20

CHAPTER TWO

The Ideology of Fear and the Public-Private Dialectic

PANOPTIC LOS ANGELES

 21

According to Soja, ‘every city is a carceral city, a collection of surveillant nodes designed to

impose a particular model of conduct and disciplinary adherence on its inhabitants’ (Soja,

1995a: 29), whereby what is perceived to be homogenous and a collection of shifting nodes and

locales, is in fact a space that is regimented by a ‘hidden’ observer and an all-encompassing

‘eye’. This argument is deduced from Foucault’s influential theory of the city being composed

of heterotopias, and correspondingly, the creation of the panopticon (a model derived from

Jeremy Bentham). Writing about disciplinary measures within hierarchical institutions such as

the prison and the hospital, Foucault argues that “panopticism” is the stage when ‘the

disciplinary modality of power…has infiltrated the others, sometimes undermining them, but

serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them, and, above all,

making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements’

(Rabinow,1991: 206-7). What he is suggesting here, is that the organised structure of

institutional techniques of discipline are not confined to the workings of prisons and other

places of control and power, but are a component of the social fabric that constitutes urban life.

When the discourses of power and knowledge become ‘actual relations of power’ (Soja, 1995a:

28), Foucault maintains that this is the determinant for shaping urban space. At the stage when

these discourses amalgamate, what society is left with is the model of the panopticon. This is

the stage of the all-pervasive and all-powerful ‘eye’. It is the unseen dictator of control, order

and power that shapes and regulates the organisation of socio-spatial relations in conjunction

with the economic ‘growth of power’. It is also an ‘eye’ that attempts to survey and watch

everything geographically as far as possible and thus continually attempts to assert its unseen

presence within and outside the cityscape.

What Foucault provides the critic with is a theoretical model of how power is exercised in

urban space and how this spatial arena can only exist and be produced if there is a coming

together of power and knowledge, and of its ontological and epistemological relations. Yet one

must not leave Foucault just yet, for to gain a comprehensive and cogent understanding about
 22

the operations and methods of surveillance of space in L.A., one must examine his influential

notion of the heterotopia (Foucault, 1986).

Foucault argues that heterotopias are those sites that are a part of urban space, spaces that are

obscured from public view because they encompass all other sites, and that they are spaces

produced in relation to other spaces. These sites contain contradictory spaces that invert and

disrupt the produced space they are supposed to represent. What is required, Foucault

suggests, is a new method of analysing and thinking about these heterotopic spaces, those that

are ‘The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our

lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knaws at us’ (Foucault, 1986:

23).

Although he posits six principles that constitute the make-up of a heterotopic site, for purposes

here it is worthwhile to concentrate upon Foucault’s fifth principle. This vital principle

concerns the process(es) of open/public and closed/private space. What is interesting is that

Foucault suggests that for certain spaces there are codes and regulations governing who is

allowed entry into a particular urban public space. In typical fashion, Foucault argues that

prisons are a space that have compulsory entry, whereby one must obtain permission to become

a component of that arena. This is clearly a spatial operation that excludes many individuals.

However, there are other sites that appear to be open (or public), yet are also spaces of

exclusion and regulation. Here Foucault includes an example of the open family guest houses

in Brazil. This is a space where one was granted entry into the house, yet was excluded from

the quarters that were for exclusive use by the family who owned the property. This site

includes an illusion of space, for it simulates notions of freedom and democracy, yet includes

spaces that are protected by unwritten definitions of open and closed space.

What is worthwhile about this principle is that it relates directly to methods of surveillance and

control. Territory is mapped out in the city, there are zones of public entry and those of
 23

prohibition. It is a supposed open and public space, yet techniques of surveillance are in

operation to dictate boundaries and discipline. The question must surely be posed as to what

use Foucault’s theories have for analysing the contemporary landscape of ‘central’ Los

Angeles? What I intend is an exploration of how these techniques and principles are attained

within the urban and what purpose they have for a comprehensive understanding of city space

and how surveillance has transformed the landscape of L.A..

