The imagined city

This chapter is concerned with developing a critical materialist analysis of synoptic surveillance as a component of urban social control located within neoliberal state projects. ¹ Here, synopticism is explored as a form of power that entails the cultivation of an ideal audience receptive to particular ways of imagining, perceiving and understanding contemporary urban space. Moreover, it is primarily a visual communicative medium, possessing a tendency to simplify complex social problems with an effect of mystifying state power and the deeply divisive contours of urban space. As this chapter will make clear, synoptic control plays a key governing role in managing inequalities within advanced capitalist cities. Globalizing trends towards entrepreneurial rule continue to be deployed unevenly between divergent political-cultural contexts. The heightening of inequalities within and between cities in Europe and North America has occurred alongside the growth of governing agencies concerned with upholding local political legitimacy across ‘representative’ urban spaces and media technologies. These governing agencies, concerned with positive marketing and the celebration and construction of ‘place’, have a central role in how citizens make sense of the urban spaces they inhabit. Following Mills, this sense-making process is less ‘bounded by the private orbits in which they live’ and more reliant on information, imagery and narrative emanating from state and corporate sources (Mills 1970: 9). As Mills recognized, the danger in this lies ‘in the power to manage and manipulate the consent’ of citizens while ignoring broader structural problems and injustices (ibid.: 50). Therefore, while urban synoptic power mystifies urban space as symbolically pure through careful prescriptions of playfulness’, ‘spontaneity’ and ‘inclusiveness’ (as a means of promoting neoliberal growth), it also promotes silences in relation to the voice and experience of poor and marginal populations.