Reclaiming The Streets
by Roy Coleman /
2011 / English / PDF
3.3 MB Download
In an age of mass camera surveillance people in the UK have become
the most watched, catalogued and categorised people in the western
world, all with little public debate or opposition. Nor has there
been much more critical research that understands CCTV within the
broader social relations out of which it has grown and
consolidated. The aim of this book is to analyse the use of CCTV
within this broader social, political and ideological context,
focusing on relations between surveillance, power and social order,
using Liverpool as a case study. At the same time the book provides
a study of social control in Liverpool city centre, exploring the
development of, and meaning attributed to, social control practices
by those at the centre of the implementation and management of
these practices. As such the book is a study of the 'locally
powerful', their organisation through the local state, and their
perceptions of order and disorder in the city centre. Liverpool's
CCTV network is thus seen as emblematic of the developments in
social control which the book explores. The book makes a key
contribution to theoretical debates around social control in four
respects: it places the analysis of CCTV within an understanding of
the social relations in which the technology emerged; it analyses
CCTV as a normative tool of social control and not merely as a
piece of crime prevention technology; it considers how social
scientists and criminologists think about and understand social
control in the contemporary setting; and finally it seeks to draw
lessons from the Liverpool case study and considers their
applicability to the study of CCTV more generally.
In an age of mass camera surveillance people in the UK have become
the most watched, catalogued and categorised people in the western
world, all with little public debate or opposition. Nor has there
been much more critical research that understands CCTV within the
broader social relations out of which it has grown and
consolidated. The aim of this book is to analyse the use of CCTV
within this broader social, political and ideological context,
focusing on relations between surveillance, power and social order,
using Liverpool as a case study. At the same time the book provides
a study of social control in Liverpool city centre, exploring the
development of, and meaning attributed to, social control practices
by those at the centre of the implementation and management of
these practices. As such the book is a study of the 'locally
powerful', their organisation through the local state, and their
perceptions of order and disorder in the city centre. Liverpool's
CCTV network is thus seen as emblematic of the developments in
social control which the book explores. The book makes a key
contribution to theoretical debates around social control in four
respects: it places the analysis of CCTV within an understanding of
the social relations in which the technology emerged; it analyses
CCTV as a normative tool of social control and not merely as a
piece of crime prevention technology; it considers how social
scientists and criminologists think about and understand social
control in the contemporary setting; and finally it seeks to draw
lessons from the Liverpool case study and considers their
applicability to the study of CCTV more generally.