When examining methods of surveillance in the contemporary ‘electronic’ city, one can become

awash with representations and models of such ‘police’ (or polis) tools. Technologies such as

pay-per-view television, identity cards, the ‘Clipper’, office key-stroke counting and of course

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV), are all telematics-based methods of control and order. My

concern is not with the abundance of surveillance tools - for there are far too many to discuss

here1 - but is rather with how social surveillance within L.A. increases social polarities,

encourages an ideology of fear and is continually determined and dominated by the hegemonic

ruling classes and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). Perhaps the most vocal critic of

the ‘totalitarian’ procedures employed by these state forces is Mike Davis. It is within his

engaging and challenging texts and essays that he proposes theories that L.A is more than ever

resembling a ‘fortress city’ (Davis, 1990) and that an ‘ecology of fear’ (Davis, 1992a), or as I

maintain, an ideology of fear is emerging among the elite classes that inhabit L.A.

ERECTING THE FORTRESS

In his classic text City of Quartz, Mike Davis attempts to illustrate the transformation of L.A.

through a variety of disciplines. These mediums are primarily geography, history, economics,

religion and contemporary urban theory. Coming from a Marxist-based background, Davis

asserts that the city 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’(Davis, 1992a: 7). This

 24

enclave is a space where the urban core is dominated by the polarities of the upper-classes and

the poor, where dominant capitalist business structures have the power to control and determine

the public mobility of Downtown L.A.’s underclass. As more financial capital is accumulated

within cities, public spaces are in danger of becoming privatised: ‘private-public spaces’. A

transgression occurs from what was previously considered a space of liberation or

heterogeneity (often funded and maintained by the city council), to a space that becomes a zone

of exclusion: one that is privately owned by a chosen social group. Areas such as Skid Row in

the city of L.A. have been deprived of council funding and regenerative processes. They are

areas of high taxation; places that have become run-down areas of poverty. The result is that

they are areas of both simulated and real danger. In contrast, the open spaces of Beverly Hills

are privately owned and are controlled by private security firms who enable the area to remain

safe and privileged, creating a ‘closed-public’ space.

It is this privatisation of public land and space that is characteristic of the gentrification of the

city. This was especially true throughout the 1980s (especially in New York City), when young

upwardly mobile people purchased apartments and loft warehouses within the centre of cities

which had been converted into luxury housing. Real estate prices soared within these areas,

causing an increase in the social divisions between the two predominant classes. Landlords and

developers realised the opportunities that this housing transformation could offer and

accordingly raised rents, causing many citizens to leave their homes and find alternative

accommodation (sometimes this meant the streets or, the few, local hostels).

Davis observes this transformation as being illustrated in terms of architecture. His

examination of architecture is to see it as representations of social power, buildings that define

regions and boundaries. Due to the increase in finance and global capital being positioned

within the core of the urban centre (Downtown) and its radius, the elite have the power to

transform (or disguise) the appearance and space of the city. Buildings, and their display of

technological surveillance, have come to signify the amount of wealth a corporation holds, and
 25

its position in the transnational economic infrastructure. As the urban core of Downtown,

LAX, and Westside has been deemed the spatial container of capitalist wealth, the geographic

space of these areas has been ‘mutated’ to dictate the movement of social space. This

architectural spatiality having the power to determine spatialization and movement is

particularly illustrated within Davis’ much published essay entitled ‘Fortress LA’ (Davis, 1990

and 1992b). It is within the discourse of Davis’ piece that he illustrates the dichotomy of space

determining and being determined by the capitalist state, and how methods of surveillance have

erected a city space that resembles an open, yet closed and private, prison.

The restructuring of LA during the 1960s and 1980s produced a compression and shortening of

Downtown space; something that has occurred from what Davis describes as a ‘militarization

of the city’(Davis, 1990: 223). Due to the rising crime rate and gang warfare in contemporary

Central L.A., architectural space has adjusted to this urban state and has restructured space in

what may be interpreted as a totalitarian manner. Davis argues that contemporary architecture,

such as the Goldwyn Library in Hollywood, has come to be indistinguishable in design and feel

to prisons. This supposed public information building, designed by Frank Gehry, has electronic

steel gates surrounding it, CCTV cameras monitoring each visitor and passer-by, graffiti proof

walls (a characteristic of contemporary L.A. architecture in ‘public’ places), and what Davis

terms an invitation for ‘potential trespassers to ‘make my day’’(Davis, 1990: 239). Davis

suggests that this inversion of ‘public’ space projects a sense of oppression, conjuring

