The digital age is also a surveillance age. Today, computerized systems protect and manage our everyday life; the increasing number of surveillance cameras in public places, the computerized loyalty systems of the retail sector, geo-localized smart-phone applications, or smart traffic and navigation systems. Surveillance is nothing fundamentally new, and yet more and more questions are being asked:
Who monitors whom, and how and why? How do surveillance techniques affect socio-spatial practices and relationships? How do they shape the fabrics of our cities, our mobilities, the spaces of the everyday? And what are the implications in terms of border control and the exercise of political power?
Surveillance and Space responds to these modern questions by exploring the complex and varied interactions between surveillance and space. In doing so, the book also advances a programmatic reflection on the very possibility of a political geography of surveillance .
Who monitors whom, and how and why? How do surveillance techniques affect socio-spatial practices and relationships? How do they shape the fabrics of our cities, our mobilities, the spaces of the everyday? And what are the implications in terms of border control and the exercise of political power?
Surveillance and Space responds to these modern questions by exploring the complex and varied interactions between surveillance and space. In doing so, the book also advances a programmatic reflection on the very possibility of a political geography of surveillance .
Questions of surveillance are always also questions of geography. From the famous disciplinary spaces of Bentham's panoptic prison projects to today's control societies based on millions of sensors, cameras and data capture devices spread across the world, perspectives from critical geography offer massive potential for understanding surveillance societies. And yet, remarkably, this pivotal and state-of-the art book is the first to really consider the intersections of geography and surveillance with real depth and clarity. Theoretically cutting-edge, politically astute, technologically informed, athletically multiscaled -- 'Surveillance and Space' is a remarkable analysis and is a 'must read' for anyone interested in the fast-moving politics and geographies of surveillance in contemporary societies.
Stephen Graham
Stephen Graham