The capacity of the individual to act independently: a capacity that is meaningful, and has both intent and purpose. Clearly, the degree of agency each individual can exert varies with social class and geographical location, and these variations are a major concern for human geographers; see, for example, Plummer and Sheppard (2006) Econ. Geog. 6, 5, 619, or Herbert (2000), PHG 24, 4, 550.

The agency-structure debate refers to the relative merits of agency and structure—the relative importance of social structure or human agency—in producing particular outcomes. From the early 1980s, human geographers sought to move beyond this ‘structure versus agency’ impasse by citing A. Giddens (1984), who provided logical arguments for taking agency and structure equally seriously.

Social structures and human agency are interpenetrated and mutually determined. ‘Structures provide human agents with a limited horizon of capabilities and possibilities, but those structures only exist in everyday practices’ (Herbert, 2000). Cumbers et al. (2011), Antipode 42, 46) deplore the tendency of scholars to consider only capital and state actors. ‘There is little sense of agency for individuals and communities…they are usually treated as passive victims of deeper underlying processes. In this paper, our purpose is to highlight the autonomy and agency of workers, people and communities in old industrial cities.’