‘imaginary dangers’(Davis, 1990: 226), where the ruling classes contain their fear of

undesirables and unemployed members of ethnic minorities by erecting buildings that

continually ‘watch’ those individuals, ensuring that the Other does not have access to that

space. This architectural transformation has not only altered the way in which the human

subject observes the buildings, but has also had a devastating effect upon the socio-spatial

dialectic.
 26

Los Angeles has been witness to a dramatic securing of the city, particularly since the

“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 have become exclusive spaces,

excluding those who are considered by the elite to be ‘undesirables’. Public spaces, social

conveniences, and places of conviviality have become almost obsolete, and any notion of

Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ is in danger of disappearing in terms of ‘traditional’ public space.

Perhaps the most explicit example Davis offers of this operation and restructuring of space is

in relation to ‘the’ race issue. Although he defines this in a binary relationship, that is between

blacks and whites rather than including the largest Los Angeles minority group the Hispanics,

he does provide the critic with an insight into the class structure of the city.

PLAYING THE RACE CARD (AGAIN)

Davis observes racial space determining the occupant’s locale. After the Watts rebellion in

1965, the fears of the upper-class ‘white’ people in control of economic power was

accentuated. The irony here is that the perception of the dominant whites was that the

discontented blacks would infiltrate and cause a threat within their spaces of power. The

hegemonic position of the ‘whites’ enabled them to embark upon a respatialization of the city,

segregating blacks from those spaces that signified white economic progress and expansion.

Downtown was witness to this transformation perhaps more than any other social and business

space in Los Angeles. Being the financial ‘capital’ of L.A., Downtown was, according to the

proponent of urban postmodernism Charles Jencks, architecturally restructured by skyscrapers,

to include ‘forty new ones where there were only five in 1976’(Jencks, 1993: 33). As this form

of architecture signifies an increase in economic wealth, Downtown restructured itself into a

 27

spatial security zone, where black mobility was restricted in the sense that if they were

occupying a space that signified the middle/upper classes (offices and the peripheral area of

skyscrapers), they were deemed unlawful, or to encourage stereotypes, that they were involved

in an illicit crime. CCTV was believed to be a technological solution to these ‘problems’, a tool

that would eliminate the reality of crime and unlawful activities, warning those who would

consider participation in a criminal offence that they were being watched and recorded.

As the fears of some of the white populace increased, created by the explosion of gang-related

crimes and race-related social uprisings, Downtown’s space was restructured. The polarity

between rich and poor was signified in architecture and if an individual from a ‘poor’ space

was to relocate into a space of economic power, then that individual would probably be seen by

the LAPD and the electronic ‘eye’ of CCTV as an outsider/intruder. The problem with

analysing this restructuring is that it means different things for each individual. There is a

danger in grouping ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ together in select and exclusive parties, particularly

when there are both successful blacks and whites working in Downtown and when there are

both ‘undesirable’ blacks and whites. What one needs to do is move away from playing the

‘race card’ and enter the arena of the space of everyday life (the street), where the restriction of

social space may appear to be more visible and coherent.

THE STREETS OF L.A.

Within Downtown (particularly the area known as Skid Row) and its neighbour Bunker Hill,

the space occupied by the homeless has been restricted ever since the fears created by the Watts

rebellion. With the advent of increasing numbers of L.A. citizens being made unemployed

(particularly during the Reagan/Bush years of massive privatisation) due to the ‘downsizing’ of

Silicon Valley, the homeless have borne the brunt of the spatial restructuring of Downtown. The

Los Angeles authorities have manipulated socially operated spaces in their attempts to remove

(or ‘hide’) the homeless from the streets. According to Michel de Certeau, the streets of a city
 28

carry their own rhetoric, where walking defines and produces urban social space, and

‘practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen’(de Certeau, 1984: 93).The spaces of the

homeless are clearly visible to all those ‘practitioners’ who walk by them and more importantly

ignore their existence.

