Security, surveillance and space: contested topologies of urban security

This paper examines the growth, application and impact of technological surveillance in relation to contemporary forms of urban security.

It analyses how the city accommodates increasingly intensified surveillance practices that work to coerce, regulate and order elements of urban life. Drawing on data generated from a decade of overlapping empirical research projects analysing surveillance-driven security apparatuses in London and other UK cities the paper examines the practices and arrangements of urban security surveillance. In doing so, the diffusion of surveillance techniques at multiple registers of action are interrogated.

At the same time, it traces how the proliferation of responsibilised security actors have drawn multiple diverse practices, organisational approaches and ambitions for control into play, generating numerous paradoxes in the way surveillance operates.

Prof. Fussey is a criminologist specializing in a number of areas including surveillance and society, terrorism and counter-terrorism, critical studies of resilience, major-event security, organized crime and urban sociology. '

He has published extensively in these areas, was recently elected a director of the Surveillance Studies Network and, during 2015, was part of a small team of co-investigators awarded an ESRC Large Grant on Human Rights and Information Technology in the Era of Big Data. He has also recently concluded working on two large-scale ESRC and EPSRC funded research projects analysing counter-terrorism in the UK’s crowded spaces and, separately, future urbanism and resilience towards 2050. His other work focuses on organised crime in the EU with particular reference to human trafficking for criminal exploitation (monograph due to be published by Routledge in 2015).

For more details, click the link below.