The Mezzanine

Top-Down Urban Planning

The “top-down” production of space often coincides analytically with urban planning, since planning requires a high degree of coordination, precision, and abstraction as well as physical and political capital. In the context of European modernity, the planned city serves as a kind of “total social fact” (Mauss, 1967): a material instantiation of the economic, legal, social, cultural, and political foundations of society; an encapsulation of modernity’s central tenets and limits, its utopian and dystopian potentials (Holston, 1989). Planned cities, however, are by no means unique to Europe or to modernity. Archaeological excavations of ancient cities, in both the Old and New World, provide evidence of planning and coordinated construction that date back at least 5,000 years (Smith, 2007). Much of this evidence is gleaned from formal qualities, such as orthogonal or rectilinear street plans (i.e., “the grid”). Cities in the Indus Valley (circa 2,600 BCE) exhibit in their straight lines a precision which suggests that the urban landscape could not have been “casually built” (Stanislawski, 1946, p. 108). The formal qualities of urban space become significant as indices of sociopolitical complexity. The difference between “self-organized and planned cities,” De Landa (1997, p. 30) writes, “is not primarily one of form, but of the decision-making processes behind the genesis and subsequent development of that form”—it is not the grid form of the city per se that is significant, but rather the abstraction, coordination, and coercion necessary to implement the grid that makes its planning significant.

Modern urban planning is seen not only an index of sociopolitical complexity, but also as a materialization of modernity’s universalizing characteristics—the expansion of state power and the concomitant rise of instrumental forms of rationality. These are qualities that operate synthetically rather than discretely: state power is performed through the rational organization of urban space, and the organization of urban space becomes a concrete milieu of legibility for rationally governing the territory (Foucault, 2009; see also Osborne & Rose, 1999; Scott, 1998). What becomes distinctly modern about planning is the high degree of abstraction inherent in the articulation of urban space: the city is produced as a rationally ordered concept or text before it is actualized as a concrete spatial milieu; modern urban space proceeds from a series of spatial mediations (the map, the model, the plan), not the other way around.

Consider the grid form—not the only form that high modern urban planning has taken (e.g., Howard, 1902/1965), but certainly the most regular (Kostof, 1991). Lefebvre (1991), Scott (1998), and others have argued that the rationality of the grid form is as much about legibility as it is about the display of state power. On the one hand, the grid affords direct military or police access to sites of social unrest, such as protests, barricades, or riots; on the other hand, the grid appears almost infinitely extendable and thus provides an efficient means for urban expansion and infrastructural development (Stanislawski, 1946). This was certainly the case for Haussmann’s public works projects in Paris (1853-1869), often cited as emblematic of modern state-sponsored urban planning (cf. Berman, 1983; Harvey, 2003, 2005). Haussmann’s vast, straight boulevards tore through the dense urban villages of medieval Paris—not coincidentally, the city’s most insurrectionary spaces—providing easy access for military and police forces to respond to subversive practices (Scott, 1998). But these boulevards also created spatial rubrics for constructing technological systems at never-before-seen scales. Haussmann’s plan was concerned not only with military access but also with modernizing infrastructure, for instance, urban hydraulics (Gandy, 2014). The replication and amplification of this process in cities worldwide (Merrifield, 2014) helps illustrate how state power becomes linked with top-down spatial production: the grid is not just how the state sees, but also how it can be seen, whether it is the spectacle of military or of infrastructure.

Bottom-Up Spatial Practice

Against urban planning, the production of space “from below” is seen to be processual, organic, and transgressive (Osborne & Rose, 2004). Where planning imposes order and legibility through massive-scale urban intervention, freedom and autonomy are located in the small-scale and illegible. To Scott (1998, p. 54), for example, medieval Paris’s labyrinthine streetscapes made them defensible, “a reliable resource for political autonomy.” While Scott’s point is that such spaces were difficult to navigate for outsiders, it cannot be said that they were without spatial order (Osborne & Rose, 2004). The 19th century urban village was surely quite knowable to insiders, if only through the type of tactile knowledge that accumulates with experience. The bottom-up production of space is, in this sense, not necessarily about the lack of spatial order, but rather about how order is produced. Whereas top-down urban planning proceeds from the text (the map or plan), bottom-up spatial production precedes spatial encoding.

