New Urban Surveillance: Technology, Mobility, and Diversity in 21st Century Cities

Abstract

Sometime near 2007 the world reached a 'watershed in human history'-the global urban population surpassed the rural (Davis 2007).Distinct from intimate towns and sprawling suburbs, cities are filled with strangers living in close proximity to one another (Jacobs 1961).Surveillance is a traditional element, perhaps even a defining feature of urban life (Coaffee et al. 2009): thus, surveillance is increasingly urban surveillance.In 21 st Century cities, this surveillance is intensifying and mutating as the strangeness and anonymity of urban life is either fading or adopting new forms.This issue is about the new forms, arrangements, and representations of urban surveillance.In the emergent highly-developed 'cybercities', where digital technologies and urban life converge (Graham 2001), surveillance is becoming more concentrated, hidden, passive, functional, mobile, and varied (Lyon 2007).If camera surveillance is often considered the prototype of surveillance (Doyle et al. 2011), then emblematic of growing mobility and mutations of urban surveillance is the ever-moving, police-controlled cameras and recent linking of public and private camera surveillance systems (such as in Chicago's city centre (ACLU of Illinois 2011); the recent proliferation of cell phone camera use and image transfer by average citizens to document and publicize police brutality (see: Finn 2011) such as during the G20 protests in Toronto; and similar use of mobile camera phones and hand-held cameras by police patrols on city streets (see: Kiss 2009: 212) to capture images of perpetrators or to surveil protesters, such as recent Occupy Movement participants in numerous city centres.Urban surveillance is not limited to the activities of the public police or to the spaces and forms of conduct in their formal purview and which become visible through routine patrols, though police practices are certainly changing with new urban trends.Nor is it limited to the natural surveillance constituted through distinctively urban architecture, buildings, and infrastructure.There is a proliferating diversity of agents, targets, and forms of urban surveillance.These developments blur distinctions between public and private and surveillance and 'sousveillance' (counter organizational surveillance -see: Mann et al. 2003) and suggest a need for new approaches and concepts.Much work in urban studies over the last two decades has documented the demise of public urban space in cities of the modern West, and all that entails consonant with urban neo-liberalisation and gentrification (Smith 1996;Blomley 2004;Wilson 2004;Low and Smith 2005).These processes are typically linked to urban regeneration (or revitalization) projects.With these trends, specific urban forms, such as Privately-Owned Public Open Spaces (POPOS), condominium high-rises -vertical versions of intensivelysurveilled and suburban gated communities (see, e.g.: Monahan 2006) -and business improvement districts (BIDs) have spread.POPOS in one form or other are found throughout Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.Condominium development in the big cities of China in the last decade rivals rates in EditorialThe New Urban Surveillance: Technology, Mobility, and Diversity in 21 st Century Cities

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