Changing public space

Figure 3.1 Sign of CCTV in Barcelona, ironically placed on Plaza George Orwell, named
after the author of Nineteen eighty-four, which introduced the famous adagio Big Brother is
watching you (Orwell, 1949)
Jeremy Bentham. He introduced the term panopticum in order to describe a model for the ideal
prison, school, or any other place where groups of people ought to be controlled. The model
presumes that to be able to control people, they should not be put in dungeons, but in places
where they are visible.
Whether CCTV actually makes public space safer is something researchers do not agree
on. There is evidence that surveillance merely displaces crime: the areas under surveillance
become safer, but the areas not covered by cameras become more dangerous (Koskela, 2000).
Groups that feel uncomfortable being supervised choose to go to places that are outside the
scope of any camera. Because the number of such CCTV-invisible ‘blind spots’ is limited,
violence is sometimes necessary to defend their spot against other ‘outcasts’ (Toon, 2000). In
Birmingham, both the percentage of those feeling safe and those feeling unsafe increased after
CCTV was installed (Brown, 1995). This outcome may be attributed to the presence of CCTV
itself, marking places as dangerous and thereby sensitising people to the possibility of danger
(Atkinson, 2003). Whyte (1988: 4) discovered that panoptical methods do not always lead to
improved behaviour: “… certain kinds of street people get violent if they think they are being
spied upon …”. Although the effect of CCTV is thus questioned, academics all agree upon
the growing importance of surveillance. This not only becomes clear from the large number of
articles addressing the issue, but also the foundation of a new peer-reviewed online scientific
journal called Surveillance & Society that appears four times a year since 2002.
CCTV is not as widespread in the Netherlands as it is in some other European countries
such as the UK and Finland. By 2003, only 20 per cent of all Dutch municipalities had
installed CCTV. It is mostly found in the larger cities: more than 90 per cent of the places
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