ancient cities

extreme, in the fractured cities of the newly developing
world. In ex-authoritarian Brazil in cities
like São Paulo, a total distrust of the police, combined
with the almost total lack of welfare state,
led to the rich fortifying their private enclaves
with razor wire, cameras, and armies of security
guards, while the poor were dominated by drug
gangs in favelas, with neither surveillance nor safety.
In the new inward investment zones of the Middle
East, India, and China, entire private towns are
being created, after the model of contemporary
city-states like Singapore and Dubai, where there
is not even the pretense of a liberal democratic
state to temper the combination of greed and total
surveillance.
It was the United Kingdom where CCTV initially
spread most rapidly into public space. The
roots were complex. First, the 1980s decline of
urban centers leading to a neoliberal urban politics
and the semiprivatization of urban space followed
New Labour’s renewed involvement of the state in
urban regeneration and the moral management of
cities. Second, a new actuarial model of justice was
developed, based on risk management. Third, a
series of trigger events and moral panics occurred,
involving football hooliganism, child abduction
(particularly the 1993 abduction and murder of
James Bulger), and terrorist attacks on the British
mainland by the Provisional Irish Republican
Army. By the early twenty-first century, almost all
British urban centers and many smaller communities
had CCTV systems, which often combined
urban management and policing roles. After the
attacks in the United States on September 11,
2001, the British example of a supposedly successful
urban security policy helped spread open-space
CCTV throughout the world. Britain, and in particular
London, has also gained notoriety as a
surveillance society, which has helped ferment
some limited opposition and resistance.
International security transformations have also
added a new dimension. For a long time, developments
in military espionage, such as the ECHELON
telecommunications monitoring system or satellite
surveillance for warfare, were regarded as separate
from urban civil controls, but developments in military
surveillance have seeped into cities. Indeed the
entire contemporary political economy of surveillance
could be argued to derive from the changes
that occurred toward the end and immediately after
Surveillance
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the cold war, with corporations involved in military
supply seeking to find new civilian markets by
exploiting the growing urban fear of crime. This
helps to explain the rise of CCTV in London, with
automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems
introduced after the Provisional Irish
Republican Army terrorist attacks in the early
1990s, using technologies tested in the 1991 Gulf
War. This has only been further intensified by the
September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States
and other terrorist attacks and by the War on
Terrorism. New systems lined to CCTV, such as
facial recognition and software for recognizing the
sound of gunshots, are advocated by police and
hawkish social commentators. Military systems,
like unmanned aerial vehicles, have moved from the
battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq to the streets of
Los Angeles and Liverpool.
Surveillance in cities is not only about repressive
securitization. Increasingly, the private sector
has also been involved in gathering data not only
on consumption but on a whole range of lifestyle
indicators and combining the data with new technologies
of mapping to create geodemographic
profiles of individuals, groups, and neighborhoods.
These can be used to target products and
services but also to organized political campaigns
and in policing. In many ways such systems
become self-fulfilling prophecies: Whereas many
mainstream commentators have remarked on the
clustering of like-minded people, few have recognized
the surveillant sorting that is carried out by
urban authorities, real estate agents, property
developers, and so on, that helps produce such
outcomes.
These semiautomated systems, along with many
others, are now prompting an emerging sense of
another shift in urban surveillance, once again
combining social and technological development.
Developments in computing and networked communications
are allowing surveillance devices to be
more mobile, miniaturized, and linked. There is a
potential recombination of the virtual and the
material, through ubiquitous (or pervasive) computing.
Infiltrated into buildings, and even people
and animals, a new flexible surveillance can both
enable and control, based on the logic of software
code, or protocol. With the absence of overt politics,
there are many who have suggested that
this has potentially technologically deterministic