Abstract – Capital, Value and Infrastructure

Surveillance as Infrastructural Principle

by aman roy

Urbanization introduces us to numerous forms of housing settlements, architectural designs,

political associations and novel lexicons. Navigating these constructions have been arduous
processes, unfolding over centuries in some countries and over the past decade in others –
producing the contours of uneven development. [Smith 1986] Irrevocably the construction of new
estates, economic prospects and social networks comprise layers of uneven distribution within
themselves, and hence must be thought of not merely at global scales but bound by histories and
communities. As a result developmental projects begin to appear as inventive and problematic
historical moments that are ecologically extractive and confusing for subject partners – harbouring
capacities for violence in the form of dispossession, exploitation or crisis. [Harvey 2006]

Conjunctively, speaking of the motivating principles behind such work involves thinking not only
through an abstraction atop the pyramid, the state, but also through the mobility and accumulation
of capital along with pre-existing histories of caste, colonialism and modes of production – building
on this takes place through the diagram described by Gidwani in Capital Interrupted. [Gidwani
2008] Accordingly, understanding any contemporary manifestation of this process requires two sets
of questions: the first set questions the above, moulds and models inherited in theory and material;
while the second set shifts registers by investigating previously unaccounted for activity that is now
commonplace in the everyday of urban infrastructure. I would like to pose my question at this
interstice – has the production of urban space been an ongoing dialogue with practices of
surveillance, be it through the self-regulation of subjects or the increasing calculability of variables
such as risk, threat or inefficiency? One of the first places to identify these dialogues is what Howe
et all term the retrofit and risk nature of infrastructure. [Howe 2015] Linking Gidwani and Howe et
all we begin to examine how the diagram and the desire to “bridge timelines”[Howe: 7] invite
certain technologies to place themselves at the heart of urban design and the architecture of
workspaces.

It is here that surveillance, as a technique, begins to mediate the infrastructural connections that are
numerous in form, as outlined by Simone when he describes the “economic collaboration among
residents seemingly marginalized from and commiserated from urban life”.[Simone 2004: 1] People
as infrastructure play a part in making metaphors and acting as the glue or “relations between
things”[Larkin 2013: 329] It is at this interstice that surveillance can introduce us to questions of
order and control, perhaps inviting us to understand how the processes of urbanization contribute to
the poetics of surveillance nested in infrastructure.

I would like to answer this question specifically with regards to two models – the first explores the
SEZ model built by Mahindra and Mahindra, Mahindra World City, outside Jaipur, India [Levien
2018] and the other examines the role of surveillance in workplace cultures that have accompanied
a transition from material good production to knowledge production. [Cross 2010] My aim is to
describe the intimate and overlapping surfaces of surveillance and infrastructural design –
examining regimented movements and architectural forms where the management of labour has
become a central principle in designing so called hi-tech, smart cities which seek to divisively
introduce governing bodies which operate in fuzzy territories between the state and the citizen,
allowing me to situate this debate as one confronting certain ideals at the heart of the public and the
possibilities of truer more effective democracies.
References

Larkin, B. 2013. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.’ Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:
327-343.
Howe, C., J. Lockrem, H. Appel et. al. 2015. 'Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk.'
Science, Technology, & Human Values. 1-19.
Simone, A. M. 2004. 'People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg.' Public
Culture. 16(3): 407-29.
Harvey, D. 1982. The Limits to Capital. New York: Verso. (Selections)
Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Athens: The
U. of Georgia Press.
Gidwani, V. 2008. Capital, Interrupted: Agrarian Development and the Politics of Work in India.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Selections)
Cross, J. 2014. Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India. London: Pluto
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Levien, M. 2018. Dispossession Without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India. New York:
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Glück, Z. 2015. 'Piracy and the production of security space.' Environment and Planning D: Society
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Monahan, T. 2011. 'Surveillance as Cultural Practice.' The Sociological Quarterly 52(2011). 495-
508