ancient cities

790 Sustainable Development
implications for social relations and neighborhood
formation and for the embedding of social exclusion
in the fabric of the city.
Certainly, in a period dominated by risk and
risk management, everything in the city has a tendency
to be sorted by profitability and threat. This
means a constant shifting between various strategies
associated with urban order: the discipline of
surveillance with its apparatus of visibility, the
moral order of the government of conduct and its
focus on welfare and responsibility, and the authoritarianism
of sovereign power with its violence and
territorial control. Contemporary urban surveillance
is also complicated by contestation over the
cultural meanings of surveillance.
Surveillance should be understood not only as
control by a small number of watchers and a
mass of watched, but as a complex and contradictory
process of social ordering, involving processes
such as synopticism (the many watching
the few), mutual surveillance, and the pleasures
and performative aspects of watching and being
watched. The body retains a central place whether
it is in DNA testing, in police stop-and-search
procedures, or as an instrument of surveillance
itself. There is a dual process of where we are
asked to be alert and watch others, but acts of
potential surveillance, such as photography in
public places are also regarded with suspicion by
urban authorities.
It is also the case that a surveillance society is
not a society of total control and, as such, may
perhaps be defined not by any totalizing model,
whether based on the panopticon or any other
exemplary mechanism, or even an amorphous surveillant
assemblage, but as an oligopticon, an
urban environment defined by multiple limited
forms of control and surveillance, riven with visible
and invisible, variously permeable borders,
gaps, and blind spots. These are not simply a question
of location: For some, especially “others,” like
asylum seekers, borders are never really crossed
but remain with them like a stretched elastic that
threatens to rebound and expel them at any
moment.
David Murakami Wood
See also Bunkers; Crime; Davis, Mike; Divided Cities;
Landscapes of Power
Further Readings
Coaffee, Jon, David Murakami Wood, and Peter Rogers.
2009. The Everyday Resilience of the City: How
Cities Respond to Terrorism and Disaster.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Coleman, Roy. 2004. Reclaiming the Streets: Surveillance,
Social Control and the City. Cullhompton, UK:
Willan.
Galloway, Alexander. 2004. Protocol: How Control
Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Graham, Stephen and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering
Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological
Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London:
Routledge.
Lyon, David. 2007. Surveillance Studies: An Overview.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Murakami Wood, D., ed., with K. Ball, S. Graham, D.
Lyon, C. Norris, and C. Raab. 2006. A Report on the
Surveillance Society. Wilmslow, UK: Office of the
Information Commissioner.
Su S t a i n a B l e de v e l o p M e n t
Sustainable development has achieved widespread
political acceptance over the course of several
decades thanks largely to a series of international
environmental and urban policy conferences,
starting with the UN Conference on the Human
Environment in 1972, through to the World
(Brundtland) Commission on the Environment
and Development in 1987; Rio de Janeiro’s UN
Conference on Environment and Development in
1992, which established AGENDA 21 with its
emphasis on sustainable land use management
and the need for local decision making; and the
Johannesburg Summit in 2002. Unfortunately,
while Rio’s AGENDA 21 has been put into practice
in more than 6,000 communities, this has
been more the case in developing nations, rather
than in the cities of the industrialized West.
Sustainable development is most often conceived—consistent
with the Brundtland Commission
report Our Common Future—as forms of development
“that [meet] the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to
meet their own needs.” Sustainable development
should achieve a more equitable balance between
human needs and those of nature, such that local