Los Angeles, Surveillance And The Public-private Space Dialectic

Los Angeles, Surveillance and the Public-Private Space Dialectic This paper will attempt to combine a materialist discourse with a representational approach. Los Angleles is merely an example of city culture, yet can be, and has been seen through contemporary urban theory as emblematic of United States culture and nation. It is also a city that allows one to strategically review the history of the city as text and as discourse of discourses. What I am going to be examining here is the implosion, or perhaps disappearance, of public and private space in contemporary Los Angeles. I shall argue that this implosion has been realised through methods of surveillance, where neither public nor private space resembles its traditional construction or representation. Unfortunately I do not have the time to discuss the ‘Other’ spaces in L.A., such as gender, sexual, and electronic, yet it is within these cultural discourses that debates are emerging concerning urban social space, shifting away from the traditional, though valid class debate. In his seminal book City of Quartz, Mike Davis asserts that the city of LA is awash with hierarchical spatial matrixes. By this he means that ‘in contemporary metropolitan Los Angeles, a new species of special enclave is emerging in sympathetic synchronization to the militarization of the landscape’. This special enclave is a space where the urban core is dominated by the polarities of the upper-classes and the poor, where powerful capitalist business structures have the power to control and determine the public mobility of Downtown L.A.’s underclass. Public spaces here are in danger of becoming privatised: or what I term ‘public-private’ spaces. A transgression occurs from what was previously considered a space of liberation or heterogeneity, to a space that becomes a zone of exclusion and surveillance. Los Angeles has been witness to a dramatic securing of the city, particularly since the economic “internationalization” of Downtown between the 1960s and 1980s. Video surveillance cameras operate on almost every street, especially outside buildings that are deemed to be representative of great wealth. Alongside this, certain streets and areas, those that are thought to be public, have become privileged spaces, excluding those who are considered by the elite to be ‘undesirables’, who ever they are. Public spaces, social conveniences, and places of conviviality have become almost obsolete. Video surveillance is the realisation of a culture embedded within an ideology of fear, where a dualistic relationship occurs determining the production of urban space through technology and where urban social space determines the technocratic order. This economic, cultural and spatial transformation, has not only altered the way in which the human subject observes the city and buildings, but has also had a devastating effect upon the socio-spatial dialectic, particularly for the homeless.

Within Downtown (especially the Skid Row area) and its neighbour Bunker Hill, the space occupied by the homeless has been restricted ever since the fears created by the 1965 Watts rebellion. With the advent of increasing numbers of L.A. citizens being made unemployed due to ‘downsizing’, the homeless have borne the brunt of the spatial restructuring of Downtown. Structures such as public seating been diminished within the cityscape, whereby the homeless are unable to produce social space Here invisible walls and spaces have been erected by continual video surveillance. Radically speaking the public street no longer resembles the mythology of open and interactive spaces of nineteenth century Paris or New York but is a cityscape that renders the street invisible and segregated and correspondingly privatised. It is a state that brings us ever closer to the dystopic imagery of a Blade Runner or Escape From New York and LA scenario. The authority that the Los Angeles Police Department and the multi-national corporations have been given to eliminate the homeless’ space of ‘home’ has progressively increased throughout the decades. Architecture and public conveniences within Downtown have been physically restructured to make it uncomfortable for these citizens to sleep, eat and live; and the police, aided by CCTV, can remove anyone they consider ‘Other’ from these so-called public spaces. Perhaps, it could be argued that the tramp is the postmodern flaneur, whereby he or she constantly changes position and locale, always fragmenting space. Although space has had the power to control mobility for ethnic minorities and the homeless in the centre, it has also determined the architectural structure of the homes of the upper-classes who live in the suburbs and hills of the city. Occupying the peripheral space of the city yet also occupying the core for business and occupation, the upper-classes have blurred and mirrored the spatial surveillance of the centre into their neighbourhoods and mansions. Mike Davis claims that homes in these areas have come to resemble ‘fortresses’. Residential areas have been able to ‘privatize local public space’ by hiring private security companies to monitor, survey and ‘protect’ their homes and lifestyles, and where as the critic Susan Christopherson correctly says, the ‘reason is not primarily personal safety but the protection of equity’. Public spaces such as the street and the public park - where the citizens of L.A. were able to drive or walk through - have now become spaces that are segregated from urban social space. This model of restructuring is essentially in my opinion a processed upper-class fear derived from the crime-ridden nodal centre of the locality. It is also a fear that is continually on the rise, for some residences are now demanding enclaves that are ‘terrorist proof’ and ‘the right to gate themselves off from the rest of the city’. If anyone has seen it, the film Unlawful Entry is a good example of this paranoia, despite being a typical weak and crap Hollywood movie.

