Notes on the Use of Surveillance in Public Housing

The increasingly widespread use of surveillance as a cornerstone of crime control presents novel challenges to questions about personal autonomy, stigmatization, and the shape of social processes. In New York City, the end of stop-and-frisk policing meant the rise of “omnipresence,” built on a progression of the surveillance infrastructure. For residents of NYCHA public housing developments in New York City, the installation of highly visible surveillance structures provokes questions about the role of surveillance in increasing contact with the criminal justice system, as well about how use of these structures redefines spaces against a background of gentrification, a globalizing real estate market, and unbuffered income stratification. This project uses ethnographic methods, including interviews and participant observation to explore the phenomenology of social processes undertaken by individuals in relation to surveillance structures and to interrogate the use of surveillance in public housing. Engaging with the work of Bourdieu, Lefebvre, Wacquant, Goffman, and Sassen, the dissertation explores social ordering, stigmatization, norm durability, and place-making among NYCHA resid