election politics and the meaning of 'the public' and 'public space'
Just a short note - an interesting article by Marina Hyde in the Guardian on how the current election campaign is being run as a 'pseudo-event', using fake public spaces and inviting the fake 'public': So far, this has been an election staged in out-of-town business parks, cleared factory floors, deserted building sites, and town halls filled with pre-screened party supporters. The list of venues to which the party leaders are bussed or flown satirises itself: a heavily-guarded empty barn, a facility that makes virtual reality suites, a rural hedgehog farm... These are not anything that could be described as civic spaces. In fact, in civic terms they are non-spaces, the sort of places you might expect to end up if you took a wrong turn at a roundabout in a vast international airport, with its strange network of goods vehicle roads and utilitarian hangars. A non-space; Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty Images See this series of images about how odd these