguson chronicles Berlin’s ad hoc urban transformations in the past ten years, as it is poised for a still uncertain future, something shared by the European Kunsthalle, Cologne: an experiment in a new kind of art institution described here by insiders Bernd Kneiss and Meyer Voggenreiter, which may well fit within Peter Weibel’s speculation on the future of museums as a species of cultural substance. Editor Brendan McGetrick asks the womens’ rights activist Rebecca Gomperts about her “extraterritorial” floating abortion clinic and the limits of being liberal. Architect and Domus editor Joseph Grima looks at a different kind of ur-territoriality: that of outsourcing, whereby new economic vitalities are being forged through a new, flat time and space. Technologist Luke Skrebowski disentangles what it means to participate in the virtual. Architect and theorist Keller Easterling sees cunning urbanism in political stupidity, and philosopher Michael Hirsch makes a case for the May 1968’s dissent being inextricably rooted in the city of Paris. Our own contributions focus on the space of freedom offered to the “professional amateur” and the “margins of opportunity” that have been sought by a generation of practictioners forced to or choosing to question the author-model of production.

Certain practitioners provide telling projects that fuse research with product: the artist Johanna Billing’s video-work Magical World is a poignant dramaturgy on the real artifices constructed around nationalities, seen through children practicing a song in a building tarnished with memory. Celine Condorelli and Beatrice Gibson’s project uses the London taxi as a measuring device to map cities, including Mumbai. The School of Missing Studies turns pedagogy into a project that employs recent notions that emerged from the troubled Balkans. Architects R&Sie(n) with artist Pierre Huyghe re-make a part of the artic that already reveals global warming is underway. And a selection of photographers, including Armin Linke, Bas Princen, Mauricio Guillen, and Frank van der Salm, remind us that the primary engagement with the world is experiential, enveloping and undeniably composed of images that make spaces that images attempt to capture. And finally, the designers Åbäke have neatly – and inventively – found spatial participation in the neglected areas of the book object itself, whereupon nation states have been picked apart to show that commonalities are more frequent than differences.

Tactics?
It is a matter of (dis)comforting fact that amateurs often grasp situations they are not technically trained to comprehend. Michel de Certeau, in his Practice of Everyday Life, claimed that the ways in which “users” take up the world that confronts them is “tactical”: canny, improvised, and aware of the abstract codes and structures that are established around them. Users – or “people”, in everyday terms – have ways of inverting the supposed power dynamics in a given situation such that, to paraphrase de Certeau’s, the weak become strong. Empowerment sometimes emerges in conditions that theoretically aught to thwart it. Knowledge is often generated at the edges or the gaps of ignorance. Participation is simply a tactic of complicit curiosity scaled to the space you’re currently in.

Did someone say we need yet another anthology of essays? According to the editors, the answer is an emphatic, or hysterical, "YES!" We have attempted to set out this territory without falling into the trap of introducing yet another newness, but - in the sense of an archaeology - dig up and trace the practices that have an effect on the production of space. This publication should therefore be understood as a critical documentation of an emerging practice, attempting to render an optimistic, propositional outlook on the future. We hope that the continents of knowledge will be welcome challenges not only for those involved in the future of architectural research and practice, but for anyone interested in navigating through current forms of cultural inquiry and debate.