This relationship between text and space, abstract and concrete, points to certain assumptions about the material affordances of the built environment. As the example of Haussmann’s Paris suggests, abstraction presupposes plasticity to urban space—that the city can be molded and bent into conformity with a plan. Lacking the capital, labor, and political force of the state, however, bottom-up spatial production views the city as a much more permanent medium, something that one can and must learn to navigate deftly, perhaps swiftly, perhaps without being surveilled. These differences reflect Harold Innis’ (1951/2008) insights about the bias of media. On the one hand are materials that emphasize control through time, for example, parchment, clay, and stone, which “favor decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions,” while, on the other, are those that emphasize space, such as papyrus, which “favor centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character” (p. 27). Bottom-up spatial production, with its local, embodied spatial navigations and relative autonomy (Scott, 1998), privileges the type of tactile knowledge that can only be accumulated through repetition over time, whereas urban planning administers control through spatial intervention, often at massive scales.

Because of the autonomy that they afford, illegible spaces are liable to become targets of top-down intervention. The tactile spatial savoir that accumulates over a lifetime is vulnerable, likely to be wiped away completely when the built environment is made plastic (Berman, 1983). One of de Certeau’s (1984) greatest contributions was to point out that despite this vulnerability, bottom-up spatial production continues to operate tactically within the cracks of top-down interventions. Against space, time becomes a tactical weapon: “The ‘proper’ is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing’” (p. xix). It is in the feet-on-the-ground knowledge of neighborhood shortcuts, honed by the quick savoir of the city kid, dodging in and out of alleyways, hopping turnstiles, that bottom-up spatial production finds its most eloquent (if suppressed) articulations within the cracks of rationally planned cities.

The Planner and the Flaneur

When one begins probing the top-down/bottom-up binary, it becomes clear that these seemingly opposite forces are more mutually implicated and intertwined than at first glance. If top-down urban planning and bottom-up spatial production always operate in tandem, is there anything distinctly modern about urbanity? Or, conversely, is there anything distinctly urban about modernity? If anything, it may be the fetishized opposition between these forces—between power and its resistance, between the abstract and the organic—that so intimately links modernity to urbanity (cf. Latour, 1993; Osborne & Rose, 2004).

These processes of purification become more clear when one considers the subjectivities associated with the top-down and bottom-up sources of power. Oddrun Sæter (2011) argues that the modern tension between spatial forces can be mapped onto two ideal-type figures—the planner and the flaneur. The planner, “the figure who is fascinated and seduced by his own way of viewing and constructing the urban landscape” (pp. 186-187), is the personification of top-down power. The planner’s view—the aerial view, the “view from nowhere”—transforms the city into an object to behold. But this view is never really from “nowhere”; the view from above is a historically conditioned material space. The skyscraper penthouse, for example, was purposefully constructed at a remove from the putrid airs and odors of crowded city streets. “To rise up in the air was simultaneously to move away from bodily functions belonging to the lower parts of the body” (p. 187). Or consider the airplane: “By offering a perspective that flattened the topography as if it were a canvas, flight encouraged new aspirations to ‘synoptic vision, rational control, planning and spatial order’” (Scott, 1998, p. 58). The skyscraper, the airplane, and more recently, the satellite (Parks & Schwoch, 2012)—these are the technologies for rising out of the bodily din of the city to view its incomprehensible scale as a coherent whole, as a medium for enacting spatial order (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The planner’s perspective (model of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, taken in the Mayor’s Reception Room, Philadelphia City Hall), 1911, photograph.

The flaneur, on the other hand, knows the city at the street-level (see Figure 2). Taken up by Walter Benjamin from the poetry of Baudelaire, the flaneur observes and appreciates the unfolding of social drama on the streetscape. It was in the wake of Haussmann’s disruptive public works that the flaneur-as-subject first appeared—the figure for whom “private joys spring directly from the modernization of public urban spaces” (Berman, 1983, p. 152). For the flaneur, the city can never be grasped in its monstrous totality; it can only be experienced partially, scene by scene. While critics have suggested that the freedom to engage in flanerie connotes a certain bourgeois privilege as well as a distinctly male gaze (Buck-Morss, 1993; Sæter, 2011), the figure is also conjured to emphasize encounters with otherness as the ethical force of urban subjectivity: “By being confronted constantly with otherness, or with that which is strange and different, the flaneur is in a position to understand the diversity of human conditions in crowded cities” (Sæter, 2011, p. 186). Unlike the planner, the flaneur does not recuse himself or herself from the din of the street, but chooses instead to remain thoroughly embedded in its sensory totality. The city, seen from the flaneur’s perspective, is as olfactory, sensory, and aural as it is visual.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The flaneur’s view (view from 13th and Market Streets, Philadelphia), 1960, photograph.

