Publicity, control and privacy in the spaces of visibility: Socio-politics of the video surveillance in the Istanbul case

Video surveillance of the urban spaces has become a crucial aspect of the contemporary city life which is characterized mostly by risk, fear and high crime rates. The rapid diffusion of the cameras across urban spaces is appraised by some criminologists as one of the manifestations of a new criminological approach based on risk government strategies. This evaluation includes also a tendency of considering the part of certain requirements in the process of deployment of surveillance cameras as a crime prevention tool that have brought on the agenda by the neo-liberal city government. In search of rendering it more attractive for the investments and consumers of the global market, the city is forced to become a safe and stable place and the cameras fulfill a crucial function in creating if not a reality, an image of such places. This purification process of the urban spaces resulting also in the commodification of those spaces is also taken responsible for producing false publicities. Depriving of the power to manage the complexity peculiar to the city life and hold all of the differences together, contemporary urban publicity is characterized by a homogenization process. This situation itself also makes significant the attempt of controlling urban spaces by way of the video surveillance.In this study it is aimed to investigate the possible effect of the video surveillance on the urban experience and more generally on the urban publicity. The theoretical starting point of the study is a critical reassessment of the gaze-power equation which finds its perfect statement in the Panopticon. In this context, `management of the gaze? constitutes the key notion of the study. From that point of view, it is tried to find out the manner of the inclusion in and the exclusion from urban spaces of the gaze embodied in the camera. In the field work to this end a total of 469 interviews have been conducted with those passers-by at the 14 selected open-street areas under surveillance in Istanbul. The data obtained from the survey was analyzed with respect to such parameters and issues as the awareness of the presence of cameras, implications of being under surveillance concerning to the control and privacy, discursive construction of the practice and the part of security rhetoric in that context.In the light of the data, two factors are found highly important as to the management of the gaze embodied in the camera: deployment of the cameras in the spaces characterized by anonymity and the security rhetoric. The analysis of the data has shown that the presence of the cameras is affirmed by way of a certain security function attributed to it; the deployment of the cameras is found suitable for the anonymous spaces that can also be subject to the terms of risk and security; the gaze embodied in the camera nevertheless have a tendency of falling out of the space in any case and especially the concerns about data protection are prevailing. In addition it has been found positive correlation between the fear of abuse and the relatively non-naïve recognition of the security rhetoric; and also between the fear of abuse and regulatory demands. It has been also seen that the regulatory demands is relating to the data protection rather than to the spatial distribution of the cameras. Besides the anonymity of spaces and the security rhetoric, the data protection and mechanisms to regulate the use of the data would have an important part in the compensation of irreducible exteriority of the gaze embodied in the camera. It is depending on the capacity of manageability of the gaze to be included in urban space and become a component of the urban experience.Key Words: Video surveillance, urban publicity, control, privacy, management of the gaze, urban space, urban experience, security