Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America (2)

We`re nearly there! These are the posters for the conference. It is promissing!!! More at http://www.ssscla.com/





Click on the images to download the high-resolution posters.

Brazil, violence and cities

An interesting article called "Not as violent as you thought" was released last year by The Economist praising the falling rates of murders in Brazil. The Economimst calls the readers attention, though, that the biggest contributions to the country's overall decline in the number of murders comes from its biggest city, São Paulo. The chart provided by the newspaper shows it very clearly. David Murakami Wood also writes about it on his blog Ubiquitous Surveillance.

What is more interesting from an urbanist point of view (!) is that crime rates, especially violent ones, are the number-one justification (and in fact, very lowdly advertised reason) for the rise in number of condos in Brazil and other Latin American countries. Estate companies normally and very efficiently uses a (blurred) rising sense of insecurity to try and sell more houses and apartments in closed and well technologically-equiped gated-communities. See, for example, the magazine "condomínio segurança", which calls itself as the first Brazilian magazine especialized in condos' security; or this article in Veja São Paulo, showing rising rates of approved horizontal condos in São Paulo between 1998-2004, which points security as the main advantage of living in places like these.

Many scholars have been pointing out that neither these communities are more secure, or crime rates are actually rising, especially if we consider the numbers in relative and proportional terms. The culture (or industry!) of fear in increasingly bigger urban places influences not only the way people use, see, feel, and build public spaces, but also the way we buy and idealise our private places, the way we live in our houses. The condominium industry seems to be happy with that... Some (like Fabio Duarte and Klaus Frey or Tereza Caldeira and Maria Sposito) consider we are renouncing and fearing the city, denying urban life, as we prefer to live enclosed in private enclaves fully-equiped with sports facilities, cinema, gyms, and even houses and apartments, in what Brazilian estate companies are calling "living clubs" (clubes de morar): "where you feel safe, relaxed and at home, all in just one place". Is that what we really want to our cities (a conglomerate of walled and secured enclaves - of different socioeconomic categories - like in the Mexican film "La Zona" or "Zona do Crime" as it is known in Brazil)? I pass!!! And we are starting to see (and discuss) how some ways of living (like more in isolation, surrounded by ubiquitous taken-for-granted-technology, surrounded by walls, in fear, etc.) might very well not be part of the solution to other urban problems. I hope the numbers shown by The Economist (released by the Brazilian Ministry of Health) are, at least partially, true and continue their current tendency of crime rates fall. So that condos enthusiats will have to find other excuses to keep walling our cities.

Back to work...

Every good thing comes to an end, so they say... And I am getting back to work after a month-long break.

And I am very happy to host my friend David Murakami Wood at home and at the university as he will work as PPGTU's visiting academic until April. We will be working together and organising the 1st Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America conference, to take place here in Curitiba between 4th and 6th March, as I posted earlier.

I should and will try to be more organised in posting here, so that we can really call this a blog!

Picture's credits: unknown author; Cox And Forkun

Surveillance in Latin America EVENT

http://www.ssscla.com/

The announcement of papers selected for presentation will be released on the 7th January 2009!

I will keep it posted!

By the way, this picture shows the North-American artist William Lawson's intervention from November 2007, hacking a surveillance camera with a helium ballon.

Low-cost counter-surveillance or just art?

Transformative Spaces

André posted on his carnet de notes about a very interesting project called Urban Mobs, which alledgedly maps people's emotions in European cities. Quoting their official website: "Urban Mobs provide a tool to study crowd communication activities and paint a popular emotion cartography".

It reminds me of Lars Spuybroek’s intervention for the city of Doetinchem in the Netherlands, called D-Tower, constructed between 1998 and 2003. A website surveyed participants’ emotions every month to transform their sensations into an unstable and colourful tower in a public square. In this way, passers-by would notice what the artist/architect supposed to be the mood of the city. Marcos Novak calls this transarchitecture and Thomas Horan would define it as transformative recombinant design.

Of course that D-tower and Urban Mobs have their similarities in the way relational concepts are applied (with the aid of technologies) to depict, question and think through spatial manifestations. But, essentially, they do it and happen in different scale. I would say they both have similar ideas, one at the building (or architecture) scale, and another at the urban or regional (or global) scale.

Follow André Lemos' Carnet de Notes

I only wish I were half as efficient as my friend André Lemos in updating this blog.

His Carnet de Notes is an essential web-publication (mostly in Portuguese)...

Keep it up, André!

Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America (1)

www.ssscla.com . PUCPR . curitiba-brazil . 4-6 March 2009

Surveillance is becoming the omnipresent and ubiquitous element dreamt by sci-fi novelists and writers. What is the influence of urban surveillance and control upon our understanding and experience of space? As urban beings, how do we behave under the constant surveillance of other people, the State and the market? Does this change the way space and place are perceived, built and experienced by us?

These and many other questions bear in mine and other colleagues minds, who wonder what are going to be the implications of the escalating use of surveillance and methods of control for places, for space and for our cities.

