surveillance

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (New York, Modern Library: 1993), page 65 of this re-edition:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of side-walk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance_not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in anyone place is always replete with new improvisations.

Isn’t Jane Jacobs’ writing succulent?

Now that the streets are stripped of live eyes, CCTVs take over, artificially attempting to maintain ’safety’ without the freedom of the city. Surveillance. Needless to say that these ‘ubiquitous’ artificial eyes also augment the need for ‘storage’ spaces.