Extended Abstract
This paper critically explores some of the emerging relationships between geographic information technologies and socioeconomic restructuring within cities. It argues that the widespread application of sophisticated GIS-related technologies, amongst a whole plethora public and private service organisations (from retailers, banks, utilities, crime control agencies and media corporations), is helping to underpin intensified processes of socio-spatial polarisation and fragmentation within urban areas. The paper has three parts.
1. GIS, Cities and Surveillant-Simulation
In part one, I set the scene by drawing, first, on John Pickles' (1995) recent work, on the links between GIS and surveillance, and, second, William Bogard's (1996) new book on the links between intensifying surveillance and electronic simulation within what he calls "telematic societies". These, he defines as "societies that aim to solve the problem of perceptual control at a distance through technologies for cutting the time transmission of information to zero" (Bogard, 1996; 9). Here I suggest that GIS technologies are increasingly being integrated into a broad raft of other telematics technologies (home and transport telematics, virtual reality, image databases, analogue and digital Closed Circuit TV etc) to underpin systems of "surveillant simulation". Increasingly, I argue, GIS applications are being constructed which are both surveillant and simulating at the same time. They are critically important technologies within the broader shift towards societies where, as Bogard puts it, "forms of control are refined and intensified in a system geared to the frenzied, instantaneous production of images" (Bogard, 1996;9). Within GISs, vast, superimposed systems of spatially-referenced data are integrating together, visualised and, increasingly, linked electronically both backwards into data capture and forwards into business and organisational decision making. The result is the construction of a whole complex of surveillant-simulation systems, as crucial socio-technical ensembles within cities. These underpin increasingly cybernetic and panoptic processes of urban development. There is growing evidence that such systems provide the technological basis for fine-tuned service restructuring, organisational change, and social control, based on cybernetic feedback loops for data and image flows, and sophisticated spatial visualisation/simulation.
The implication of this for understanding the city is that traditional concern with surveillance amongst followers of, say, Foucault, increasingly needs to be collapsed together with Baudrillarian debates about the role of simulation and simulacra within urban change. Ever-more pervasive data surveillance is spatially visualised and operationalised through sophisticated GIS and, increasingly, Virtual Reality and computer monitoring technologies. Increasingly, these are being used to provide comprehensive simulations of the "real" world which are then taken to be the "real" world - the basis for a myriad of decisions about who belongs where, how to maintain profitability, and the appropriate roll out of urban services. Gelerntner (1991; 3) captures this with his notion of "mirror worlds" -- software constructions which become such life-like metaphors for the "real" city that they are taken for "software models of some chunk of reality, some piece of the real world going on outside your window".
Such electronic surveillant-simulations, I argue, are increasingly being constructed to support decision making, business restructuring decisions and the development of further iterations of surveillance by service organisations within cities. In fact, within the context of an increasingly profit-driven, liberalised/privatised and globalising corporate environment, surveillant-simulation systems are emerging as crucial techniques for bolstering profitability, flexibility and responsiveness. For retailers, banks and utilities, for example, GIS surveillance systems are increasingly being woven into processes of business process re-engineering and service restructuring. This makes it possible to drive service plans and the "roll out" of investment across cities according to tight geo-demographic targeting criteria. And as cybernetic loops monitoring consumer behaviour become more sophisticated (through retailers, mail order, consumer credit, profiling agencies, home telematics systems, road transport informatics, wide-area Closed Circuit TV etc), it is increasingly becoming possible to replace aggregate geo-demographic spatial data sets (say, at post code or census tract level) with individual sets based on actual citizen behaviour or consumption. Thus simulations of the city merge ever-closer to totally panoptic, real time simulations of the city (the best example here being CCTV). Such panoptic and cybernetic networks increasingly start to resemble the command-control- and communications webs already developed in the military. In the consumption field, the process of targeting reaches its limit, as service enterprises attempt to compete for market share within increasingly liberalised markets (whilst, of course, gradually easing out of less-profitable commitments or obligations covering poorer groups and areas).
2. Surveillant-Simulation in the City: Three Examples
In part two, I explore three examples where GIS is being used as the basis for surveillant-simulation across a range of urban service providing organisations. The first case is the UK utility industry, where GIS is being rapidly applied to allow utility corporations to take-advantage of the newly liberalised regulatory situation. Here, national and regional public monopolies have recently been transformed into profit hungry, shareholder-driven enterprises. Utility firms are re-engineering their structures and engaging in ever-more global mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances within the globalising energy, telecoms and water industries. Increasingly, they are engaging in surveillant simulation to support the competitive "cherry picking" of lucrative market segments within cities whilst withdrawing from unprofitable social and spatial commitments. Geo-demographic profiling is being used to support improved infrastructure planning and direct marketing. Customer loyalty schemes are being developed to foster intimate knowledge over lucrative consumers. Utility meters are increasingly being transformed by telematics into interactive systems for surveying and simulating real-time household behaviour. Finally, real time telematics technologies are providing the technological foundation for markets in utility services to operate over single technical networks previously considered to be natural monopolies.
The second case explores the emerging linkages in the consumption sphere between GIS and telematics applications in retailing and home teleservices (interactive cable TV, phone, video on demand etc) into surveillant simulation systems. There are three levels to consider here. First, retailers and banks are increasingly integrating GIS and geo-demographic targeting into store investment and disinvestment decisions. In the UK, for example, the main retail banks have used GIS techniques to withdrawn 25% of urban bank branches on the basis of careful assessments of profitability. But the parallel trends towards telemediated services (banking, shopping, services) requires the locational restructuring of service networks n urban places to be considered alongside social and spatial access to services in electronic space. Examples are presented here of the UK's leading phone bank, First Direct, the relationships between physical and electronic access to retailing services. Finally, the possible broader role of surveillant simulation systems in mediating the increasingly cybernetic links between social access to services in urban places and electronic spaces.
