Although new methods of collaborative production might seem to anticipate a communal era in architecture, Harvey argues that commonality strategies that work in small organizations cannot be reproduced in other scales. With this warning as starting point, this article asks for the alternatives of commonality in architecture in its various levels, ranging from object design to urban planning.

In this work, we developed an integrated simulation framework for pandemic prevention and mitigation of pandemics caused by airborne pathogens, incorporating three sub-models, namely the spatial model, the mobility model, and the propagation model, to create a realistic simulation environment for the evaluation of the effectiveness of different countermeasures on the epidemic dynamics. The spatial model converts images of real cities obtained from Google Maps into undirected weighted graphs that capture the spatial arrangement of the streets utilized next for the mobility of individuals. The mobility model implements a stochastic agent-based approach, developed to assign specific routes to individuals moving in the city, through the use of stochastic processes, utilizing the weights of the underlying graph to deploy shortest path algorithms. The propagation model implements both the epidemiological model and the physical substance of the transmission of an airborne pathogen (in our approach, we investigate the transmission parameters of SARS-CoV-2). The deployment of a set of countermeasures was investigated in reducing the spread of the pathogen, where, through a series of repetitive simulation experiments, we evaluated the effectiveness of each countermeasure in pandemic prevention.

Post-Fordism, with its evolution towards immaterial production in the areas of information, knowledge and affective, creative commerce, foregrounds design as a central, enabling activity. If this enablement finds particular application in cities of the Global North, it testifies to a shift in the geopolitical distribution of productive agency and application of international labour, one that sees industrial activities ‘reassigned’ to the Global South, leaving cities of the variably de-industrialised countries to develop cultural, symbolic, and creative economies. This paper examines the nature of urban place and the work regimes practised there consequent to these economies. It argues firstly for ‘cityness’ in these context to be understood as a creative urban factory – a place where older managerial and organisational techniques applied to factory environments in the service of high productivity are recalibrated and diffused across the entirety of urban territories. Secondly, the paper links the productivity of the creative urban factory with a biopolitical makeover of cities themselves, seeing in an optimisation of productive capacity a situation where the entirety of living labour is taken up and commoditised via the production of ever-customised lifestyles and identities. A raft of new identifying subject and worker categories emerge that exceed or elude the older class identifications, and with it, a certain potential to collectively counter the exploitation inherent post-Fordist work. While exploring the possibility of new identifying collectives – what Hardt and Negri have referred to as the multitude – the paper makes an argument for design itself to be a key medium for rethinking and re-enacting collective agency. As the harbinger of new forms of user participation and co-operative processes that are, by way of emerging technological tools, open, evolving, ad hoc, reflexive and customisable, design practice increasingly must contend and adapt to forms of de-professionalisation. Rather than seeing in this adaption a demise in profession position, the new possibilities appearing in design point to a low-tech, yet digitally-driven enabled, re-politicisation of design and creativity, one better able to contend with the strictures of the urban creative factory.

CommonSENSE is a participatory design toolkit which aims to support communities, neighbors, flatmates, researchers and hobbyists, to creatively explore the potential of their own living space and actively engage them in its design and re-arrangement. Through a sensor kit gathering real time space occupancy data and an online design engine where users access and act upon these data to produce or evaluate design solutions, the platform enables users to document and share their habits and desires, visualize design ideas and test them in physical space. CommonSENSE envisions an alternative definition of "environment intelligence" where embedded systems and information technology turn users into active participants in the design of their living environment. This paper presents the implementation details of this participatory platform prototype in the case of the Athenian typical apartment block (polykatoikia) and discusses its spatial and theoretical implications from three different perspectives: as a participatory design engine prototype, an "urban intelligence" tool and an open source development toolkit.

In this work we propose the design principles of a stochastic graph-based model for the simulation of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. The proposed approach incorporates three submodels, namely, the spatial model, the mobility model, and the propagation model, in order to develop a realistic environment for the study of the properties exhibited by the spread of SARS-CoV-2. The spatial model converts images of real cities taken from Google Maps into undirected weighted graphs that capture the spatial arrangement of the streets utilized next for the mobility of individuals. The mobility model implements a stochastic agentbased approach, developed in order to assign specific routes to individuals moving in the city, through the use of stochastic processes, utilizing the weights of the underlying graph to deploy shortest path algorithms. The propagation model implements both the epidemiological model and the physical substance of the transmission of an airborne virus considering the transmission parameters of SARS-CoV-2. Finally, we integrate these submodels in order to derive an integrated framework for the study of the epidemic dynamics exhibited through the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.