Networked security in the colonial present: Mapping infrastructures of digital surveillance and control in São Paulo

Abstract

Abstract The saturation of urban space with all kinds of information and communication technology–driven security devices has long since turned into a recurrent topic of both human geography and critical security studies. However, comparatively little effort has been made to analyze these technologies and infrastructures in relation to their locally specific modes of deployment. This relative failure to account for technopolitical path-dependencies may result in unilaterally positivistic descriptions, when, in fact, there is no such thing as a technopolitically and/or semantically ‘virgin’ urban fabric waiting to accommodate a new securitarian blueprint. The present article aims to address this lacuna by analyzing the introduction of a ‘smart’ surveillance system in São Paulo, Brazil. Taking as its point of departure the condomínio fechado (the ‘closed condominium’) as a locally specific urban diagram, it sets out to trace the system’s implementation along the lines of a (post)colonial topology sorting bodies and organizing circulations according to a historically entrenched pattern of social domination. Accordingly, despite its failure to significantly reduce crime rates and raise the general level of public security, the system succeeded in further normalizing a configuration in which the obsession with personal security eclipses any potential for political transformation. Its implementation thus endorses a social status quo that is both structurally violent and profoundly unequal.

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