‘The gaze without eyes’: video-surveillance and the changing nature of urban space

This article discusses how ever-increasing video-surveillance is changing the nature of urban space. The article evaluates whether surveillance can be seen as a means of making space safer and ‘more available’. The main focus is on surveillance in publicly accessible spaces, such as shopping malls, city streets and places for public transport. The article explains how space under surveillance is formed, and how it is related to power structures and human emotions. Space is conceptualized from various viewpoints. Three concepts of space are postulated: space as a container, power-space and emotional space. The purpose is not to construct a meta-theory of space; rather, the concepts are used as ‘tools’ for exploring the issue of surveillance. It is argued that video-surveillance changes the ways in which power is exercised, modifies emotional experiences in urban space and affects the ways in which ‘reality’ is conceptualized and understood. Surveillance contributes to the production of urban space.

[1]  G. Rose,et al.  Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge , 1994 .

[2]  J. Jacobs.  The Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1962 .

[3]  A. Madanipour.  Urban Design and Dilemmas of Space , 1996 .

[4]  Nick Tilley,et al.  Understanding Car Parks, Crime and CCTV: Evaluation Lessons from Safer Cities , 1993 .

[5]  E. Wilson,et al.  Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment.@@@The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. , 1993 .

[6]  Peter J. Taylor,et al.  Beyond containers: internationality, interstateness, interterritoriality , 1995 .

[7]  Nicholas R. Fyfe,et al.  Closed circuit television and the city , 1998 .

[8]  Rob Shields,et al.  Social Spatialization and the Built Environment: The West Edmonton Mall , 1989 .

[9]  Richard Shusterman,et al.  Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , 1992 .

[10]  Ian Spring,et al.  City of Quartz , 1992 .

[11]  Stanley Cohen.  Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification , 1985 .

[12]  D. Massey.  Space, Place, and Gender , 1994 .

[13]  F. Jameson,et al.  Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , 1992 .

[14]  Rosa Ainley.  Watching the detectors : Control and the panopticon , 2002 .

[15]  Helen Liggett,et al.  Spatial Practices Critical Explorations in Social/Spatial Theory , 1995 .

[16]  Karlene Faith.  Up against foucault: Explorations of some tensions between foucault and feminism , 1995 .

[17]  M. Hannah.  Space and the Structuring of Disciplinary Power: An Interpretive Review , 1997 .

[18]  Nicholas R. Fyfe,et al.  Policing the City , 1995 .

[19]  K. Simonsen.  What kind of space in what kind of social theory? , 1996 .

[20]  Nancy Duncan,et al.  RENEGOTIATING GENDER AND SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACES , 1996 .

[21]  Martin J. Murray,et al.  Postmodern Urbanism , 2002 .

[22]  Gene Wolfe,et al.  The Architecture of Fear , 1987 .

[23]  Taner Oc,et al.  SAFER CITIES FOR WOMEN: PERCEIVED RISKS AND PLANNING MEASURES. , 1992 .

[24]  David Lyon,et al.  The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society , 1994 .

[25]  Susan J. Smith.  Crime, Space, And Society , 1986 .

[26]  Maureen E. Penfold.  Social Justice and the City , 1974 .

[27]  N. R. Fyfe,et al.  “City Watching: Closed Circuit Television Surveillance in Public Spaces” , 1996 .

[28]  Don Mitchell,et al.  The End of Public Space?People's Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy , 1995 .

[29]  Nancy Duncan.  BodySpace : Destabilising Geographies of Gender and Sexuality , 1996 .

[30]  C. Gardner.  Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment , 1995 .

[31]  Jean Hillier.  The Gaze In The City: Video Surveillance In Perth , 1996 .

[32]  I. Balbus.  Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse , 1985 .

[33]  Chris Philo,et al.  Foucault's Geography , 1992 .

[34]  J. Wajcman.  Feminism Confronts Technology , 1991 .

[35]  S. Herbert.  The geopolitics of the police: Foucault, disciplinary power and the tactics of the Los Angeles Police Department , 1996 .

[36]  Jane Ransom.  Feminism, difference and discourse : The limits of discursive analysis for feminism , 2002 .

[37]  Reclaiming Vision: Looking at landscape and the body , 1996 .

[38]  Hille Koskela,et al.  'Bold Walk and Breakings': Women's spatial confidence versus fear of violence , 1997 .

[39]  Stephen Graham,et al.  Spaces of Surveillant Simulation: New Technologies, Digital Representations, and Material Geographies , 1998 .

[40]  M. Cain.  Foucault, feminism and feeling : What Foucault can and cannot contribute to feminist epistemology , 2002 .

[41]  H. Dreyfus,et al.  Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. , 1985 .

[42]  M. Curry.  The Digital Individual and the Private Realm , 1997 .

[43]  Georg Rose,et al.  Postmodern geographies: the reassertion of space in critical social theory , (London: Verson, 1989. Pp. 266. E9.95 paperback) , 1991 .

[44]  S. Herbert.  The Normative Ordering of Police Territoriality: Making and Marking Space with the Los Angeles Police Department , 1996 .

[45]  M. Foucault,et al.  Of Other Spaces , 1986 .

[46]  M. Domosh,et al.  Those “Gorgeous Incongruities”: Polite Politics and Public Space on the Streets of Nineteenth-Century New York City , 1998 .

[47]  Felix Driver,et al.  Power, Space, and the Body: A Critical Assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish , 1985 .

[48]  P. Taylor.  The state as container: territoriality in the modern world-system , 1994 .

[49]  D. Sibley.  Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West , 1995 .

[50]  Mike Davis,et al.  Fortress Los Angeles: The militarization of urban space , 1992 .