The Surveillance State or the Anxious City?

The New York Times reports that Britons are becoming weary of living in a “surveillance society” citing a covert surveillance operation to trap a woman suspected of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighbourhood school.

There is no doubt, as the report argues, that Britain has many security cameras and a fair number of databases full of our intimate personal details. But how should we understand the relationship between ourselves, the state and surveillance? After all the aspiration to improve the education of our children doesn’t seem like the biggest threat to state power. Like the vetting procedures that have been in the news recently, surveillance today doesn’t seem like the exercise of state supremacy, as much as a reflection of official anxieties. These anxieties have now spread to many areas of life that previously would have operated according to established and widely accepted codes of conduct.

From the point of view of the public, we may be weary of some aspects of surveillance, but there is little sign of any widespread principled objection to the idea that we need to be watched, and to watch each other. Take for example this report in The Daily Mail recently on a new internet game which allows 'super snooper' players to plug into the nation's CCTV cameras and report on members of the public committing crimes. The 'Internet Eyes' service involves players scouring thousands of CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for law-breakers.

The article raises some important questions about how we understand surveillance. For a start, for all the emphasis on Big Brother, it is clear that CCTV is not necessarily being used by the state to constantly watch over us. While there are over four million CCTV cameras in the UK, according to the article only one in a thousand is actually monitored by someone in authority. The fact that many cameras are not monitored (and that few crimes are actually solved as a result of CCTV) strongly suggests that the current desire for surveillance needs to be understood differently from the past. In fact, Internet Eyes is a good example of the way that today surveillance is less about them watching us, than us all watching each other.

In recent years we have seen a shift in crime policy (and consequently urban planning policy) from the aim of cutting crime itself, which after all has been going down for 15 years, to the objective of reducing the fear of crime. Yet few ask the question why we are we so fearful of crime at a time when crime is actually going down. In fact our perception of the threat that we face from criminal activity is less to do with the level of crime itself, and more a product of our anxieties about our position within society. At a time when the social bonds within communities have become frayed, social anxieties have grown. Seen in this light, we can understand how CCTV is motivated not so much by Big Brother as much as by our own need to feel that someone is looking out for us. As the CCTV camera whirls round to track us as we pass, it is to some extent operating as our own comfort blanket. CCTV appears to represent a technical attempt to overcome our fears and our social estrangement.

Civil rights campaigners have argued that the new game is effectively 'a snoopers paradise'. But as the broadcaster Mark Lawson highlighted earlier this year, snooping is now official Government policy. Lawson points to the development of anti terror policies and highlights university lecturers asked to alert authorities as to students who don’t turn up for class, and communities asked to spy on what neighbours put in the bins. He suggests that policies today echo the awareness campaigns of the second world war when the public were urged to look out for fellows with bratwurst in their sandwich boxes. But the snooping agenda is by no means limited to potential terrorists. Lawson might also have pointed to the way we are encouraged to keep an eye on what our neighbours recycle, on the benefits they claim, and, in the London Borough of Southwark, the type of clothes worn by their children – apparently an indication of whether they are likely to be abusers.

Narking on your neighbours reflects Government policy in an age of anxiety. Whether related to crime and terrorism, or ill defined notions of abusive and anti social behaviour, in the absence of genuine social ties, social policy frequently homes in on what is viewed as the only aspect of life which appears to have some capacity to unite us – our distrust others within our communities. But fear as the basis for community can only breed ever more anxiety and distrust.

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No Place Like Home? New Localism in America

An interesting piece from Joel Kotkin at New Geography who suggests that America is seeing the emergence of a ‘new localism’.

Those in the UK who’ve kept up with the debate on communities over the past few years will be familiar with new localism –New Labour have viewed it as a means to avert community breakdown and what they view as excessive individualism. Kotkin also talks of “rootlessness and anomie” and associates spatial mobility with social disintegration and of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams."

The article highlights a number of trends that emerged before the recession and have consolidated since. The most important are: -
· the collapse in "spatial mobility". In the 1970s 20% of people moved annually; by 2006, it was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the 1940s;
· the "boomerang kids" trend as children’s financial reliance on their parents continues well into their 30s and 40s as job options and the ability to buy houses diminishes; and
· the rise in working electronically at home full time which by 2015 is forecast to be more than those using mass transit.

Kotkin’s basic premise is that the longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with those places, and the greater their commitment to helping local businesses and institutions thrive. Home-based workers will eat in local restaurants, attend fairs and festivals, take their kids to soccer practices, ballet lessons, or religious youth-group meetings. While there are some important differences, some of Kotkin’s arguments appear to echo those of the new economics foundation and the Transition Towns movement in the UK.

While we might welcome the freedom to choose to work at home, to what extent can localism more broadly be viewed as a positive development? Were cities not the means to escape the constricted environment of the village? Can we really be that positive about living more locally, especially if it is the result of less opportunities to sell houses and find new employment?

