IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v56y2019i10p1951-1967.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The potential for urban surveillance to help support people who are homeless: Evidence from Cairns, Australia

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew Clarke

    (University of Queensland, Australia)

  • Cameron Parsell

    (University of Queensland, Australia)

Abstract

Numerous studies have documented how surveillance practices, such as CCTV, are deployed to support ‘revanchist’ responses to homelessness wherein punitive policing and urban design practices are used to exclude people who are homeless from prime urban areas. However, few studies have considered the capacity of surveillance to facilitate supportive responses to homelessness. In this paper, we explore this supportive capacity through an ethnographic case study of responses to homelessness in the regional Australian city of Cairns. We demonstrate that, whilst surveillance is deployed to police the homeless in Cairns, it is also used to facilitate social services to access and engage with them, for example by using CCTV as a means to coordinate supportive street outreach activities. We conclude from this that there is no necessary relationship between surveillance and punitive/revanchist responses to homelessness, therefore efforts should be made to document and promote its positive uses alongside critiquing its punitive ones.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew Clarke & Cameron Parsell, 2019. "The potential for urban surveillance to help support people who are homeless: Evidence from Cairns, Australia," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(10), pages 1951-1967, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:56:y:2019:i:10:p:1951-1967
    DOI: 10.1177/0042098018789057
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098018789057
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0042098018789057?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jon Bannister & Anthony O’Sullivan, 2021. "Big Data in the city," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(15), pages 3061-3070, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:56:y:2019:i:10:p:1951-1967. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.