ABSTRACT
The chapter offers a detailed analysis of the Oewersig neighbourhood residents’ association’s response to crime in the JB Marks Municipality, a small South African city. Cameras that are monitored live by a private security company (PSC) have been installed in the streets. Oewersig is an important case study. Various other upper-middleclass neighbourhoods in the study area have started to implement similar initiatives or have been considering doing so. The politics around the homeowners’ association and camera surveillance is quite complex. It would be easy to dismiss this initiative as unjust and intrusive. Some prejudices and dangerous logical leaps did in fact manifest in some interviews with residents. For the most part, however, the residents of Oewersig are confronted with fear and a limited list of conceivable options by which to allay these fears. Out of the available options, they arguably chose or were guided, through the dialectic between representations of space and spaces of representation informed by interactions with city hall, to a relatively tempered though far from ideal option. Nevertheless, wittingly or not, the initiative stimulates a problematic form of border-making.
