Subverting Public Space(s): A Case Against Utopias (original) (raw)
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However, many urban theorists, when talking about politics, refer to those phenomena of political participation that involve representative and deliberative systems, including “new forms of social organization—transnational labor organizing, indigenous rights and environmental justice movements (…)— [which] are always creating alternative new spaces of and for public political expression” (Low and Smith, 2006: 16). In this special issue, we want to zoom in on the everyday and the micro-level as a site of political expression. For this we turn to the lens of performative, prefigurative and affective politics of the everyday, agreeing with Himada and Manning (2009: 5) that “Politics” with a capital ‘P’ is much less the “real deal” than it presents itself. While “Politics” operates in the sphere of representation, where precomposed bodies are already circulating, “the micropolitical is that which subverts this tendency in the political to present itself as already formed.”