It is de Certeau’s focus on the street that breaks away from Foucault’s theory that the state is

able to control and dominate society via the panopticon. It is because of the cultural need and

requirement of individuals to interact and communicate with each other, that according to

David Harvey ‘spaces can be more easily ‘liberated’ than Foucault imagines’ (Harvey, 1990:

214). What this illustrates about the busy streets of Downtown L.A. is that the abundance of

surveillance cameras may not have the regressive and totalitarian potential to transform human

social and spatial mobility as Davis proposes. Instead, they respatialise human interaction

where the citizens of, say, Skid Row, are unable to ‘perform’ successful interactions with the

high executives of corporations in Downtown. It is through ignoring a class and racial system,

that de Certeau appears to project a form of utopia, whereby he maintains that social

interaction occurs regardless of spatial boundaries determined by a hierarchical social

formation. As Los Angeles is deemed a postmodern city because of its cosmopolitan and

heterogeneous mix of citizens and cultures, and because of the erected visible and invisible

fortresses, interaction is deliberately restricted to ensure a sense of security and exclusivity.

De Certeau fails to recognise that these ‘requirements’ of human interaction and

communication are manufactured and controlled by the all-powerful ‘eye’. Interaction can (and

should) be possible and be achieved between different individuals and groups, yet the economic

infrastructure has deemed them impossible, or not viable, by an unequal capitalist class system.

The methods of video surveillance position this polarisation to a more extreme level. This is the

stage where ‘undesirables’ are not give the opportunity to experience the complete ‘pedestrian

rhetoric’ of de Certeau’s theory. Human movements are simultaneously monitored and

restricted, creating zones of exclusion and division. Without this monitoring, certain classified
 29

‘undesirables’ would be ‘free’ to walk and interact within the areas of public consumption,

creating a semblance of democracy.

The public space of Downtown L.A. has erected invisible walls and spaces through continual

video surveillance, an invisibility that is accentuated by the unseen observer. The street no

longer resembles the open and interactive spaces of nineteenth century Paris or New York but is

a cityscape that renders the street invisible and segregated. This positions L.A. as an individual

and uncharacteristic city space: an area that ‘performs’ spatial operations that are not ‘seen’ in

the majority of other world cities, possibly creating what Jencks terms a ‘heteropolis’ (Jencks,

1993). These uncharacteristic spatial operations in L.A. are perhaps most severely experienced

by the homeless of the city, those persons who have generally - because of the economic

structure and the rising numbers of the unemployed - been forced to relocate themselves and be

seen as the most marginal section of the ‘undesirables’; a state that brings us ever closer to the

dystopic image of a Blade Runner or Escape From New York scenario.

POLICING THE CITY AND THE PERIPHERY

Dramatic increases in police power and control to remove the homeless from the space of the

streets took place during the 1980s and continue today during the Clinton administration. The

authority that the LAPD and the corporations have been given to eliminate the homeless’ space

of ‘home’ has progressively increased throughout the decades. Architecture within Downtown

has been restructured to make it uncomfortable for these citizens to sleep, eat and live: public

toilets have been closed to deter them from keeping dry and security cameras have been erected

to reduce any ‘public’ space occupied by the extreme poor. Davis argues that this ‘new

Downtown is designed to ensure a seamless continuum of middle-class work, consumption, and

recreation, insulated from the city’s ‘unsavoury’ streets’(Davis, 1992b: 159), where this

restructuring allowed the capitalist state to determine space in L.A. by continually presenting a

hierarchical structure that performs the role of the ‘thought police’. These ‘unsavoury streets’
 30

also emerged as a consequence of the economic depression during the 1980s. The accelerated

rate of homelessness was due to the cutbacks in the defence industries positioned on the

periphery of the city centre and the decline in small businesses and community facilities within

the core.

Although space has had the power to control mobility for blacks and the homeless, 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 and correspondingly occupying

the core of the city for business and occupation, the upper-classes have blurred the spatial

security of the centre into their neighbourhoods and mansions. As stated earlier, homes in these

areas have come to resemble prisons, or ‘fortresses’. Residential areas have been able to

‘privatize local public space’(Davis, 1990: 246) by hiring private security companies to

monitor and ‘protect’ their homes and lifestyles, and where the ‘reason is not primarily personal

safety but the protection of equity’(Christopherson, 1994: 420). What were once 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 is

essentially an upper-class fear that has derived from the crime-ridden nodal centre of the

locality, where the streets and business buildings of the Central Business District have

embarked upon a securing of the city and their economic space. It is also a fear that is

continually on the rise, for the occupants of the homes are not content with the oppressive and

excessive security they own: some are now demanding enclaves that are ‘terrorist proof’ and

‘the right to gate themselves off from the rest of the city’(Davis, 1992a: 12).

