“Assess the role of existing urban surveillance and security practices in keeping the city safe”
1. Assess is asking you to do some weighing or evaluating in your answer. What kind of evidence or examples would you need to do that? How will you assess, perhaps by comparison?
2. Existing implies that these practices are real and used currently or in the past. Don’t then focus on futuristic forms of surveillance/security being imagined for the future.
3. By emphasising surveillance and security the question is asking you to look beyond surveillance measures (and how that’s been defined) but to wider sets of practices that could be militaristic, privatised, which might be about securing communities and individuals, or spaces. These could range from the most simplistic – a bollard – to the most technical – facial recognition relying on AI.
4. Keeping the city safe is quite a subjective thing. So safe for whom? Who might be made unsafe in the process? Is safe measurable, and in-terms of what? Is it a feeling or a perception? e.g. it doesn’t have to actually work but make us think it will. Can it deter crime and has that been measured?
5. Make sure your examples are kept urban. If you delve too much into surveillance online, for example, it might be harder to see how these are actual urban practices concerned with keeping a city or actual cities safe. It would be a shame to needlessly miss an important aspect of the question.
Essay Structure
Take a case-study driven structure (case-study examples might be drawn from the wider literature and examples explored by academic authors, or maybe your own case- study assembled from your wider research). In this approach you devote each section to an example explored in-depth. A discussion section then helps you bring together your findings for each section.
e.g. Introduction
a. Case study 1
b. Case study 2
c. Case study 3
d. Case study 4
e. Discussion bringing the case studies together
Conclusion
Evidence and specificity
Make sure you are illustrating your arguments which reference to actual places and cities. We’re geographers so we should be expecting to focus on how the themes explored in the course actually happen in particular cities. You could include a combination of different cities within the essay. You could indeed focus on one city. The key is that your essay is not a general answer, but one that is able to go into the specificity of particular cities and places.
Reading
see attached documents
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/15/paris-attacks-no-credible-threats-us-security
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/26/vienna-police-alert-attack-warning-christmas
J Coaffee: Recasting the “Ring of Steel”: Designing Out Terrorism in the City of London? in Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics
Look at important news articles, reports from think tanks, NGO’s, official documents, even documentaries to provide evidence
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