URBLOG

Surveillance city

These cities within cities are eating up Britain's streets

Anna Minton on how urban regeneration has seen entire districts pass into the hands of private companies – and their security guards.

This monitoring and surveillance of innocent activities, which does not necessarily require anti-terror laws, is taking place all around Britain as a result of the growing private ownership and private control of cities. Liverpool One, which spans 34 streets in the heart of Liverpool, is effectively owned by the Duke of Westminster's property company, Grosvenor, which leased the entire site, including streets and public places, from the council for 250 years. Cabot Circus in Bristol, Highcross in Leicester and what promises to be the biggest of all, Stratford City in London, are all owned and run by property companies.

How not to prevent violent extremism

Spooked: a report published  by the Institute of Race Relations finds that the government's Prevent programme for tackling extremism fosters division, mistrust and alienation.

"The atmosphere promoted by Prevent is one in which to make radical criticisms of the government is to risk losing funding and facing isolation as an 'extremist', while those organisations which support the government are rewarded. "

Our city centres are turning into secure enclaves that erode trust

Can we banish fear and loathing from the city?

While the centres of our cities are turning into secure enclaves, high security is also becoming an ever bigger feature of the homes we live in.

The real issue is that most people simply don’t know what is happening, presuming that because the streets have always been public, as far as they are aware, they will continue to be so.

Review by Owen Hatherley

Helicopters and traffic in Brazil

High above Sao Paulo's choked streets, the rich cruise a new highway

 The helicopter craze currently sweeping Sao Paulo is also a tale of two radically different cities. Above, the space-age world where flying news teams trawl the skies for their next scoop and wealthy executives glide effortlessly between luxury condominiums, beach resorts and business meetings; below, the gridlocked mayhem where the vast majority of residents crush together in an orgy of congestion and motorcycle crashes.

Shenzhen

Naomi Klein on growth and surveillance in a chinese city from Rolling Stone

Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples.

Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer. Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses.

...as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city.

Policing the retail republic

Does regeneration around a giant private mall in central Liverpool mark a worrying attempt to keep out the less well-heeled?

"The rules for the newly privatised city centre fabricate an ideal citizen - aspirational in consumption and thinking big with urban pride. This is depicted as no ordinary regeneration because Liverpool people 'possess so much passion, so much pride and such a desire to shop'."