The dilemma with these security techniques is that by limiting spatial mobility for other L.A.

citizens, the occupants of the upper-class enclaves are in fact minimising the space in which

they themselves can interact. The ghettoised spaces of the inner city poor also excludes the

wealthy from spatial mobility, because of the media-induced mythology of danger that areas

such as Watts and South Compton have. Yet this distorted picture of these areas being infested
 31

with crime does hold some truth, particularly before the truce between L.A.’s two main rival

gangs, the Bloods and the Crips. What occurs when both social groups are excluded from other

spaces and are self-contained is a mass compression of social space that has been produced

from the radical extremes in class structure that is characteristic of L.A.. Yet it is also a

situation that stems from the fear the upper-classes have helped to create, not only within the

sphere of the street and social space, but also through the omnipotent media. To take this notion

of security one step further, the Rodney King rebellion in 1992 accentuated this belief and also

illustrates how L.A. is developing an ideology of fear that is more real than an ersatz form of

postmodern L.A..

DESTROYING AND RE-BUILDING THE CITY

As mentioned above, the Watts rebellion of 1965 helped to accentuate levels of fear within

central L.A.. In 1992, the same fears were resurrected after the acquittal of four police officers,

after the blatant and brutal beating of black motorist Rodney King. Although the amateur video

footage of the event was shown on television across the world, few people envisaged that the

officers would be deemed innocent. No fixed surveillance cameras could have prevented the

chaos and fury that followed the court decision. Those who took to the streets were being

surveyed by the world, from the obligatory cameras of CNN and other major news networks,

rather than from the privileged CCTV. Here the voyeur was known; the all-powerful ‘eye’

belonged to both the ‘desirable’ and the ‘undesirable’. What is interesting about such a media

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 voyeur, invading the behaviour of

the LAPD, the institution that would normally have the power to survey and harass ‘the Other’.

The question to be asked though, is how this public/private event had the potential to

restructure space?.
 32

The uprising in 1992 was the ‘fortress’ architect’s dream come true. The massive spatial

security of buildings that the city had introduced and put into practice during the previous two

decades had at last succeeded in its mission and objective. As predominantly young black male

youths looted and destroyed buildings in central L.A., the area of Bunker Hill, according to

Davis, lived up to its name: ‘By flicking a few switches on their command consoles, the

security staffs of the great bank towers were able to cut off all access to their expensive real

estate’(Davis, 1992a: 3). 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. Jencks has

argued that even before the rebellion there had been ‘enough representations of alienation…

talked about, designed and built for us to understand…what a riot realism would be’(Jencks,

1993: 91). 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 owned by Koreans, who were believed to have

taken many economic opportunities away from the already established black citizens of L.A..

The ‘fortress’ buildings were inaccessible to those who took to the streets in protest, 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. I believe that 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. Realising that the Central Business District was effectively

secure, the LAPD ensured that the rebellion did not spread into the upper-class areas by

confining it to the areas of poverty and unemployment.

This operation of the LAPD (aided by the monitoring of CCTV, police helicopters and the

ubiquitous television news network cameras) compressed the urban space and places that they

were required ‘to protect and to serve’, allowing them to gather information about human

mobility quickly and efficiently, particularly movement according to race. Although the LAPD
 33

made its presence known in the streets of Broadway and Spring and particularly in the near-

destroyed Koreatown, their predominant concern, as mentioned above, was with the Central

Business District. The LAPD had a major influence in the structural design of the C.B.D.,

offering advice on the most effective security techniques. Since the Rodney King rebellion,

many businesses and those upper-classes living in suburbia have approached the LAPD to

instruct them on the most effective way to restructure their public-private space. As Davis

suggests, ‘the riot-tested success of corporate Downtown’s defenses has only stimulated

demand for new and higher levels of physical security’(Davis, 1992a: 4).

