smart city
surveillance city
Dr David Murakami Wood
Canada Research Chair in Surveillance Studies,
Queen’s University, Ontario
[email protected]
Control Society
• Deleuze, post-panoptic ‘Control Society’
– Inculcation of morality replaced by modulation
of flows
– Breaking down of people and things into
constituents: data subjects, digital sorting:
“ʻdividualsʼ… made of codes”
• Alex Galloway: protocological world
• ‘Spatial protocol’: highly restrictive and
controlling rules embedded within the
environment
A note on theory
• Control / Discipline / Authority always exist
together (in different ways)
• Resources for social ordering
• Bringing Neil Smith together with critical
IPE theory, I identify an ‘uneven security
development’
• Also: techno-futures as virtual (Brian
Massumi), ‘fantastic’ (Jodi Dean) or
Utopian (Katherine Hayles)
Smart Cities
• ‘Cities like Rio de Janeiro are integrating
intelligence and smart technology into their
operations to run better and make “dumb,
rude, and dirty” traits of the past’. (SAP
Business Trends, 2013)
• Rio Smart City
Surveillance and Smart Cities
• Promoters generally do not acknowledge
central place of ‘surveillance’ within smart
city projects
• But smart cities are inevitably surveillant
cities: intensive management of urban
flows requires information about
everything that moves in the city
surveillance and smart cities
IBM 2013 report on its Smarter Cities
program:
The availability of vast collections of data about all
aspects of city life makes it possible for civic leaders to
understand how things really work so they can make
better decisions. Much of this data comes from
sensors and video cameras that are being used to
monitor everything from public safety to traffic jams. In
addition, city agencies are increasingly sharing their
data with one another and with the public. This allows
leaders to get a holistic view of the city, and to unlock
the value of all of that data they’re collecting. (2013: 6)
Securitizing Smart Cities
• 1990s – increasing concern about
‘unruliness’ of cities and crime / urban
terrorism terrorism) + Military Operations
in Urban Terrain (MOUT)
• Answers always involved surveillance:
distributed sensor platforms and computer
analytics
• Policing – both visual and digital turn:
crime mapping, predictive policing models
etc.
Securitizing Smart Cities
• Some ‘smarter City’ projects overt about security
e.g. Durham, NC boasts of ‘police analytics’
reducing crime and reducing educational and
economic disparities
• After 9/11 in US – demand for the immediate
implementation of ubiquitous city strategies for
security reasons
• Funding via Homeland Security and post-2008
stimulus - integration of CCTV, emergency
services, analytics… Construction of multiagency ‘Fusion Centers’
• Now recombination e.g.:
• ‘smart border’ projects
• ‘Domain Awareness’ initiatives (Oakland, NYC)
The machine-readable world
• Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp) is
ubiquitous surveillance (ubisurv) (c.f.
Alberto Araya)
• You can flee the city, but… surveillance is
everywhere
• Kitchen & Dodge (2011) Code/Space
• Haggerty & Trottier (2013) on ‘monitoring
beyond the human’
• Smart homes, Smart Cities,
‘brandscapes’…
Automating Securityscapes
Rafael ADS
Sentry-Tech
Stationary
Remote
Controlled
Weapon Station
(Israel /
Palestine)
Automating Securityscapes
EADS Cassidian
integrated Border
Surveillance
Solution (Saudi
Arabia)Station
Surveillancescapes
G-Max UPDS
Perimeter
Intrusion
Detection
system
Surveillancescapes
• Some pics and text
G-Max UPDS
Perimeter
Intrusion
Detection
system
Towards ambient government?
• Technologies of government increasingly
distributed and networked
• If security is the primary purpose of
government, and security can be
embedded in anything, then government
can be ‘ambient’ – all around us, part of
the environment
• ‘Naturalization’ of government is a hiding
of politics:
– ‘smart cities’ building in subtle forms of
socialization and behavioral conditioning –
like a digital Tony Blair.
Towards ambient government?
• Reminder: fantasies are never fully realized –
unevenness, incompleteness, breakdown,
failure, revelation resistance, revolution
• However, is the political already so devalued
that this will not attract major resistance or
even notice?
• What forms of revelation are possible? From
visibility or legibility
• Privacy is not very useful either as a basis for
theory or for praxis in this context
Sousveillance?
Obscurity and Illegibility?
Adam Harvey’s
‘CV Dazzle’ antiface recognition
make-up
Destruction?
German activists destroy video surveillance
cameras as part of an urban ‘game’