When I’m not Finishing My Damn Thesis (FMDT), I either watch Roger Federer doing his ballet/ice-skating combo, or else have interesting conversations with supervisors and friends.  Via a post-supervision chat I found myself uttering the phrase “digital Haussmanisation.”

Let me “unpack” that, with complete sentence structure and so on.

For hundreds of years (longer?) elites have been trying to control and absorb ‘the commons‘, notably via various ‘Inclosure Acts‘,  This is to create dependency among ‘the masses’ who might be able to run away/live off the land and to accumulate capital (by dispossession).  So far, so obvious.

However, ‘enclosing’ the city is a different challenge, since there are high concentrations of people who might fight back instead of being dispersed/deported, and the city is where the elites often live too.  Not helpful to have the streets full of blood necessarily.

Elites have almost always feared the city and its uncontrollability (see Marshall Berman on the work of city engineer Robert Moses in his book ‘All that is Solid’, and see also Stephen Graham in the equally wonderful ‘Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism’).

The French learnt lessons about colonial control with small numbers of troops (who were not always reliable) and so reshaped the physical nature of Algiers (from memory, Graham talks about this. I could be wrong.)

The French naturally brought those techniques back from the colonies to reshape the metropole, Paris.  It was changed from warrens of tenements and twisty windy timey-wimey  to what we see now –  wide straight boulevards, which have the advantage of being harder to barricade [see the very etymology of that word], easier to send troops in to suppress rebellion without those being vulnerable to ambush/capture.

This large scale urban engineering effort was, famously, conducted under Baron von Haussman.

So far, so (uncle) history.  And, “so what?”  Well, imho what we are seeing now, with digital face-recognition and  real-time tracking by police forces (in China, UK etc)  is the possibility of digital haussmanisation (concept TM, patent pending).  The movement of individuals and groups will be monitored, controlled, stopped etc, the commons enclosed by being able to tag everyone all the time, in real-time, and say whether they are allowed to move from a to b or not, how and when.

Again, this stuff has already been well under way in the “colonies”,and is now, once mature, being exported to the metropole.  Plus ca change… (There might be something useful on this here – Hollow Land  by Eyal Weisman, as a laboratory for the 21st century…)

It isn’t so much the Panopticon, where one central surveillance point attempts to See All, and the walls are permanent, the institution clearly carceral, but the Panspectron, where the points of surveillance are pervasive, (hyper)linked and distributed (see this old blog post for more).  And of course,  the points of surveillance are ‘co-created’ by their subjects; as many have said, the extraordinary thing is that we now routinely give up vast quantities of personal data freely to corporations while bemoaning the evils of the state.

So, digital Haussmanisation.  I said it first. Cite me or else.