Abstract
“Surveillance is not only found in the lens of the camera and within a technological artefact but can also emerge from within the very spaces housing bodies—from urban, to suburban, domestic to institutional—spaces actively enforce the watchful gaze of surveillance.” - Flynn and Mackay (2019:2). This research project looks to explore the power of surveillance and how one may be read or seen through the lens of surveillance in the City of Johannesburg. The project will commence with unpacking how surveillance may be understood as an apparatus of power in architecture, “with Surveillance, the subject of the gaze is at a disadvantage and is often unaware of when (s)he is being watched, and thus the distribution of power is asymmetric” (Mann and Ferenbok, 2013, 19). The aim of this project is to explore the relationship between being watched by an unknown mechanical gaze, surveillance, and looking back and responding to this gaze, sousveillance. This project does not claim to answer a history of surveillance but is focusing specially on ways in which one may respond directly or viscerally, at the level of the body and skin to the screens and eyes that watch one’s daily movement. Furthermore, this project demonstrates the power of surveillance and how it might render the body digitally at a macro level (that is, at an urban scale) but also at a micro level, determined here at the scale of the human body, and also proposes a series of architectural propositions to counter the powerdynamics as revealed in this initial research. The aim of this project is to react and protest the way surveillance has controlled the way one moves in space, and how one is perceived through surveillance. It explores the personal and intimate responses to surveillance, how one may or may not be seen by surveillance through the markings at the level of the body and surface, how one manipulates their surface or appearance, or changes their movement to hide from surveillance. Martin J. Murray, in his introduction to ‘City of Extremes’ (2011, xi) suggests that there is no city like Johannesburg, that still bears the marks of Apartheid spatial planning and surveillance, so deeply and deliberately within its fabric (Murray, 2011). From its inception, one might argue, in context surveillance has been a particularly exaggerated urban experience, and a constantly operative spatial tool in the making of the city of Johannesburg which continues to haunt the city and its people. Expanding from Murray’s (2011) writing and understanding of the spatial dynamics that have shaped and continue to shape the city, this project references and commences with a sharp awareness of the history of surveillance in the City of Johannesburg, to understand the cultural practices and behaviours of surveillance which lie revenant in the present. This project is cognisant of the implications of apartheid spatial planning and how surveillance was a key element in city planning in Johannesburg. Nevertheless, this project focuses on surveillance in public space, such as suburban neighbourhoods in northern Johannesburg and the experience of counting and acknowledging the surveillance cameras that fill its streets. These spaces begin to reveal the visceral relationship that has started to enclave in the protected community space and encourages one to consider the many eyes that watch and record daily life. This Main Design Project studies how one responds physically and psychologically to the effect and understanding of being watched all the time. Taking on the landscape of surveillance of Johannesburg - its CCTV cameras and control rooms, the fortified gates and thresholds, security guards and neighbourhood watch WhatsApp groups as the protagonists within a somewhat arguable fictional and biased archive of events and agents within the city, the project questions this intermediary screen, its politics, and built-in political positioning - and aims to expose it, ultimately. By exposing the many types and many layers of surveillance, particular to this context, the project explores the agency of the subject and observer through the mechanical gaze of surveillance...
M.Tech. (Architecture)