When one considers these spaces and figures, which are considered constitutive of top-down and bottom-up spatial productions, the ground on which the binary rests becomes shaky. On one hand, the tactics of bottom-up spatialization emerge within the cracks of the decaying “concept city” (de Certeau, 1984), while, on the other, modern urban planning is driven by the will to manage and sort on-the-ground sociality through the medium of urban space (Holston, 1989; Osborne & Rose, 1999). On both sides of this equation, urban spatial production is never a mono-directional activity.

Connectivity

The most readily apparent function of the mezzanine is to house infrastructures that connect individuals and households to energy sources, to mass media outlets, and to one another (via telephone lines and internet connections). This infrastructural connectivity, while central to the mezzanine’s functionality, is not unique to it. Infrastructures—broadly conceived, both rural and urban—are the material bases for the movement of, and connections between, people and things. Railroad lines, for example, are infrastructures for moving people or commodities, sewerage systems for removing waste, the electrical grid for delivering energy. Infrastructures “are objects that create the grounds on which other objects operate, and when they do so they operate as systems” (Larkin, 2013, p. 329). The mezzanine houses a good number of these connective systems, linking individual dwellings to infrastructural networks that span the urban landscape.

Looking up during a walk through my neighborhood in South Philadelphia, the mezzanine is not much more than a tangle of cables and switches—telephone wires, electrical cables, circuit breakers, transformers, cable for television, and, most recently, the addition of fiber optic cable for high speed internet—although I certainly cannot tell the difference between any of these by sight. Hanging like jungle vines, this mess of wire is strung between the limbs of utility poles, branching off into interfaces with the two- and three-story row homes that line the narrow neighborhood blocks. One cannot help but be struck by their strangeness, or by the seemingly obvious insight that these wire connections may be the most tangible way that individual dwellings become collectivized, that is, vis-a-vis the grid of the utility networks and telecommunications corporations. This, however, is not the type of collectivization that typically promotes reflexive group consciousness; I do not find myself emboldened by the presence of utility poles, nor do I imagine myself as part of a group comprised of customers of my internet service provider. These are mundane collectivizations.

The first utility poles were erected by telegraph companies in the mid-19th century as a cheaper and quicker alternative to laying wire underground (Mulqueen & Zafar, 2014). Their initial expansion hugged emerging railroad lines in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, linking telecommunications infrastructure with transportation. ¹ In addition to being cheaper and quicker to erect, poles had other advantages: connections could be expanded seemingly without limit, as could the number of lines that hung from the poles. By the time that electricity became common for urban households in the early 20th century, followed soon after by the telephone, telegraph poles had already become commonplace along urban corridors. From the late 1970s and early 1980s, cable television providers began adding their lines to the poles. Today the standard utility pole stands 35 feet high and is compartmentalized into as many as four sections. The primary level, the highest section of the utility pole, houses high voltage electricity wires (which carry more than 600 volts); the secondary level, located just below, houses electrical currents that have been “stepped down” from the primary wires through a transformer; the third tier communication level, some 40 inches below the secondary level, is where telecommunication cables are attached, including telephone, television cable, fiber optic cable, and, in some cities, wireless internet hubs; finally, at the base is the “public level,” with no apparent functionality (Kingsley, 2005; Mulqueen & Zafar, 2014; Siegel, 1984).

Throughout the majority of the 20th century, with radio, telephone, and television becoming standard in households, telecommunications infrastructure connected individuals to one another and to centrally controlled mass media outlets by restructuring the domestic sphere (Hartley, 2002; Spigel, 2001; Williams, 1974). The exterior world was brought into the interior home in new ways, buttressing the solidity of domestic space as a coherent realm distinct from the outside. Interior spaces were, in turn, flipped inside out and objectified as ratings companies like Nielsen aggregated family-consumers into audience blocks, which could then be bought and sold to advertisers (Melody, 2013). More recently, the widespread availability of high-speed internet has laid the ground for the rise of a network structure and a destabilization of the broadcast system’s hegemony. New modes of collectivization and surveillance emerge to fill the gaps of the waning broadcast model (McGuigan & Manzarolle, 2013). Remaining constant through these transformations, however, is the spatializing function of these infrastructures. The network of telecommunications connections overlays the grids of cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. The connectivity afforded by telephone lines, and now internet connection, is matched by forms of alienated collectivization; with new consumer database technologies like geo-demographic information systems, these aggregations become finer-grained than ever before, poised to capitalize on spatialized disparities between urban populations. The result is what Graham and Marvin (2001) have called “splintering urbanism,” in which unequal access to infrastructural resources stands to compound spatial concentrations of poverty within and across urban landscapes, creating a positive feedback loop for spatial concentrations along lines of race and class (see esp. Burrows & Ellison, 2004).

