In Michel Houellebecq’s at times teeth-grindingly misanthropic satirical novel The Possibility of an Island, he paints a dismal picture of the future. About half the book concerns the life of one Daniel24, a ‘neo-human’ contemplating an apocalyptic world from behind a battery of CCTV cameras from where he observes – and occasionally electrocutes - the now feral old-humans who attack the perimeter of his defensible bunker. Within, Daniel24 – a clone of a celebrated early 21st century French stand-up comic, Daniel(1) - communes with himself by reading and creating a commentary on the journal of Daniel1. He also occasionally communicates via email or video chat with other neos, especially one Marie22 (later Marie23) with whom he exchanges poetic ramblings and occasionally live feeds of himself masturbating. Such is the life of the fortressed neo-humans of near future which have retreated from all direct human contact.

(Baroness) Susan Greenfield speaking in the House of Lords discussion of WEB 2.0 technologies earlier this year mused on similar themes.

I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf. Perhaps future generations will recoil with similar horror at the messiness, unpredictability and immediate personal involvement of a three-dimensional, real-time interaction.

For her, Facebook, Second Life, Twitter etc, mark a step-change in human social relations and the potential for our withdrawal from the ‘messiness’ of face-to-face human interactions altogether. Perhaps, but a look at a few developments beyond the screen might help us understand the reality of the withdrawal from everyday social interactions more perspicuously. It’s worth reflecting on what has happened to the actual space we all inhabit over the last 30 years.

The relationship between technology and social control in a broader social context is explored in a more pointed way in Anna Minton’s book Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City. The book tells the story of the withdrawal from urban street life in the past thirty years goes hand in hand with the construction of new privatised spaces in our cities, our homes and beyond. An outlook of fear and social control has been built into architectural practice and urban planning with the guiding idea of creating ‘defensible space’ and the young – feared by the rest of society - have been subjected to more or less systematic harassment while indulging in activities considered everyday in times gone by. Minton explains how the process has helped create a more alienated, withdrawn and fearful citizenry.

Her book details how the 21st century city is becoming a place where civic spaces are edged-out or closed down to be replaced with the new privatised spaces governed with an enforced civitas. Rather than being governed by the law of the land they are surveilled and controlled by privately determined codes of conduct, the rules of which are seldom announced but are nevertheless rigidly enforced. Designed by private landlords and modelled on protocols used to police shopping centres, the new urban landscape being created is not really part of the public realm at all. While some of this story has been visited before, especially in the American context – as far back as Mike Davis’ City of Quartz – its importation into the British and specifically New Labour context and the particularities that throws up is certainly worthy of examination.

Minton’s story starts with the ‘regeneration’ of the Docks in East London during Thatcher’s reign. From here Minton tracks the development of a privatised city landscape in the UK, from the early experiments with private business zones in Canary Wharf and Broadgate, to the fortressed apartments in gated developments which have spread around the outskirts of London and now grow at its heart. She ranges from the creation of a new system of localised social control, embodied in the ‘respect’ agenda, to the construction of what are effectively entirely privatised city-centres now which are spreading throughout the country.

The attempt by Thatcher and her environment secretary Michael Heseltine to deal with the collapse of Britain’s industrial economy by replacing it with a financial one was pioneered with the Canary Wharf development in the Docklands: once the largest port in the world, it had more or less closed down throwing thousands out of work. These early experiments in ‘regeneration’ – often justified in terms of new jobs and better conditions for the local communities - had some rather different effects. In fact, local people without the skills to make use of the new jobs were marginalised and then pushed out as property prices rose: this pushing up of property prices was an explicit part of the agenda for inducing the private sector to invest. Ultimately this regeneration, while creating new finance and service industry jobs – generally for workers from outside the area - also created enclave business districts in the midst of a residual community who were fortressed out or otherwise excluded.

Minton gives us an eye-opening tour of the new urban landscape of the UK in the wake of Canary Wharf. In East London’s docklands we find ExCel, the private living campus for the rich ‘which includes an exhibition centre as big as Earls Court and Olympia combined, six hotels and 2,000 homes’ (p13), and which, although completed before 9/11, can be locked down by a ring of steel to make a completely secure site. Across the country gated communities spring up where the rich and aspirant congregate in their ‘secured by design’ developments from where they nervously hunker down, site fortified and protected by security guards and CCTV. In the most exclusive developments there is the grand comedy of ‘double-gating’ where the super rich - already secured in gated communities - put up their own personal security walls within walls to fence out their neighbours: the merely very, very rich. But it is not only the super-rich for whom the guiding architectural principle is ‘defensible space’ (1).

