by Maud Webster | Note: this was an essay I wrote during the first year of my degree.
The issue of control has concerned city-makers since the concept of the city arose in ancient societies. Cities come about through an influx of individuals and groups settling in the same space, each bringing their own cultures, moral codes, and ambitions. Conflict can occur, so measures are imposed to ensure control. Resources within a city are limited, which can lead to tensions between different groups that hold differing values: this leads to social, cultural, political and economic struggles.
These measures can involve designating spaces as either public or private, invoking boundaries and different expectations for different places. This separation of spaces, and decisions about who should be provided with exclusive land to develop on, determines where some people will have less freedom of movement, or undergo tighter controls. These choices, regarding who should be allowed where, have been contended by urbanists to encroach on individuals’ right to the city.
The philosopher Henri Lefebvre proposed this concept of the ‘right to the city’, in his book Le Droit à la Ville, arguing that urban life has been reduced to a commodity due to the effects of capitalism (Lefebvre, 1996). In London, public space – which should be accessible for all citizens on a “completely unrestricted basis” (Planning and Housing Committee, 2020) – has increasingly become privately managed, rather than by a local authority, since the rise of neoliberalism in the late 1980s. This leads to individuals and groups being excluded from areas of the city, resulting in control of spaces, and consequently control of people’s access to places which are supposedly public, confusing the once clear public / private boundary in urban areas, as cities fulfil their role as hubs for consumerism. These consumers are prioritised over socially marginalised and vulnerable populations; for example, through the introduction of hostile street furniture, such as the imposition of uncomfortable benches and anti-homeless spikes which prevents rough sleepers (Andreou, 2015).
In London, there is a distinct lack of information explaining which areas are public and which are private; according to the geographer Bradley Garrett, if this data exists then it is not yet mapped in “any sort of systematic way” (Garrett, 2015). Confusion over access to certain spaces will prevent people from trying to access or fully utilising them, even if they are public, inadvertently controlling how people move in urban spaces. In Scotland, by comparison, there is the cadastral map which clearly shows the registered real rights of land, meaning citizens can understand which spaces they have access to (RoS Knowledge Base, 2020).
Ultimately, privatization of public spaces works to empower some users of the space (usually the rich elite) and control others (usually marginalised groups).
The right to the city is compromised, in our digital age, by the methods of surveillance which both public organisations [governments] and private organisations [companies] undertake on people living in the city. Once public spaces are privatised, they are often maintained under constant surveillance (Harvey, 2012). Surveillance is heavily imposed in many cities worldwide; in the city of Chongqing in China, there are an estimated 2.58 million cameras, making it the most surveilled city in the world with a camera for every six residents (Keegan, 2019). The intelligence which can be gathered by security cameras can be used positively, to ensure security and increase efficiency in cities. For example, in Singapore, geospatial data is used to identify gaps in civic provision, which can then be addressed by urban planners (Zhongwen, 2018); this works to control the efficient planning process of the city to improve the citizens’ quality of life. On the other hand, surveillance can be used to censor a citizen’s right to demonstrate and protest. China has an expanse of surveillance focused on Hong Kong, which led many protesters participating in Anti-Extradition Protests to wear masks that conceal their identity, to prevent the government from arresting or tracking them (Hollingsworth, 2019). This form of control is undoubtedly negative and infringes on people’s civil liberties; monitoring can be used to modify the behaviour of ‘volatile’ groups and individuals.
The city planner Oscar Newman argues that architectural design can crucially affect levels of criminality. After studying the city of New York, he found that higher crime rates exist in high-rise as opposed to low-rise housing projects, due to occupants feeling less personal responsibility for a space with so many residents (Newman, 1976). He proposed the concept of defensible space, and his second key design principle (as outlined in Creating Defensible Space p116) was to design housing which enables “residents across the street, whose units also face the street, to survey their neighbours front doors” (Newman, 1976), thereby setting up a natural system of neighbourhood surveillance.
Arguably the main rationale for both governmental and corporate surveillance is to aid the efficient function of the justice system; it can be viewed that prisons, and other correctional facilities, are the ultimate model of control of people and their access to spaces and resources. Cities are undoubtedly more subject to crime than rural areas. Crime statistics show that in 2018/19 predominantly urban areas experienced roughly 650% more reported robbery than predominantly rural areas (Office for National Statistics, 2019). This discrepancy may demonstrate motivation for the government to use novel, modern ways to combat crime in these urban areas, such as using CCTV and similar surveillance methods to catch and identify criminals.
Many urban planners resort to urban regeneration to ‘clean up’ a previously considered ‘unpleasant’ public space; this often results in gentrification, excluding less affluent citizens from both living and accessing specific urban areas. By introducing businesses that cater to a middle-class clientele, many lower-income workers will seek other places to use civic services like shops, and increased property rent prices will often drive pre-regeneration residents out of the area (Amirtahmasebi, 2015). This can work to control the range of income-levels represented in an urban area, and thus the resources which are being contributed to the economy and society.
It can be argued that the implications of this form of control are to ensure a city comes as close as possible to adhere to the ‘normative’ values of a ‘good’ city.
When considering a city as a system, urban authorities work to control people, spaces and resources to prevent conflict and improve efficiency. Cities are particularly dependent on this control due to their diverse and high-density population, which can increase the likelihood of conflict, and therefore crime and inefficiency. They are sites of struggle for control between the different users of spaces and the authorities who run the city, due to the limited resources available for distribution between such high populations.
Looking to the future, urban planners must ensure that these systems of control do not unintentionally exclude marginalised groups of society, to ensure the diverse nature which characterises cities is retained.
campus.scape 