Managing Mobility

Once utility poles were common enough in urban settings, it did not take long before municipal governments began to take advantage of their otherwise obtrusive presence. In addition to housing telecommunications and electrical infrastructure, with the “democratization” of cars—the mass-production of automobiles marketed to the middle classes in the United States, Canada, Europe, and elsewhere shortly after (Sheller & Urry, 2000)—it became necessary to erect a series of textual communicators throughout the urban environment as a way to regulate the dangerous flow of automobilized traffic. Utility poles now also house stop signs and traffic lights; yield signs, speed limits, and parking zoning—a host of textually coded information that hangs over walkers’ heads in urban streetscapes.

In urban sociology, physical mobility has been understood as “the pulse of the community” (Burgess, cited in Sheller & Urry, 2000, p. 740), a proxy for economic and social activity. When it comes to the urban landscape, the automobile may be the most important form of mobility, “as constitutive of modernity as is urbanity” (Sheller & Urry, 2000, p. 738). Sheller and Urry describe automobility as a “complex amalgam of interlocking machines, social practices and ways of dwelling, not in a stationary home, but in a mobile, semi-privatized and hugely dangerous capsule” (p. 739). Humans and cars become intertwined as a privileged, hybridized subjectivity—the “car-driver”—for whom the urban landscape is bent and stretched in all sorts of manners. Packer (2008, p. 3) presents a history of post-war America through the tensions inherent in automobility—“how driving behavior and the mobility it creates have been dually represented, on the one hand, as having great potential and, on the other, as a serious threat to social order.” Automobility represents a dangerous freedom, he suggests, one which is both central and threatening to the moral commons of the United States. “Mobility was a necessary feature of growth and modernization, but had to be stabilized by association and anchored within a place” (Sheller & Urry, 2000, pp. 740-741).

Like the spatializing functions of connective infrastructure, which aggregates and dissects urban populations with the same stroke, the privileging of automobility over other forms of transportation-infrastructure in the United States and elsewhere has stabilized disparities in urban space, in this case privileging the car over other forms of mobility: “The material fabric of cities substantiates a static architectonic that is shot through with ‘ways’ of mobility. Cities are encrusted with ramps and overpasses, bridges and tunnels, expressways and bypasses, roundabouts and ‘gyratories’” (Sheller & Urry, 2000, p. 740). Urban architecture becomes “a function of movement” (Sheller & Urry, 2000, p. 740). The road—dangerous for pedestrians or cyclists, if not a completely prohibited space—has effectively been removed as an option for street sociality in everyday life. It is for this very reason that protests have so often “taken to the streets,” halting traffic, barricading bridges, taking over on-ramps of intra- and inter-urban highway systems (e.g., Bredderman, 2014; Levine et al., 2014)—sometimes, as in the case of the Oka Crisis, for months at a time (Kalant, 2004). Or consider parades that occur on city streets. It is not only out of convenience that parades occupy the space of cars, but also to perform the prioritization of community or civic association by temporarily halting the pulse of automobile traffic.

One way to understand the explosion of street signage in the mezzanine, then, is as a way to manage or temper the dangers posed by automobility—to control the car-driver while maintaining its place as a privileged subjectivity. Automobility here is less a pulse or rhythm of urban life, but rather a dangerous vitality that must be made to pulse; it must be given its rhythm. The mezzanine houses this rhythmization, giving a systematicity to the otherwise unruly and fatal infrastructure of automobility.

Navigation

Another practice related to the introduction of the automobile is the elevation of street name signage. In South Philadelphia, some corner buildings still bear old street-name placards engraved onto the sides of their structure. The street name’s placement at approximately eye-level suggests that these inscriptions likely predate the automobile and were designed instead to be read by pedestrians, or possibly equestrians or carriage-riders. With the rise of mass automobility, however, street signs were enlarged and raised up to increase visibility for much faster-moving vehicles.