With the presence of many scholars from different parts of the world (David Murakami Wood, David Lyon, Nelson Arteaga Botello and Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva), Marta Kanashiro, Fernanda Bruno and I are organising the international symposium Surveillance, Security and Social Control in Latin America, to take place at PUCPR in Curitiba (Brazil), 4-6 March 2009.

Call for papers:

Please send proposed titles and abstracts (no more than 250 words) by December 16th, 2008.

You will be informed of acceptance within a week in order for you to make travel plans as soon as possible.Contributions will be eligible for consideration for a special trilingual issue of Surveillance & Society to be published in early 2010. Please send them to:

rodrigoDOTfirminoATpucprDOTbr . rjfirminoATyahooDOTcoDOTuk

Workshop: augmented city, surveillance and spatial control

A 2-day workshop will take place at PUCPR in Curitiba, sponsored by Fundação Araucária and the Postgraduate Programme in Urban Management, on the 28th and 29th October 2008. Here is the programme of the event (click on the image to see an enlarged figure of the promotional poster, in Portuguese):

“If you wanna know what we know of what is known about you, and what kind of consequences this has upon urban space”...

... take part of the WORKSHOP augmented city, infiltrating technologies: surveillance and control in contemporary society, with the presence of scholars and researchers from UFRJ, UNICAMP, FIC, PUCPR and a representative of the High Command of the Militar Police in the state of Paraná.
On the 28th e 29th October in the Montessori conference room, 1st floor of the Humanities Building (CTCH). Free entrance!

28 de outubro
9h00-9h30: Opening
9h40-10h40: "Distributed surveillance, cartography and the city" - Fernanda Bruno (UFRJ)
10h50-11h50: "Space, technology and the constitution of the augumented city" - Rodrigo Firmino (PPGTU-PUCPR)
12h00-14h00: Lunch
14h00-15h30: "Crime prevention through urban design" - Cel PM Roberson Luiz Bondaruk (High Command of the Militar Police in the state of Paraná)
15h40-16h40: "Freedom, security and violence by the classics in political theory" - Samira Kauchakje (PPGTU-PUCPR)

29 de outubro
9h00-10h00: "The infiltrating city: the configuration of the contemporary territory" - Fábio Duarte (PPGTU-PUCPR)
10h10-11h10: "CCTV: discourses, practices and productions" - Marta Kanashiro (UNICAMP)
11h20-12h20: "Networks, security and community" - Sérgio Czajkowski (FIC, UP, FDB)

Surveilling the internet in Brazil?

The Brazilian Senator, Eduardo Azeredo, has submitted to the chamber a bill that puts serious restrictions to internet freedom in Brazil. This bill (supposedly created to stop cybercrimes) intends to impose identity registrations associated to IP numbers and ISPs. Basically, this will oblige ISPs to inform the identity of all associated internet users (through a ever increasing database of registered users).
Among other restrictions, this will challenge the use of P2P and free access to public wireless networks all over the country. In the words of another blogger (void life): "They want to prohibit the collaborative networks and virtually prevent the dissemination and sharing of information and knowledge through the Internet".
Some Brazilian scholars and activists are heading a protest and an online petition to stop this and other similar bills to be voted by the Congress and the Senate. I will leave a link to the petition on the main page of this blog.

The petition can be signed here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/veto2008/petition.html

More on this...

(in English):
http://www.nardol.org/2008/7/18/the-new-brazilian-internet-surveillance

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2006/11/11/holding-the-line-for-internet-freedoms-in-brazilian-cyberspace/

(in Portuguese):
http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/07/por-que-o-projeto-sobre-crimes-na.html

http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/07/projeto-de-lei-de-crimes-na-internet-um.html

http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/07/leia-o-absurdo-artigo-do-senador.html

http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/07/lei-de-crimes-na-internet-perguntas.html

http://samadeu.blogspot.com/2008/08/senador-azeredo-no-responde-pergunta.html

CALL FOR PAPERS - Brazilian Journal of Urban Management

And here is the call for paper for URBE's first two issues. More information (in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French) available at www.pucpr.br/cursos/programas/ppgtu/urbe_e.php

"The editors of urbe (Brazilian Journal of Urban Management), a journal by the Postgraduate Programme in Urban Management from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (PUCPR), would like to invite contributors to submit original papers to be considered for publication in the journal’s two first issues, to be launched in 2009. Urbe will consider papers with a preferential focus on the following thematic areas: Urban and regional development; Urban economy; Urban epistemology; Natural resources management; Public management; Governance and urban networks; Electronic governance; Urban mobility; Urban planning; Municipal strategic planning; Public policy; Information systems; Urban and regional sustainability; Urban law; Urban sociology; Urban geography; Perception and urban landscape; Urban design.

We would like to invite contributors to send their original scientific work, respecting the editorial norms (www.pucpr.br/cursos/programas/ppgtu/urbe_e.php) in the following formats: theoretical study, essay, critical review, report of an experiment or report of a research. Papers will be accepted in four languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish or French.

The deadline for papers considered for issues 01 and 02 (to be launched in 2009) is the 15th December 2008. Submissions can be done to the editors via e-mail, urbe@pucpr.br, and respecting the journal’s editorial norms (which can be found in Portuguese and English)."