ancient cities

Defining Surveillance
Surveillance may be considered as the systematic
collection, classification, and sorting of information
about subject populations for the purposes of
behavioral adjustment or control. As such it is
crucial to our understanding of the evolution of
the city and of modernity. It is essential to differentiate
surveillance from simpler activities of information
gathering or watching. Surveillance requires
the gathering of information of some kind, from
the directly sensory to the indirect or technologically
mediated; however, to be surveillance, the
gathering of information must be conducted systematically.
Accidental or contingent acquisition of
information is not surveillance; however, many
activities in which surveillance is involved, like
espionage, may involve the combination of contingently
acquired and systematically acquired data.
Surveillance must also be purposeful and directed
at the altering of behavior in some way; many
forms of systematic information gathering have
purposes that are not surveillant.
Surveillance may also be differentiated according
to the object of surveillance, and in particular
between targeted and mass surveillance. Targeted
surveillance specifies the object of surveillance in
advance and concentrates only on that object,
whereas mass surveillance provides an overview
without specifying any particular object in advance.
In practice, these forms are a spectrum and often
interconnected. For example, an open-street video
surveillance system may be used for the mass surveillance
of crowds in urban streets; however, if
one individual arouses the suspicion of operators
or the attention of biometric or behavioral recognition
software, the same system can then be used
to target and track that person.
History of Urban Surveillance
The city itself exists partly as a mechanism for
surveillance. The concentration of populations in
an intensely territorialized space enables the counting
and monitoring of people. Historically, many
cities were both bounded by a city wall and internally
divided. Gates provided pinch points and
filters, a location for sorting people out: counting,
checking goods and possessions, verification or
identification, disease control, taxation, and the
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enforcement of fines and punishments. For example,
premodern Beijing had a series of concentric
walls that separated the city on the basis of the
importance of its inhabitants; individual alleys
barred by wooden lattice gates were guarded and
closed at night. Many city-states had special areas
reserved for traders. Particular resident “others”
were also spatially confined; for example, beginning
in 1516 in Venice, Jews were restricted to the
ghetto nuovo (literally “new quarter”).
Many early modern systems of order were
based around generalized safety such as the hierarchical
fire-wardening system and watchtowers of
tinderbox Edo (Tokyo) or the Dutch polder model
of community responsibility for maintaining flood
dikes. Sometimes, control of natural disasters gave
opportunities for ruling classes to institute wider
moral controls: policies developed in city-states of
northern Italy in response to the great plague of
1346–1350 combined concern about urban health
and social unrest, laying the foundations for modern
systems of epidemiology and census. More
often, surveillance was part of a strategy of securitization,
for example, the multiple informer and spies
of Ottoman Istanbul or prerevolutionary Paris.
In the modern period, there was a general move
toward the use of surveillance to resolve perceived
moral problems associated with the rebellious, the
mad, the poor, and the vagrant. Whereas such
people had previously been outcast and transported
or even executed by urban elites, new places of confinement,
from workhouses to prisons to asylums,
emerged in the early modern period to house them.
Historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, famously used
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as the spatial exemplar
of this shift in thinking. In this plan for an ideal
reformatory prison, prisoners were expected to alter
their behavior through the belief that they were
constantly monitored. Although such ideals never
fully materialized in any prison that was built, surveillance
both as an idea and as a practice infiltrated
state and private organizations, from factories to
schools. Originating in arms production, in factories,
new systems of rational management, which
monitored and organized the time and activity of
workers, were introduced along with spatial ordering
techniques like the production line.
However, despite a long concern with identification
and the nature of the person, surveillance
remained relatively unsystematic at a state level,