From a municipal perspective, architecture and urban planning decisions dictate the presence and use of physical structures in our world. But architecture and urban planning decisions are also used to constrain and regulate the behavior of people and communities. While urban planning principles have been explored in the literature, there remains a gap between connecting urban design principles with a municipality’s decision to enact urban surveillance. As this symposium contends, there is a “shadow carceral state” where carceral power exists in systems of administration and social control. This Essay argues that urban planning and architecture principles are part of the shadow carceral state and are indeed linked to the decisions to enact urban surveillance.
By viewing physical and virtual geographies from a critical perspective, this Essay locates the invisible link between the design and behavioral regulation of physical space with the decision to enact virtual surveillance. This Essay situates urban surveillance enactment within the urban planning, criminology, and critical geographies scholarship. The intertwined decisions of how to structure the physical design of a community and whether to enact urban surveillance are best described by a paradigm this Essay calls “surveillance by environmental design.”
Instead of separating urban planning decisions from a city’s decision to enact urban surveillance, this Essay argues that surveillance by environmental design is one of the primary mechanisms that has created the ever-present, all-seeing surveillance state that we live in today. The surveillance by environmental design paradigm informs us that surveillance is an essential element, and indeed inextricable from a municipality’s urban design decisions, allowing us to locate the normative impacts of an urban surveillance by environmental design practice. Thus, if we are to resist the installation of surveillance technologies in our communities, we must first make visible the ways in which our architecture and urban planning principles contribute to our decisions to enact virtual carceral surveillance.
