Reclaiming the Streets:
Surveillance, Social Control and the City

By Roy Coleman
Published by Wilan Publishing

Reviewed by Paul Jones

At a time when many sociologists and other academics have moved their research away from questions of state power, Roy Coleman's Reclaiming the Streets: Surveillance, Social Control and the City puts it at the centre of its analysis. This book is of interest to those of us who want to make sense of how the logic of capitalism is translated through local coalitions of business and local governments, and has driven the regeneration we are witnessing in our cities. It is refreshing to have research revealing the operation of power with a distinct focus on the processes that lead to the exclusion and marginalisation of groups in our cities.

The book uses Liverpool city centre as a case study to explore the ways in which CCTV and other surveillance technologies are utilised by coalitions of locally powerful business entrepreneurs and the state to order city spaces.

Coleman draws on critical sociological/criminological perspectives to explain the ways in which these 'social ordering practices', underpinned by surveillance, serve not only to regulate behaviour in Liverpool's refashioned spaces but also to actually exclude certain groups from the city. Those marginalized by the social controls associated with such regeneration include the homeless, street traders, skateboaders and some other youth groups. Reclaiming the Streets is a timely intervention, as it shows how certain groups, constructed in media and political discourses as 'undesirable' or a 'threat', are regulated; this approach reminds us of the current moral panics in the media over hoods and caps (ironically initially demonised as they prevent clear identification by CCTV).

As well as this focus on those disempowered by the entrepreneurial city, Coleman also looks at the powerful groups who are driving the changes in Liverpool city centre. His book is distinctive in its attempt to address the ideological underpinnings of 'urban entrepreneurialism', and show how these more general ideas have been put into practice at street level in Liverpool. In revealing the relationships between organizations of locally powerful business interests and local and national government Coleman develops a convincing argument about links between capital and political power. In short, this is a valuable contribution to our understandings of how power operates in local settings, and the focus on Liverpool will speak to the experiences of many in the city.

Click here to read the article "Surveillance in the Capital of Culture" by Roy Coleman.