Like traffic signs, street signage is an often-overlooked participant in the proliferation of text within the urban environment. Within architecture and design studies, street signs have been considered part of the broader category of “street media” (Murthy, 2005; see also Drucker, 2010), but little attention has been paid to their role in the organization of space as an infrastructure of navigation, of systematized landmarks. The significance of street signage here is the way in which it interpellates de Certeau’s urban “practitioners” within a universalizing system of abstracted space. How does the flaneur find his or her way through the city, or back home after a saunter? Like the grand boulevards of Paris where the flaneur first discovered the transgressive pleasure of observing urban drama, street signage serves as a material bridge between top-down planning’s abstraction of space and bottom-up practices embodied spatializations.

Consider the example of address systems, one of the earliest and most extensive forms of “geocoding.” Until the 1860s, houses in cities in the United States were numbered haphazardly. House-numbering systems were “static”; existing structures were objects to be enumerated, without any systematic orientation to the city’s grid (Rose-Redwood, 2006). Home and business addresses were especially illegible to outsiders or visitors to a city. A market thus developed for pocket-sized guides and directories in the early 19th century for various industries, including prostitution. For instance, in The Guide to the Stranger, published in 1849 as a directory of “houses of ill-fame in Philadelphia,” the address of a brothel would have read “No. 4 Wood Street, Near Eleventh” or “No. 341 Lombard Street, Above Tenth” (Anonymous, 1849). The house number here bears no relation to its location on the grid; No. 4 Wood St. might be next to No. 27 and No. 13, for example. Furthermore, the directories were only as good as the house-numbering systems to which they corresponded. Until the second half of the 19th century, municipal governments were reluctant to take on the responsibility of ensuring that buildings were visibly numbered. In Mobile, Alabama, for instance, after the city denied his request to maintain the house numbers, a directory publisher took on the task of ensuring the visibility of house numbers himself (Rose-Redwood, 2006).

After the postal system’s rate reforms in 1845, which standardized costs across all distances within the United States and allowed for the free delivery of daily newspapers within certain distances of publishers, “postal culture” began to transform, slowly at first, but eventually requiring a higher degree of legibility in street addresses (Henkin, 2007). The Philadelphia house-numbering system, developed in the early 1850s and adopted in cities across the world, adapted to these new circumstances by systematizing street address systems. The Philadelphia system operates through decimal metrics: street addresses correspond to a building’s location within the cartesian grid of the city. A “house of ill fame,” then, would be renumbered from No. 4 Wood St. to, say, 1034 Wood St., to reflect its location between 10th and 11th Streets. Street signs in Philadelphia have since been labeled with their “block hundred number”—1000 Wood St., for example—so that the address serves as a practical coordinate within the textually demarcated grid (consider the Wilder St. sign in Figure 3). In theory, once the system is in place, an individual can look up to street signs anywhere within the city and link their physical location to its correlate within the abstract space of the map.

The Philadelphia system also forced cities to reverse course on their laissez-faire house-numbering policies. Maintaining a coherent spatial system, and enabling the federal government to operate its low-cost post, became a central responsibility of local government (Rose-Redwood, 2006). By geocoding the physical world, address systems like Philadelphia’s provided an informational infrastructure—what Rose-Redwood (2006, p. 470) calls a “spatial regime of inscriptions”—that made urban form navigable to both citizens and state agents.

Not only did house numbering offer a means of property identification, but it was also seen as a way of “economizing time” by reducing the amount of time spent searching for the business or residence one sought to find, thereby speeding up the potential rate of the circulation of capital. (Rose-Redwood, 2006, p. 470)

Surveillance

The fourth function house at the mezzanine level is surveillance. The vast majority of security or CCTV cameras in both public and private spaces are located at the mezzanine level. Taking advantage of infrastructure already in place, for example, most municipal cameras are attached to utility poles and traffic lights; private exterior cameras tend to be on the second or third stories of houses or businesses. This may be the first indication that there is something significant about the mezzanine and its affordances for monitoring behavior. But the role of the mezzanine in surveillance exceeds these cameras; or rather, surveillance cameras should be seen as one part of a larger rubric of surveillance practices that includes both formal and informal—top-down and bottom-up—mechanisms of social control.

