Introduction

Cities are not mere repositories of wider global processes. Huge swathes of economic activity still take place domestically, and indeed cities are structured through different local and regional strategic interests in which certain policies will favour some to the detriment of others. It is in this sense that architects and city planners become key organic intellectuals in local communities for the articulation of hegemonic ideas associated with specific state projects. City designers have a substantial input into the way in which rival demands for and over city space are deciphered and transformed into ‘design products’ for promotional purposes and for potential investors. Planners also often become caught up in the party politics of the day, in the sense that they become the medium through which hegemonic agendas gain practical application in spaces (van Deusen, 2002; Fainstein, 2005; Eisenschitz, 2008). Some, for example, have been co-opted and pressured by successive governments to incorporate a PPP agenda in how they envisage changes in cities (Jessop, 2002; Flinders, 2005; Gough et al, 2006). As we know, PPPs are also part of a wider neoliberal agenda aiming to deregulate international trade barriers, privatise business practices, stem the power of trade unions, reorganise welfare entitlements along workfare lines to ensure a steady supply of (cheap) labour for business and police spaces between localities in terms of ‘value for money, the bottom line, flexibility, shareholder value, performance rating, social capital and so on’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002, p 387; see also Gough, 2002).

The aim of this chapter is to argue that the redevelopment of cities is indeed embroiled in the hegemony of neoliberal workfare. Digital technology is an integral element of this neoliberal formation by helping to classify distinct public spaces in new ways that then reproduce specific power relations. These points are developed in this chapter by exploring how digital technology in the form of CCTV exposes public space in cities to certain neoliberal moral and regulatory agendas, which exclude as well as include groups. Such technological mechanisms are important because they affect the right to the city and ordinary people's democratic input into how urban spaces are constructed, designed and managed. They subsequently pose serious challenges to the ability of community publics to challenge the hegemony of neoliberalism in their respective localities. The chapter begins by exploring how neoliberalism has shaped agendas around community regeneration in UK cities.