Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance

Such buildings do need to express the dignity of the work of a democratic assembly, but he concludes that only the scale of the building and the position from which members speak are important.

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He is particularly concerned about the way citizens who visit assembly buildings are likely these days to be impeded by all kinds of security barriers and then treated as tourists rather than fellow members of a political community. Some streets and squares have important functions as spaces for protest, especially where they are near buildings which symbolise the polity.

Protests draw attention to an issue and enrol people in it. If they take place in locations regularly used for such purposes, the dignity of history adds power to the protest.

He notes how variable are the spaces for such protest around key buildings in the different cities he examines. He also recognises that streets, too, are important for protest on the move, i. These concerns lead him into some useful comments on the design of streets and squares which have important political functions within a city as a whole. Finally, he looks at the multiple spaces in a city where citizens can feel that they and their diverse points of view are taken seriously.

Such spaces may be marked not just by accessibility and inclusive acceptance, but by the ways in which different events are memorialised in statues and other artworks and messages. In his conclusion, Parkinson not only summarises his approach into ten points.

He also provides a set of principles for evaluating the democratic qualities of the spaces available in a city for the public performance of a democracy. These read rather like a design brief to be used by city planners and architects. He uses this scheme to evaluate the cities he has examined. But he is clearly rather nervous about this venture into normative judgements, and suggests that his principles should be treated more as hypotheses for further elaboration than as general principles. His call to political scientists to give more attention to the performative practices of democracies is also valuable.

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I did, however, feel uneasy about some of his thinking. His empirical focus is on capital cities, yet he makes only passing comments about the relation between the city and the wider political communities of which each city acts as capital. Yet the eleven polities are very different. Parkinson argues that these differences will affect the meanings which accumulate around the physical spaces of the capital city, but surely there are major differences between these meanings in states which are federal compared to states which are unitary, and countries where the capital has been in the same place for centuries and where the location of capital and country has shifted significantly in the past.

Somehow, the comparison of Berlin and London seemed inappropriate. I also felt that more attention was needed to the interplay between physical political performance and its portrayal in the media.

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Parkinson argues that TV presentation, for example, is selective not just in what is extracted from such performance, but also in the position of cameras. Yet in some countries, interested citizens can watch their parliaments at work throughout the day.

Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance

Finally, I was not sure how far it was possible to develop general principles with which to evaluate the physical settings of democratic performance. In the hands of designers and developers, these could deflect attention from grasping the specific meanings and challenges which surround the physical sites of democratic performance in a particular place.

Its qualities arise from the complex and contingent interaction between evolving political practices and the available sites of their performance. Parkinson is surely right to call on analysts and activists to give much more attention to these interactions.

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My field is applied democratic theory, especially the links between policy processes and wider public experience and debate. I have written on referendum processes around the world, public participat I am Professor of Politics with a joint appointment in the School of Government and International Relations and the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia.

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I have lived and worked in Australia from to and most recently since ; and in the UK at various times, including when I was Lecturer then Senior Lecturer at the University of York; and when I was Associate and then full Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick. I spent most of the next decade in public relations in Wellington, Auckland and London, eventually working for myself as a specialist in internal communications on big IT and restructuring projects.

It was while doing internal communications work that I learned that the major obstacles to corporate change were less front-line workers — they were often the creative ones — and more managers with power bases to protect. Working to overcome those barriers was the origin of my interest in participatory and deliberative democracy. I began at Melbourne, then moved with him to the Australian National University in Bob Goodin and John Uhr joined my supervisory panel there. You can find my full academic CV here: Parkinson CV Aug I blog, sporadically, at http: Books by John Parkinson.

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