The third and final example speculates on the potential links between surveillant simulation technologies such as GIS, Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) and cellular phone networks and crime control initiatives. Some examples are presented of the remarkable extension of sophisticated city-wide CCTV system within the UK, and the current shift towards digital systems based on algorithmic monitoring and linked to sophisticated data bases of recorded crime and recorded criminals. The US shift toward electronic tagging of offenders, and the use of cellular radio systems for surveillance is also explored. I then speculate on some on the potential implications convergence between a raft of digital technologies (facial recognition databases, cellular tagging, GIS, and CCTV, and systems of Road Transport Informatics (RTI)), to provide wide-area systems for surveillant simulation. The danger, I argue, is that the commercialised environment within which these technologies are being shaped and applied, along with the growing fears of cross-class social interaction, will lead to growing social control and the fine-tuned segregation of people based on where they are deemed to "belong" within cellular and fortified urban structures.
3. Conclusions: Towards a Critique of Surveillant-Simulation in the City
The growing links between a raft of digital geographic technologies are currently being shaped by powerful industrial interests to infuse urban areas with increasingly pervasive systems of surveillant simulation. Such systems signify a notable intensification in shifts towards panopticism in the city. Data capture becomes increasingly automated, driven by actual social behaviour, and approaches nearer to "real time" feedback speeds. Visualisation becomes more sophisticated as GIS and other virtual reality technologies provide the technological underpinnings for complex and increasingly "real time" simulations of the urban realm. And these visualisation and simulations combine in turn to provide the potential for fine-tuned organisational restructuring, service targeting, and new, intensified systems of social control and segregation. Such technologies are being developed and applied within the context of a strong supply push from an increasingly globalised media-telematics industries. What Bob Lilley and Paul Knepper (1993) call the "corrections commercial" complex - ie the fast-growing complex of security, military and prison corporations- who are, post Cold War, attempting to colonise civil markets, are also key players in this supply-side push. They are being further supported by the broader debates about the supposedly world-improving momentum of the "information superhighway", the imperative to apply telematics uncritically to every aspect of civil life, and the pervasive crisis of public confidence in home, street and transport security.
The result in advanced industrial cities seems to be the emergence of urban landscapes made up of many superimposed layers of surveillant simulation. Each layer has its own finer and finer mosaic of socio-spatial grids; its own embedded assumptions and criteria for allocating and withdrawing service access; its own definitions for specifying the "acceptable" presence of individuals in different "cellular" spaces; and its own cybernetic loops of system feedback, within which systems of surveillance become ever more integrated into systems of simulation. the broad result is the development of social control systems of unprecedented intensity and power which are virtually invisible and unregulated. What is most worrying is that the more disturbing aspects of these trends tend to be virtually ignored within public debates about cities and technology. In fact, many are actually being welcomed under the banners of "improved customer service" or the use of technologies to provide technical quick fixes to the complex urban social problems of crime and alienation.
In the academic GIS literature, too, critical reflection on these trends is scarce; many GIS academics are themselves too financially reliant on the lucrative spoils of these processes to offer any critique. Most often, as Pickles (1995) argues, positivistic and technologically utopian scenarios prevail. Simple catch-all disclaimers about GIS being applied to "the benefit of all", within a culture of technical rationality, are used to deflect attention from awkward issues about changing power relations, urban social polarisation and intensified social control. Longley and Clarke (1995;4) for example, started a recent review of the role of GIS in business and service planning with the convenient assumption that "businesses and services function in society through their rational use of resources to fulfil economic and social objectives". Without recognising how GIS and its applications are being enrolled into the changing nature of social relations, the danger here is that GIS research will be unable to offer genuinely useful perspectives on the remarkable processes of socio-technical change within contemporary cities.
References
Bogard, W. (1996), The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gelerntner, D. (1991), Mirror Worlds: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox... How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean, New York: Oxford University Press.
Lilley, R. and Knapper, P. (1993), "The corrections-commercial complex", Crime and Delinquency, 39(2), April, 150-66.
Longley, P. and Clarke, G. (1995), (Eds), GIS in Business and Service Planning, Cambridge: Geoinformation International.
Pickles, J. (1995) (Ed), Ground Truth: The Social Implication of Geographic Information Systems, New York: Guildford.
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Biography
Stephen Graham is a lecturer in the Centre for Urban Technology (CUT) in Newcastle University's Department of Town and Country Planning. A qualified town planner, he has worked in Sheffield City Council on both physical development planning and the development of urban telematics policies. His research at CUT centres on the role of telematics in the social and economic restructuring of cities, technology and the future of cities, and the possibilities telematics offer for innovations in urban policy and planning. He has published widely on these areas. His recent books include Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places, published by Routledge in February 1996 (co-authored with Simon Marvin), and Managing Cities: The New Urban Context, published by Wiley in 1995 (co-edited with Patsy Healey, Stuart Cameron, Simin Davoudi and Ali Madani-Pour). More details oh his work can be found on the Web at http://www.ncl.ac.uk:80/~ncut/
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Stephen Graham
Centre for Urban Technology (CUT)
Department of Town and Country Planning
University of Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU
United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0)191 2226808
Fax +44(0)191 2228811
Email s.d.n.graham@ncl.ac.uk
Details, information, & publications from the Centre for Urban Technology, as well as many links, are available at our World Wide Web site at: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~ncut
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