One of the most famous articulations of these mechanisms is in Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). For Jacobs, the city is a social ecology, a tightly woven fabric of casual checks and balances. Like any other ecological system, the functioning of the urban social ecology is susceptible to external disturbances. Mid-century urban planning projects, led by planners who, in Jacobs’ view, were oddly anti-city in their machinations, had begun to undermine the cohesiveness—and thus the effectiveness—of informal social systems already in place. The failures of expertise came into sharp relief when it came to public safety. In Jacobs’ view, safety was not something that could be imposed from without by, say, the police. Safety had to emerge synthetically from within—from the amalgam of minute social interactions that together constitute a cohesive community. For instance, Jacobs challenged the idea that the good air of parks and other public spaces would help to fortify a sense of community and civic responsibility among neighborhood residents especially, noting that, in many neighborhoods, the extant public spaces were hardly being used (Wekerle, 2000).

The problem for Jacobs, then, was not the parks themselves, but rather their failure to attract a critical mass of visitors, leaving many public spaces desolate and therefore susceptible to becoming a gang “turf” (Jacobs, 1961). The answer to the problem of public safety would be to bolster the types of effective, but informal, mechanisms already at work in successful neighborhoods. Key to this success is a critical mass of vigilance and visibility—or what Jacobs famously called “eyes on the street”:

The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity. (Jacobs, 1961, p. 35)

Like the flaneur, the third-story “kibitzer” watches as the social drama of the city unfolds, but does so with a watchful eye. Jacobs’ suggestion was, instead of increasing the size of the police force, cities should work to increase the number of watchful eyes on the street. ²

In 1961, the “eyes on the street” concept was somewhat heretical, since cities tended to be thought of in terms of their over-crowdedness, not the benefits that the crowd might afford. By the late 1970s, however, the effectiveness of informal order for thwarting crime had become the new inherited wisdom (e.g., Kelling & Wilson, 1982). Sometimes called “natural surveillance,” new fields began to emerge that fused concerns about security and public safety with urban design and planning. “Crime prevention though environmental design” (CPTED), for example, focuses on “designing the placement of physical features, activities and people in such a way as to maximize visibility and foster positive social interaction” (Green, 2012). While CPTED may have a far narrower focus than Jacobs’ much broader concerns (Wekerle, 2000), its practitioners continue to pay homage to Jacobs as the patron saint of natural surveillance. For instance, the Design Centre for CPTED (2010) imposes the “Jane Jacobs Test” on design proposals: “All designs that attempt to reduce opportunity for crime [. . .] be tested to ensure that they also support and enhance the overall urban environment, both social and physical, through improved design and beautification.” The best way to maximize natural surveillance, the Centre suggests, is by “encouraging watching”—

The same as the CPTED principles of surveillance and eyes on the street [sic.] but by changing the valuation from a militaristic term such as surveillance to a typical human behavior, such as watching, the possibilities for design are improved. (Design Centre for CPTED, 2010)

Street lighting offers a way to buttress and enhance natural surveillance. If common sense holds that ample illumination is a step toward thwarting would-be criminals, its potential to prevent crime is further supported by its ability to attract more desirable and vigilant community members out on the street at night.

[L]ights induce these people to contribute their own eyes to the upkeep of the street. . . . [G]ood lighting augments every pair of eyes, makes the eyes count for more because their range is greater. Each additional pair of eyes, and every increase in their range, is that much to the good for dull gray areas. (Jacobs, 1961, p. 42)

Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in street lighting for crime prevention, especially within policing strategy and policy circles (e.g., Brooklyn Park, n.d.). Does street lighting effectively prevent crime or does it just move it around to adjacent areas? Which types of lighting systems create more or less shadows? A report titled “Improving Street Lighting to Reduce Crime in Residential Areas” (Clarke, 2008), published recently by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Community-Oriented Policing Services, begins by laying out several ways in which improved lighting systems might unwittingly increase crime, and counters with a best-practices report for avoiding such scenarios.

What the “eyes on the street” concept illustrates is that the most pressing issue when it comes to the art of designing for surveillance is the ability to effect an impression of casual panopticism—that would-be criminals have the feeling of being watched. That security cameras are placed prominently in the mezzanine, then, is no mere serendipity; they are there not only to see, but to be seen. In other words, there is something important about the ease with which the informal, bottom-up social practices celebrated by Jacobs and her followers can be formalized by top-down actors through the modulation of design or environmental conditions, or making visible the technological eye of CCTV. If the surveillance camera serves as a symbol for the surveillance state, it might also be seen as a proxy for Jacobsian forms of informal control that proponents of “bottom-up” urbanism would argue only thrive without intervention “from above.”