Spaces of Surveillant Simulation: New Technologies, Digital Representations, and Material Geographies

Abstract

In this paper I analyse some emerging socioeconomic applications of information and communications technologies and explore how they support technological systems which increasingly blend surveillance with simulation. In the first part of the paper I explore the technological shifts supporting blended ‘surveillant simulation’ and review how the emerging links between surveillance, simulation, and material geographies have been addressed in recent debates on society, space, and cultural change. In the second part I go on to explore four examples in detail where widespread electronic surveillance systems are providing the captured data and images to produce electronic simulations of the ‘real world’ in near ‘real time’—virtual banking, retailing and ‘reality’, crime control and electronic tagging, road transport telematics, and ‘smart’ utility systems. Attention is focused on how such simulations of the real world are then used to support new spatial practices based on the fine-grained allocation of goods and services, and intimate patterns of attempted social control, in real time, through the time–space fabric of material geographies. I conclude by analysing the implications of surveillant simulation for theories of technology, space, and place, for social polarisation in cities, and for considering opportunities for resisting the spatial practices of dominant organisations.