BUSINESS SECURITY AND ‘MALLING’

Susan Christopherson has termed this central area of Los Angeles city (Downtown) as being

characteristic of a ‘business improvement district’ (Christopherson, 1994: 418) and Davis that

it is a component of the ‘social control districts’(Davis, 1992a); both remarks indicate that they

are spaces of finance and therefore security. Although they are conventionally public spaces,

they are privatised in the sense of the ‘public-private’ dialectic described above. Christopherson

argues that these districts attempt to emulate the controlled environments of the shopping mall,

where private security firms are employed to dictate access, video monitoring is continuous and

where mobility and patterns of consumption are regulated and surveyed.

The analogy of the Central Business District with shopping malls is useful because it illustrates

how a private space disguises itself as being wholly public. Those entering the mall

environment (presumably the predominant middle-class white consumer) desire food and

clothing that signify globalism and the diversity of cultures that ‘heterotopic’ L.A is thought to

represent. 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 ethnic minorities face-to-face. The consumers are removed from the safe space of

their homes in the gated communities of suburbia, into another protected and regulated
 34

environment, without ever experiencing the mythology of a dangerous multi-cultural and

heterogeneous society. Surveillance cameras in shopping malls ‘remove’ the ‘risks’ that are

characteristic of inner city life, and the mall also simulates a public space in the sense of a

place that is open to all citizens and is a place of leisure and consumption.

The privatisation of public space in Downtown ensures that urban designers and planners can

portray a simulation (or ‘hyperreality’) of this space, for those living in the suburbs believe that

the mall environment is public, in that it is not regulated and monitored. This theory is

interesting for it clearly illustrates the breakdown of definitions of public and private. Iris

Marion Young describes public space as ‘a place accessible to anyone, where anyone can

participate and witness, in entering the public one always risks encountering those who are

different, those who identify with different groups and have different opinions or different

forms of life’(Young, 1995: 268).Within the realms of the mall, what may be deemed public is

in fact private, because those members of society who are witness to this space have little

comprehension of what exactly constitutes a public space such as a park, because such places

have become privatised and spaces of exclusivity. The street that consumers witness in this

controlled environment is that of a walkway besides a parade of shops designed for profit and

consumption, often a simulation of the mythical Main Street of ‘traditional’ America (an

explicit and overt example being CityWalk at the Universal Studios’ theme park). Public space

can no longer be defined as Young describes it, for it has become a concept that bears no

relation to the conventional and traditional binary relationship between public and private.

Instead, both have been juxtaposed creating a permanent public-private dialectical relationship.

This confusion between what is private and what is public space becomes even more distorted

if one looks at the way those living in suburbia have erected and transformed their homes

within the enclaves, creating their own autonomous ‘smart’ homes through the use and

appropriation of technological tools. The fragmentation of L.A. city life into the suburbs

creates a further dispersion and disintegration of public space, something that was accentuated
 35

by the uprising in 1992. To gain a more complete understanding of this ‘militarization’ of

space, one needs to examine the way in which the technological surveillance techniques that

have come to characterise the contemporary space of the city are transferred to the private

realm of the home. CCTV, the information superhighway and the Internet can possibly all be

viewed as potential destroyers of the public spaces of city life, whereby those who can afford to

have access to these tools are able to distance themselves even further away from the streets of

central L.A.. The question to be asked though, is what is the future for those ‘other places’ and

public/private spaces in Downtown L.A., if the emerging world of cyberspace2 encourages the

erection of “virtual cities” and the annihilation of a public realm within the cityscape of L.A.?
1
See David Lyon (1994) for an in-depth discussion of the various methods of surveillance in contemporary society.
2
Cyberspace is a term coined by the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson in his debut novel Neuromancer (1984): ‘A
consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation…A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…’
(Gibson, 1984: 67). I interpret it to be that ‘space’ that is beyond the interface of the computer, a transparent place that
is infinite and one where communication is interacted through telephone links and fibre optics. It has recently become
the buzz-word to describe the Internet, the Information Superhighway and “virtual communities”, that is those
electronic spaces that cannot be navigated or positioned, spaces that are not constrained by temporal and spatial
boundaries.