Security in the Society of Control: The Politics and Practices of Securing Urban Spaces

Abstract

In the view of some Deleuzian scholars, societal steering evolved from analogue disciplining of static enclosures into network-centric, privatized, digital, and global control. This article re-engages the control thesis from a decidedly empirical security studies perspective. In the age of globalization and urbanization, technological innovation and liberal policy ideals, how are security apparatuses reorganized, and in what relations do they stand to local societal and political orders? The article argues that the Deleuzian framework indeed proposes an impressively rich, integrative, and topical research agenda-but also that its security studies applications can benefit from further development. With a view to vindicating its analytical potential, the article first systematizes the control thesis. It then employs a spatial and empirical heuristic to inquire into the securing of three distinct urban spaces-a site of mobility, a public square, and a place of mass commerce-and to illustrate the actual (re-)configuration of contemporary security management. Forgoing articulation of universalisms about societal steering, the article makes the case for more nuanced engagements with security ensembles, their technological evolution, and their relations with democratic ideals, globalization, and de-territorialization, both in and beyond Western polities.

Urban Design as Technology of (Counter‐) Democratic Security Politics

“…As a technology, architecture thus adapts to the multiple yet distinctively local functions found at Z€ urich main station, as it seeks to secure mobility in a context of pronounced commercialization. The ambition is to keep travel safe and mass-movement fluid, but also to have stores benefit from transit in ways that do not compromise the security requirements of the overall mobility paradigm (Hagmann 2017).…”

“…This empowers scholars to produce new types of rich empirical case studies (e.g. Hagmann 2017; Samara 2010), and to consequently reengage prominent urban security theories. Particularly prominently, it helps question implied assumptions of environmental criminology theories ( routine activity , rational choice and defensive space theory , cf.…”

“…Taking things together, then, reflexive security analysis offers a distinctive take on the intertwined questions of security policy, politics and the built environment (Hagmann 2017). How urban design is made complicit to local senses of insecurity and/or the managerial production of urban security, how security‐minded urban development interacts with aspirations of democratic politics and how these connections vary across time and the global cityscape (Roy and Ong 2011), are questions pursued by reflexive analyses of politics and social behavior, dialectical concepts of causation, and thoroughly localized data collection.…”

A Mechanism of Masking Identification Information regarding Moving Objects Recorded on Visual Surveillance Systems by Differentially Implementing Access Permission

“…The Proposed Mechanism consists of an image collection module, an image DB module, an image services module, an object extraction module, an identification DB module, an object identification module, an access permission DB module, and a masking module. Figure 4 illustrates the sequences in which the Mechanism proceeds [40][41][42][43]. Figure 5 shows the proposed mechanism.…”

The Programmatic and Institutional (Re‐)Configuration of the Swiss National Security Field

“…This situation is hardly satisfying for a number of reasons: Although welfare budgets outpaced security spending, threat management continues to represent an important and resource‐heavy public policy domain. With its expansion, technological upgrading and turn to homeland protection, the security field also affects the everyday life of Swiss residents in increasingly direct ways, prompting important discussions about the place of security management in a democratic polity (Hagmann ; Hagmann and Saliba ). Most importantly maybe from a scholarly perspective, the field's programmatic and institutional changes touch on issues such as federalism, inter‐agency politics, state‐society relations, and foreign affairs, and hence a range of central concerns of political science research.…”