What is most striking about Minton’s story is how this model of regeneration first developed in business districts by the Tories was enthusiastically adopted by the incoming New Labour government. New Labour’s regeneration however also incorporated their own ideas about a new and pervasive form of social control which was then deployed in shopping centres, housing developments, gated communities and city-centre developments across the country. Secured by design is not just an architectural ethos for designing business districts, but the principle governing the creation of ‘communities’ in which we all live and work. How did this come about?
A central part was the innovation of new localised forms of governance. Rules effectively developed to police indoor shopping centres are now extended and used as the model for the new privatised quasi-public spaces. This means that a host of activities once at least tolerated in public spaces are now effectively outlawed. Proscribed activities include ‘filming, political activity such as handing out leaflets, demonstrations, busking, begging or selling the Big Issue.’ And in some places ‘even eating a sandwich or taking a photo’ is forbidden. Spontaneous street-life is now replaced in ersatz form by the shopping centre spectacle; real locales with history and texture are replaced by anaemic shopping zones with theme park aesthetics. And all are policed by rulebooks created by private landlords and enforced by private security services and of course watched by cameras. The UK now has one fifth of the CCTV cameras deployed in the entire world – a staggering 4.2 million of them – and these are incorporated into a battery of new measures to police the conditionally public spaces of our cities and towns.

Yet these same principles are now built into the houses that everyone else is forced to buy as they are increasingly incorporated into everyday design practice in the UK. Thus excessive public control and a culture of fear are being built into the landscape. CCTV and fortressing are not just for the centre of cities. Securitisation is coming home in the form of new build development near you. Under the banners of ‘Pathfinder’ schemes and the ‘Respect’ agenda – new norms of social control are being rolled out and built into housing estates and developments across the country.

Via Pathfinder schemes - whose stated goal is to regenerate communities – there is an explicit policy to raise property prices and then rebuild communities along the new securitised lines. First an area is identified as ripe for redevelopment by a private landlord then, as tenants move out, their properties are not re-let. As the properties become dilapidated, other tenants become unhappy and distressed and are pressurised to move on. Finally they are turfed out altogether when their now defunct communities are declared unsustainable. Thus Pathfinder has become the mechanism by which old housing developments are run down while the local tenants are harassed, forced out of their communities and then priced out of the area. The new communities are then rebuilt along models of ‘defensible space’ which, surveilled with batteries of CCTV cameras, attempt to design out crime. They are policed by more punitive regulations and codes of conduct that the new tenants must abide by under threat of ASBO and ultimately expulsion.

The great New Labour innovator David Blunkett pioneered the use of a ‘wider police family’ to control these new spaces. Thus armies of security guards, community support officers and other para-police were developed who can give out penalty fines for minor disobedience to localised rule-books; administrating forms of behaviour management first developed for business districts like Canary Wharf. Pride of place here is given to the ASBO which is used to create effectively personalised laws. These often work by first banning a teenager from a public space or from some activity and then when he or she violates the conditions of the order - which up to 80% of people issued with these orders do - throwing them in jail. It is thus unsurprising that Britain locks up more young people than any other country in Western Europe, or that young people in Britain feel more alienated from all forms of authority than practically anywhere else on the continent.

As Minton notes, there is an apparent paradox here in that all of this gating and fortressing doesn’t really seem to have solved its stated problem, not crime itself – there’s no evidence CCTV cameras et al have much effect on this – but the feelings of insecurity of its citizens (2). People are if anything more worried about the problems of street life; Minton writes:

’The problem is that these environments remove personal responsibility, undermining our relationship with the surrounding environment and with each other and removing the continual, almost subliminal interaction with strangers which is part of healthy city life. The consequence is that people are left far more frightened when they do have to confront the unexpected that can never be entirely removed from daily life.’ (p33)

New Labour’s enthusiasm for so-called public-private partnerships has created a new privatised public space, ‘open to the public, but only on certain conditions’ (p56), at the heart of many of our cities and towns. They are regulated, not by the law of the land, but by a cabal of private security firms, ASBOs and supervised by CCTV cameras and private security. The sheer science fiction spectacular of this surveillance culture is brought home with BBC reports that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAMs) or Drones – already deployed experimentally on a housing estates in Liverpool (3) – are to be a major feature of the Stratford City development - effectively a new city in East London - to be used during the forthcoming London Olympics. Whereas the Jetpack was the symbol of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics the London Olympics will be surveilled by an autonomous eyes in the sky. One security report quoted by Minton confidently predicts that the Drones will be retained to surveil Stratford City after the ending of the games, keeping a watchful eye on its inhabitants as though they were insurgents in Iraq (4). Stratford City, like over new privatised city spaces will be regulated by the now-familiar mixture of private security firms, CCTV cameras and codes of conduct dreamt up by private landlords but often enforced – ultimately in the courts – by organs of the state.

