Troublesome trade-offs: balancing urban activities and values when securing a city-centre governmental quarter

Background Homeland security measures increasingly affect urban life and activities. Standoff distance, which prevents unscreened vehicles from approaching within a certain distance of a building, is a widely applied measure when protecting buildings against attacks with vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices. This measure both is rather inexpensive and has few negative externalities when implemented in rural areas. Unfortunately, sites with protection needs often are situated in city centres. Methods We apply the so-called Security Function Framework to illuminate the externalities or the ‘troublesome trade-offs’ between protecting a high-value site against vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices and protecting other urban values. Results This paper demonstrates that standoff creates challenges for other important values, such as functional office spaces for all employees, deliveries and emergency vehicle access. Simultaneously, standoff creates opportunities for reinforcing social-responsibility requirements, such as accessibility for pedestrians and environmental considerations. Conclusions Security measures can have both negative and positive externalities and planning might alleviate some of the negative ones

No (Big) Data, no fiction? Thinking surveillance with/against Netflix

Surveillance Studies often look at cultural products as pedagogical or heuristic devices, as if they were windows into the popular representation of surveillance practices. However, artworks may also be the (by-)products of consumers' surveillance. Online platforms like Netflix harvest vast amounts of data about clients' behaviour, so to predict their interests and produce more successful, profitable creations. In this chapter, we discuss how to think about surveillance with and against Netflix, focusing on the tensions between databases and narratives, and between politics and data-driven fiction. We explore how surveillance practices are both presented and performed when Big Data gleaned from viewers is used to tailor-script a series questioning mass surveillance, such as House of Cards. We argue that surveillance then displays itself as an embodied and transformative experience. While viewers can figure its inner workings in a more concrete manner, they are, at the same time, turned into data-breeding publics

Politics and ‘the digital’: From singularity to specificity

The relationship between politics and the digital has largely been characterized as one of epochal change. The respective theories understand the digital as external to politics and society, as an autonomous driver for global, unilateral transformation. Rather than supporting such singular accounts of the relationship between politics and the digital, this article argues for its specificity: the digital is best examined in terms of folds within existing socio-technical configurations, and as an artefact with a set of affordances that are shaped and filled with meaning by social practice. In conceptualizing the digital as numeric, countable, computable, material, storable, searchable, transferable, networkable and traceable, fabricated and interpreted, it becomes clear that the digital cannot be divorced from the social. These affordances of the digital are discussed in relation to specific political, digital practices that are further developed in the different contributions in this special issue, such as predictive policing (Aradau and Blanke, this issue), data protection (Bellanova, this issue), extremist recruitment videos (Leander, this issue), political acclamation (Dean, this issue), and pandemic simulations (Opitz, this issue).SCOPUS: ed.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe