ABSTRACT
In a very real sense the street had become an interior - gas lit and policed; the crowd felt a safety in a domain where buildings and lights created an artificial sky at night. Its equipment was standardised - from the bench to the lamp, the kiosk to the pissoir, the railing to the tree guard, the pavement to the drain - so that even as the trace of the route united a hither to parcelled out city, so did the objects of its use remind the citizen of one, uniformly governed Paris. (Vidler, 1978)
Introduction
The quotation at the start of this chapter may seem like an odd place to begin a discussion of CCTV and the contemporary British town centre. However, it reminds us that the urban realm, public streets and spaces, are capable of being rendered into a product in design and spatial organisation and that there is nothing new in this. Nor is there anything new in the ends of such rendering. In the Paris of the Nineteenth Century, Hausmann (the city planner) transformed the city centre into a space symbolically representing the power of the state, and physically instantiating the possibility of political suppression through the application of state terror and violence - the boulevards provided wide and straight avenues along which canon could be fired and in which the mob and its movements might more easily be observed.
