David Murakami Wood

Digitizing surveillance: Categorization, space, inequality

In this article, we seek to add to current debates about surveillance and society by critically exploring the social implications of a new and emerging raft of surveillance practices: those that specifically surround digital techniques and technologies. The article has four parts. In the first, we outline the nature of digital surveillance and consider how it differs from other forms of surveillance. The second part of the article explores the interconnections between digital techniques and the changing political economies of cities and urban societies. Here we explore the essential ambivalence of digital surveillance within the context of wider trends towards privatization, liberalization and social polarization. The third part provides some insights into particular aspects of digital surveillance through three examples: algorithmic video surveillance (in which closed circuit television systems are linked to software for the recognition of movement or identity); the increasingly prevalent practices of digital prioritization in transport and communications; and the medical surveillance of populations, wherein databases are created for increasingly mixed state and commercial medical purposes. Following this, in part four, we reflect on the policy and research implications raised by the spread of digital surveillance.

Security is Coming Home: Rethinking Scale and Constructing Resilience in the Global Urban Response to Terrorist Risk

This article argues that contemporary security as a concept, practice and commodity is undergoing a rescaling, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, with previously international security concerns penetrating all levels of governance. Security is becoming more civic, urban, domestic and personal: security is coming home. In the context of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), asymmetric confl ict, the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘splintering’ of cosmopolitan urban centres, policy is increasingly centred around military derived constructions of risk. This securitisation is bound up in neoliberal economic competition between cities and regions for ‘global’ status, with security emerging as a key part of the offer for potential inward investment. The result is increasing temporary and permanent fortifi cation and surveillance, often symbolic or theatrical, in which privileged transnational elites gain feelings of safety at the expense of the liberty and mobility of ordinary citizens.

Surveilling Strange Materialities: Categorisation in the Evolving Geographies of FMD Biosecurity

The 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) epidemic in the United Kingdom resulted in the popularisation of the concept of biosecurity. At its most basic, biosecurity refers to simple cleansing and disinfecting, but during the FMD epidemic it became associated with a powerful system of surveillance. We characterise surveillance as a thing in itself, a mode of ordering that can be added to others. The establishment and maintenance of categories are fundamental to the practice of surveillance, but social studies of surveillance have not yet fully realised the way such categorisation operates within the nonhuman and the spatial. Strange materialities are those things which do not quite belong within a particular order. We examine the actions of surveillance in the world of strange materialities that was the FMD epidemic. Here we see that surveillant practices acted on the nonhuman FMD virus by constructing territories to control humans. Surveillance seems to proceed as the translation of a worldview (a system of categorisation) into materiality and we conclude with some thoughts on what this may mean for geographical studies of technical, biological, and human materialities in which surveillant processes are at work.

Brandscapes of control? Surveillance, marketing and the co-construction of subjectivity and space in neo-liberal capitalism

This article considers the emergence of the ‘brandscape’ as a new apparatus and a mode of order in neo-liberal capitalism. Simultaneously locating its emergence as a result of developments in marketing, urbanism, technology and surveillance, we discuss its characteristics, forms and potentialities. The brandscape is a marketing neologism that combines the concept of the ‘brand’ with ‘landscape’. Based on the notion of the brand, which seeks to give reassurance and familiarity to customers by semiotic visual codings of product ranges, brandscapes in consumer spaces have an inherent experiential quality and form the basis of the new affective economy. The brandscape recodes the consumer subject as a spatialised, desiring, networked body produced through a complex of marketing techniques designed to analyse buying behaviour, target consumers, and seduce them with strongly affective experiences. Working as immaterial labourers, through the constant provision of consumer data upon which the brandscape rests, consumers become exploited as well as exhilarated. Brandscapes also become securityscapes, as their boundaries and interiors are heavily policed to protect the dreams of safety and riskless living they proffer. However, as simulated consumer subjects are reinscribed onto the material, we note both the tendency to failure in the assumptions of the underpinning marketing processes and the competition to brandscapes from other visions of security and ubiquitous computing futures. But the problems of brandscapes provide the context for a move from biopolitical to neuropolitical control, as the brain, rather than affect, becomes the new site of contestation.

Surveillance in urban Japan: A critical introduction

This paper provides a critical introduction to the development of surveillance in the Japanese city. Adapting the analytical scheme of understanding, intensifying, automating, integrating, globalising and resisting surveillance, it considers whether the historical and contemporary development of Japanese urban surveillance fits the narrative of Western surveillance studies. It shows that there are many interlinked and parallel evolutions, particularly in the context of shared global fears of urban terrorism and crime. However, Japans history, governance, urban morphology and sociocultural evolution provide a particular context, which means that surveillance in urban Japan must be considered not just in comparison with the West, but in its own right.

The Aesthetics of Control: Mega Events and Transformations in Japanese Urban Order

This paper examines the changing ‘style’ of urban order in Japan through the example of mega events, drawing on the architectural critique of Taro Igarashi and the historical sociological analysis of Masachi Ohsawa. It argues that construction for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics was typical of a ‘concrete aesthetic’ that reflected a Japanese version of ‘control society’, at once modern and post-modern. Ironically, this period has since been re-imagined through ‘Showa nostalgia’ as shown in the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics and the 2005 Aichi Expo. This nostalgia has been a resource for a globalising form of urban order, seen in more recent mega events like the FIFA World Cup 2002, the 2005 World Expo in Aichi and the 2007 World Athletics Championship in Osaka. This order combines a new aesthetics of visibility through technocratic surveillance with authoritarian governance that seeks to render invisible the marginal, particularly homeless people and foreign migrant workers.

Security is Coming Home

In this book we have examined the relationship between the vulnerability and resilience of the city, focusing on the UK national, regional and sub-regional governance architectures for civil contingencies and security that are developing in the Twenty-First Century. These were primarily developed in order to build up a consistent degree of resilience across the country in order to prepare for, and respond to, a variety of threats faced. Although this has been driven since the 1980s by a concern for Integrated Emergency Management (IEM), and despite the concerns of provincial cities over flooding and the threat of animal disease pandemics to rural areas, it is clear that the threat of terrorism has become the predominant driver at state level. This has enabled emergency planning to enjoy unprecedented funding and profile at all scales. In the last chapter, we explored what this might mean for the everyday life of the city from spatial governance to institutional and personal responsibilization.

The International Campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment: A Test Case for the Future of Globalisation?

Abstract Written from the point of view of a campaigner against economic globalisation, this paper looks at the recent Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the campaign against it which eventually led to its demise. It looks at the nature of the diverse coalition of interests opposed to the MAI, and in particular their use of e‐mail and the Internet, and argues that the success of this campaign has lessons beyond the immediate victory over the forces promoting the MAI. It is argued that the emergence of anti‐globalisation action also contains the seeds of new grassroots forms of ethical social organisation, based in specific but interconnected localities, a cosmopolitan interlocalism, and that this in itself remains a key feature in the short‐ and long‐term success of such action.

Swift and sure: McJustice for a consumer society

In response to the riots in the UK in 2011, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (2011) observed ‘these are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.’ However, Bauman goes further in the article suggesting we are, ‘all consumers now, consumers first and foremost.’ Reflecting upon his comments, the idea that consumer attitudes are becoming prevalent in society poses the question: how does this impact the criminal justice system?

The Normality of Living in Surveillance Societies

It is increasingly argued that contemporary capitalist nations have become ‘surveillance societies’ in which surveillance related activities are embedded as the core mode of organization, production and societal order (Lyon 1994, 2001, 2007). But what does it mean to live in a surveillance society and what economic, political and social relations are produced? These are the key questions addressed in this chapter.