In the older civic model of street life citizens were expected to and did take care of public spaces and their fellow citizens, keeping an eye on their neighbour’s children, or perhaps helping out if someone got into difficulty. Of course this didn’t always work out but the presumption of civility had consequences for how people acted. Today spontaneous social interactions of all kinds, but especially those between adults and children or teenagers, are considered suspicious and are being built out (5). The consequences of this are predictable with Britain being reported as the country in which people are least likely to get involved if they see a crime being committed (6). This appears to be the result of securitisation, as the public sees its responsibilities usurped by paid public officials in further vacates the space. The result, spontaneous social action disappears, a more nervous citizenry is created and, perversely, the call for ever more intrusive and ever more pervasive surveillance networks.

Minton’s critique of the state of our current civic spaces is powerful and authoritative but her solution - to model UK cities on those of continental Europe and eschew an ‘American’ approach based solely by the profit motive – doesn’t really get under the skin of the problem. An earlier model of red in tooth and claw capitalism – as Rem Koolhaus showed in his book Delirious New York – helped to create an entirely different and more ebullient set of public spaces. Underneath the Respect agenda that Minton so lucidly deconstructs there is a basic distrust of spontaneous human action which is particular to the political outlook of New Labour and not so easily foisted onto brute market imperatives. Rather, it is a particular face of capitalism without any positive vision, that is the TINA (there is no alternative) thesis, that underlies the imperative toward behavioural control build into contemporary design. The design is really the concretisation of an elite outlook that sees no alternative to the market but no longer believes in the market’s ability to drag up the poor and sees its only option as the manufacture of an enforced civitas surveilled, policed and constructed along the principles of defensible space

It is the same distrust that we find in current schemes to register all adults who come in contact with children, or regulate what football fans chant at football matches, the amount we drink on a Friday night, or the hundred other ways that our current government – having given up trying to address us at any sort of ideological level – is content to regulate our behaviour and use ever more authoritarian measures to do this. Unfortunately Cameron’s new Tories have seemingly imbibed this outlook. Minton’s ideas about trying to design in more conviviality to our cities are certainly welcome and may even make some impact on the current climate. But it is the anti-human and authoritarian agenda which drives these policies which needs to be confronted directly and this is a bigger task.

So what then for the future of social network technology ...

One of the more interesting social networking systems invented in recent years is Couchsurf.com, where members open up their houses to strangers who are travelling around the world in the hope of making new friends or simply meeting some interesting people. The model appears to be not watching your neighbours from CCTV but inviting the world into your home. As implausible as this might sound, for anyone who thinks online social networks are all about a retreat from the social world, it appears to be a successful and growing phenomenon. According to CouchSurfing’s figures:

‘Since 2004, 1.25 million successful CouchSurfing stays have been recorded. 1.5 million new friendships have been formed through CS, and nearly 90,000 of those are described as being close friendships. Members have reported 3.2 million positive experiences, which is an incredible 99.6 percent of all CS experiences.’ (7)

Perhaps social network technologies need not lead to a de-socialised future, just as the world beyond the screen is not as a scary a place as we were led to belief. Yet, the underlying dynamic that is shaping our activities in the street and online makes the worst possible assumptions about human beings. We should be careful that by regulating the online world in a human-averse manner we do not re-enforce the same trends and that the future of technologies in both in our cities and online should not be quietly dictated in this way. Rather, it’s really time to reclaim the streets and socialise the online world without fear.

Notes

1) A term coined by Oscar Newman in his 1973 Defensible Space: People and Design in the Violent City. The book dealt ways of curbing crime in New York City by attempting to create territorial spaces that defends themselves. As Minton argues (Chapter 4) this model also conceives of strangers as inherently as source of danger.
2) An internal police report found that there is only one crime solved for every thousand cameras. Given the amount of money spend on them that could be spent on more traditional policing it is not clear this as any net effect on the detection of crime.
See : 1,000 cameras ‘solve one crime’, BBC News, 24 August 2009
3) See: Pilotless police drone takes off, BBC News, 21 May 2007
4) See: Wood, D. M., & Ball, K. (2006). A report on the surveillance society. Surveillance Studies Network, UK, Sep, 14. (cited in Minton, page 31)
5) The use of Mosquito technology in British cities moreover points to an increasing criminalisation of just being a child and teenager. See The sound that repels troublemakers, BBC Wiltshire, 14 June 2006
6) Giangrande, R., Haldenby, A., Lundy, L., Parsons, L., Thornton, D., & Truss, E. (2008). The Lawful Society. London: Reform, cited Minton, p169.
7) Figures and quote retrieved from www.couchsurfing.org on 9 October 2009.