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The Futurological Congress - Polish Architects Exhibition

This week the Barbican Centre in London hosts the Futurological Congress - a conference and exhibition organized in conjunction with the Polish Embassy running from 28 – 30 September. Darryl Chen presents an introduction to the work of the London think tank Tomorrow'sThoughtsToday on Wednesday afternoon. Also making an appearance are Daniel Libeskind and Joseph Rykwert.

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Space is the place?

Two encouraging developments this week in the quest to establish a permanent human presence in space. The Times records that data from India’s lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 shows large quantities of water on the surface of the moon. This discovery increases the possibility that astronauts could be based on the Moon and use the water found there to drink, extract oxygen to breathe and use hydrogen as fuel. Meanwhile, Building Magazine reports that Norman Foster and Partners are part of a consortium hoping to investigate the possibility of adapting materials found in space for building purposes.

Foster has already designed the world’s first spaceport currently under construction in New Mexico - primarily as a base for Richard Branson’s commercial space flight venture Virgin Galactic. His latest bid is to the European Space Agency which wants to set up a programme for robotic and human exploration of the solar system, and to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon. It hopes that adapting materials found in space for building purposes could eventually help establish a more permanent presence on the Moon.

Jonathan Glancey welcomes Foster’s bid, and rounds up some space-age architecture from Archigram onwards. But, inadvertently, he confirms that so far the space age has had only a limited role in influencing the architectural and urban future. For example, whether or not you admire the soap-sud structure of Grimshaw’s Eden Project, it’s worth asking where it sits with the broader human objective of conquering space. As Glancey points out, the aim of the Eden Project is ‘protecting and nurturing plant life’. In the time since the Apollo flights to the Moon, stills of earth shot from space have often been interpreted as a sign of how vulnerable life is on earth. And, as we’ve become more anxious over life on planet earth, not only has the desire to explore space receded, but many of those who still do want to go into space are no longer motivated by a project of discovery. For example the idea of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was to stream a continuous live colour image of the Earth from a million miles out in space. For environmentalists like Al Gore, the benefit of live footage of the whole Earth broadcast continuously over the internet would be to provide a powerful modern reminder of the fragility of our home planet. The Eden Project might look like a bubble city from another planet, but its motivations are similarly earthbound.

James Woudhuysen - who is speaking at Minimum… or Maximum Cities? on the future of energy - argues that we need to rekindle our appetite for space and go back to the moon - and beyond. “To want to go into space is human. It is a good in itself, an expression of humanity’s desire to conquer the unknown, discover more about our universe.”

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The Dilemmas of Growth - “minimizing the maximum regret”

World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change published last week by the World Bank looks at development in the context of a changing climate. It argues that future strategies for urban growth should take account of the idea of “mini­mizing the maximum regret”.

If we unscramble this somewhat opaque expression, we find an important indication as to how economic growth and urban development are now viewed. Maximising growth was once widely accepted as a primary aim for national economies and cities. Not only was prosperity welcome in its own terms, but it was accepted that growth helped urban communities exert more control over their circumstances. As the authors note (p8), “adverse climate trends…. do not discriminate by income, but better-off people and communities can more successfully manage the setbacks”.

Yet elsewhere the report goes on to largely reject this logic. For example, after two decades of impressive growth, China has created significant new infrastructure throughout the country. Yet the Bank questions the benefits of such growth by recalling that many migrant workers were left stranded in the unexpect­edly intense snow storms in January 2008. A similar logic is used to interpret Hurricane Katrina; decades of steady prosperity do not always produce good outcomes.

Today growth is often linked with an increase in cities vulnerability to climate change, and the focus is less on growth than on the “well-being” of current and future generations. For the Bank the development model needs to be reworked as one of creating “resilience”. Planning becomes an exercise in contin­gency rather than optimisation, less concerned with maximising development and more with minimising future risks. The “tolerable windows” approach advocated by the Bank uses “guard­rails” to set limits to development at levels thought acceptable according to expert judgement.

The term “minimizing the maximum regret” is adopted from post-war statistician Leonard Savage. But how useful is this approach for planning cities? While it sounds very scientific, there are arguably two important problems. Firstly, the frameworks which govern the work of planners (or urban statisticians?) necessarily reflect our fatalistic times. Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that today “it is not undue pessimism that is dangerous, but undue optimism”. The result is a tendency to speculate on worst case scenarios and lower the bar in terms of what is acceptable development. Secondly, urban planning becomes an exercise in deferring to statistics rather than an attempt to develop and then impose our ideas as to how the future should be. Rather than an exercise in statistics, the urban designer Edmund Bacon argued that ‘the city is an act of human will’. Is he right? We will return to this question over the coming weeks and months.

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