Klauser, Francisco

2009, Klauser, Francisco

The paper investigates the multiple public-private exchanges and cooperation involved in the installation and development of CCTV surveillance at Geneva International Airport. Emphasis is placed on the interacting forms of authority and expertise of five parties: the user(s), owner and supplier of the camera system, as well as the technical managers of the airport and the Swiss regulatory bodies in airport security. While placing the issues of airport surveillance in the particular context of a specific range of projects and transformations relating to the developments of CCTV at Geneva Airport, the paper not only provides important insights into the micro-politics of surveillance at Geneva Airport, but aims to re-institute these as part of a broader ‘problematic’: the mediating role of expertise and the growing functional fragmentation of authority in contemporary security governance. On this basis, the paper also exemplifies the growing mutual interdependences between security and business interests in the ever growing ‘surveillant assemblage’ in contemporary security governance.

2007, Klauser, Francisco

This article critically assesses the adequacy of CCTV as an instrument to revitalize urban areas suffering from concentrated social disadvantage. Empirically, it focuses on the video-surveillance of street prostitution in the Swiss city of Olten. This CCTV system was installed at the beginning of 2001 and focuses on an urban `hot spot' used by different types of marginalized social groups. In the Olten case-study, video-surveillance is examined as it is understood and perceived both by the population at large and by daily users of the monitored area. In investigating whether surveillance cameras render monitored areas accessible to people erstwhile excluded from that space because of their negative subjective perception of risks, this article puts particular emphasis on the phenomenon of `distanciation' caused by CCTV. By showing that CCTV is forgotten very quickly and felt to be somehow unreal against the background of everyday social activities in monitored areas, this approach also stresses that CCTV is very limited as an instrument to revitalize public places of fear.

2007, Klauser, Francisco

In order to emphasize the importance of understanding the experience of the city as one that includes all human senses, this article focuses on the increasing use of CCTV in city centers. As we can see by looking at the array of monitors within control rooms of CCTV systems, surveillance cameras contribute to the development of a "parallel world" created by the assemblage of decontextualized images coming from monitored places throughout the city. Thus, sitting in the indoor space of CCTV control rooms, as if in a capsule, camera operators live an exclusively technologically mediated experience of the city.
However, public space users can neither cognitively know nor sensually approach these hidden spaces, nor can they know or perceive the new urban boundaries between monitored and not monitored places. From the point of view of monitored individuals, this paper shows that the dissociation between hidden spaces of control and fully exposed public space results in an intangible feeling of a new kind of indeterminable superficiality that ultimately leads to the personal withdrawal from this confusing reality.
On an empirical level, the resulting disturbance in the (sensory) relationship between the self and the surrounding territory in connection with video surveillance is studied by the example of CCTV of street prostitution in the Swiss city of Olten. On the basis of thirteen in-depth interviews conducted with street-users this paper points out how the CCTV implied spatial and mental separation between how the world behind and the world below the cameras is lived and experienced.