‘You'll never walk alone’: CCTV surveillance, order and neo‐liberal rule in Liverpool city centre¹

Abstract

This paper is concerned to chart the establishment and uses of CCTV within the location of Liverpool city centre. In doing this the paper seeks to contextualize CCTV within contemporary 'partnership' approaches to regeneration which are reshaping the material and discursive form of the city. Thus CCTV schemes along with other security initiatives are understood as social ordering strategies emanating from within locally powerful networks which are seeking to define and enact orderly regeneration projects. In focusing on the normative aspects of CCTV, the paper raises questions concerning the efficacy of understanding contemporary forms of 'social ordering practices' primarily in terms of technical rationalities while neglecting other, more material and ideological processes involved in the construction of social order.

Securing the home: Gender, CCTV and the hybridized space of apartment buildings

“…Research on techniques of securing urban space through video surveillance tends to focus on large commercial properties, such as malls and arenas, business parks and office complexes, leisure parks and cultural centres, and the streets that surround them (Coleman and Sim, 2000;McCahill, 2002;Norris, 2003). Perhaps given the focus on the significance of CCTV for public space, considerably less research has been conducted on the ways in which CCTV operates in relation to inhabited, domestic space.…”

“…This article seeks to address this gap, which we understand to result from several interconnected factors. First, the vast concentration of studies on CCTV has emphasized public spaces and the close relationship between CCTV, neoliberal re-orderings of the city and mass private property (Coleman and Sim, 2000;Fyfe and Bannister, 1996;McCahill, 2002;Norris, 2012;Wakefield, 2005). Second, there has been a general lack of systemic attention to gender, and specifically to women's experiences, in surveillance studies (Ball et al, 2009;Koskela, 2012;Mason and Magnet, 2012), and the private space of the home has traditionally been associated with women and/or femininity (Hayden, 1982;Saegert, 1980;Sanger, 1995).…”

Postcards From Pigtown

“…a native white Protestant dream of a world without blacks or immigrants" (Wiener, 1994, in Giroux, 2002. In Pigtown, and entangled with creating a perception that the Main Street is a safe and secure place to do business (Coleman & Sim, 2000), the initiative offers a powerful mnemonic for corporate investors that paints an insulting and patronizing picture that decries the lives, despair, dreams, hopes, and experiences of residents.…”

Security and social ‘sorting’

“…(pp. 134-5) Coleman and Sim (2000) have also discussed how economic regeneration strategies based on stimulating retailing, leisure, tourism and the arts have been accompanied by the desire to attract 'the right sort of people', so much so that we are witnessing the implementation of 'social ordering strategies' (p. 623). 'Undesirable' people are identified by how they look and behave -their bodies and their embodied displays are routinely scrutinized as a result of private sector strategies which are profit driven and 'underpinned by the construction of a preferred and particular moral order built on the politics of inclusionary respectability and exclusionist otherness' (p. 629).…”