Roy Coleman

Surveillance in the city: Primary definition and urban spatial order:

The shift to an entrepreneurial city has inaugurated changes in the surveillance and control of urban space through a myriad of technologies and legal-moral ordering practices. This has occurred as cities attempt to reimage and remarket themselves in the context of regional, national and international inter-urban competition for capital investment. A re-emphasis on the visual in the politics of the street underpins changes in the primary definition over urban spatiality and statecraft. This article examines these powerful definitional processes as a strategy to create visually pleasing space that is impacting on discourses and practices of surveillance that target forms of ‘crime’ and ‘incivility’ and contribute to the spatial production process itself. It is argued that in producing urban spaces of an entrepreneurial kind, contemporary surveillance practices need to be placed within wider debates about continuing urban inequality and the meaning of spatial justice.

Watching the degenerate: street camera surveillance and urban regeneration

Government and media rhetoric obscures the entrepreneurial roots of closed circuit television (CCTV) and its position in the regeneration of politically and economically ‘viable’ city centres. The paper charts this concern with ‘viability’ and traces the reassertion of class based discourses on crime, fear and insecurity as a component in the regeneration of UK cities and reflected and reinforced by camera networks. The efficacy of CCTV is questionable and its significance may be understood less for its ‘crime prevention’ potential and more for its success in reinforcing a long established scrutiny and criminalisation of the activities of the least powerful inhabitants of urban areas at the expense of scrutinising other harmful activities in the city.

Managing the mendicant: regeneration and repression in Liverpool

In 2010, Liverpool was the most deprived local authority area in England. Its position was unchanged from earlier surveys conducted in 2004 and 2007. Almost a quarter of Englands 100 most deprived smaller areas were located in the city (Liverpool City Council, 2011). The city was also the ‘easiest place to die – 35 per cent above the national average – …’ (Armstrong, 2012) while one third of its children lived in poverty.. What has been the local states response to this dire state of affairs? It has developed a strategy built on governing poverty through regenerating the city, particularly its central shopping hub.

The Synoptic City: State, ‘Place’ and Power:

Early 20th-century urban expansion developed alongside media technologies to aid communication across increasingly differentiated and divided social groupings. Early sociologists maintained that this technology was problematic in relation to the potential for social solidarity and broad citizen political participation. This article extends these early ideas in relation to the synoptic city: a component of neoliberal statecraft generating its own media infrastructure, imaginaries, and messaging pertaining to the ideal city and the right to the city. In this article, it is argued that synoptic power is conjoined with a culture of entrepreneurialism attempting to confer legitimacy on the latter in emotional, sensual and value-specific terms. Synoptic technologies attempt to cultivate common experiences ‘for the many’ but are in fact produced by ‘the few’, with the possible danger of generating highly scripted views of entrepreneurial space and ‘place’ through celebratory animation and strategic silencing.

Book Review: David Lyon, Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009; 208 pp.: 9780745641553, £45.00 (hbk); 9780745641560, £14.99 (pbk)

with the literature of the period, the text illuminates an area with which few criminologists have truly engaged (although see Johnston, 2006). In deference to the complementary strands of the penal imagination and the creation of a citizen-subject, it is perhaps best to close with some lines from Emily Dickinson, whose work is used throughout the text (p. 118): Captivity is Consciousness – So’s Liberty.