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?