Week 11 Session: The Car Park

The car park isn't part of the supermarket, and it isn't part of anywhere else either. It's the exact non-place Marc Augé was describing — before you've even reached the automatic door

3 May 2027

Before the session#

Next time you’re in one, spend thirty seconds actually looking at a supermarket car park instead of walking through it.

In the session#

Augé’s non-place — a space of transit with no identity, no relations, no history — describes the car park exactly, and describes it better than it describes the store itself, which at least performs a relationship with you at the door. The car park performs nothing. It is pure threshold, repeated identically outside every branch of every chain, and that repetition is the point.

Afterwards#

The car park is where the argument leaves the building. Week twelve is where it has to add up to something.