The dilemma with these security and surveillance techniques is that by limiting spatial mobility for other L.A. citizens, the occupants of the upper-class enclaves are in fact minimising the public space in which they themselves can interact: even though ‘they’ view these surveillance tools to accentuate their freedoms. Yet, the ghettoised spaces of the inner city poor also exclude the wealthy from spatial mobility, because of the media-induced myth of danger within central Los Angeles. What occurs when both social groups are excluded from other spaces and are self-contained, is a mass compression of public social space that has been produced from the radical extremes of class structure in L.A., persistently establishing spaces that are both exclusive and private: public-private spaces.

In 1992, the same fears as those of the Watts rebellion were resurrected after the acquittal of four police officers for the blatant and brutal beating of the African American motorist Rodney King. No fixed surveillance cameras could have prevented the chaos and fury that followed the court decision. Those who reclaimed the streets as a temporary autonomous zone were being surveyed by the world, from the obligatory cameras of CNN and other major news networks, rather than from the privileged eye of CCTV. Here the voyeur was known; the all-powerful ‘eye’ belonged to both the ‘desirable’ and the ‘undesirable’. What is interesting about such a mediatised event is that it originated from an individual practising video techniques who just happened to be ‘in the right place, at the right time’. The amateur was the surveyor invading the brutal behaviour of the LAPD, that institution which would normally have the power to survey and harass ‘the Other’ through their own privileged methods of surveillance. This rebellion was the ‘fortress’ architect’s dream come true. The erected concrete bunker buildings provided safety for those in control of L.A.’s financial capital and also reduced the level of fear for those citizens living in the suburbs concerned about the welfare and defence system of their workplace. Yet it was those buildings and businesses that did not have the financial capital with which to employ the dominant fortress architects (Frank Gehry and Charles Moore) that became the brunt of the looting, especially those businesses owned by Koreans. The fortress-like buildings were inaccessible to those rebels, yet one wonders whether this was because of their architectural design or whether it was because the rebels saw their own neighbourhoods as being worthless and concentrated their discontent in those areas. Surely it is the latter, because no matter how secure and defence orientated these fortress buildings are, the LAPD would have protected them at any cost because of the economic wealth they represented. This operation of the LAPD and technological surveillance via CCTV compressed the urban space and places that they were required ‘to protect and to serve’. Although they made their

presence known in the streets of Broadway and Spring and particularly in the near-destroyed Koreatown, their predominant concern was with the Central Business District. Susan Christopherson has termed this central area of Los Angeles as being characteristic of ‘business improvement districts’. Although these are conventionally public spaces, they are privatised in the sense of a ‘public-private’ dialectic. Christopherson argues that these districts attempt to emulate the controlled environments of the American shopping mall. Within the mall the predominant white middle-class consumer is removed from the safe place of the gated communities of suburbia, into another regulated and surveillance ridden environment. The mall provides an escape from the urbanity of Central L.A., for it allows these consumers to experience ‘global’ products, yet also ensures that they do not have to witness or experience the apparently dangerous ‘Other’ face-to-face. Within the mall, what may be deemed public is in fact private, for those members of society who are witness to this space have little comprehension of what exactly constitutes a conventional public space such as a park. The street that consumers witness in this controlled environment is that of a walkway besides a parade of shops designed for mainly corporate profit and personal consumption, often a simulation of the mythical Main Street of ‘traditional’ America. Public space in this arena can no longer be defined as a place accessible to anyone. Instead it is a space that has been juxtaposed creating a permanent public-private dialectical relationship, where public activities are watched by private video cameras and private security teams. Who in turn produce a simulation of public space that is wholly private designed for the placement of consumerism. It is through techniques of video surveillance, and now the glorified realm of cyberspace, that public space can be seen to be a myth, for we no longer truly understand what a public space actually is, if in fact we have ever known. When you visit a cash machine in Torun you are being monitored by certain forms of surveillance, yet many would suggest that it is a public activity outside a public building. At the institution I am at, we have a web cam situated in the IT centre; yet no one asked me if I potentially wanted my activities to be made public through cyberspace. This however is nothing new, urban social space has nearly always been monitored and watched. What can be seen to have perpetuated an ideology of fear is the rise in technological innovations: there is a greater chance today that the voyeur will not be seen. So, very briefly, what of the future? The urban social space of cities in this technological age may become further fragmented because of emerging telecommunication and surveillance techniques, just as it did during the industrial age of the late nineteenth century. What will remain though is a hierarchical structure dominated by the information-rich, and also the age-

old tradition of being a voyeur and being the surveyed. The withdrawal of citizens to suburbia (both urban and electronic) does have the potential to collapse both the public and private spaces of the city of Los Angeles. But it must be said that LA is not unique to these scenarios, for they are common to most industrialised city spaces. It is however a city that encourages one to review the city as both text and practice, whilst recognising that it may actually all come together there. Perhaps within contemporary public space it is the tramp who has become the equivalent of the mythologised Parisian flaneur able to wander the spaces of everyday life. Or perhaps the tramp is the voyeur who is forced to watch the cameras watch him/her/it?