CommentStreams:8dc0dff879da800a174b5ad4553e2a9b

Thanks for sharing, Maja! Lots to unpack, my background as an architect will inevitably gravitate the notes below towards the built environment and perhaps less surveillance politics, but it's a fascinating topic nonetheless:

(1) What is the relationship between the overall development towards urban surveillance and "nudging" and the particular requirements / ideologies that IOC impose on any organizer of the games? I.e. to what extent the necessity of installing a major surveillance apparatus is part of the "package deal" for any Olympics host city these days, or perhaps the games is a pretext for installing increasingly tight surveillance infrastructure? If the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games is one of the nodes of your research, I think it opens up a side-question about the logistics and protocols of the Olympics itself as an institution that is entangled with all sorts of opaque corporate and institutional interests. This is certainly the case of urban development (with the ruins of the Athens Olympic village being a great example) , but also peculiar branding policies, regulations and other operations associated with hosting the games.

(2) How does this development in Paris fit in the broader lineage of reconfiguring the city to make it governable? You write "Urban design is updated in the Parisian gaze" (a great line), and it makes me think of Haussmann's renovation of Paris in the 19th century, which essentially included various forms of urban regeneration, "slum clearance", but also the construction of the wide avenues in place of narrow streets, where part of the rationale was to make it more difficult for residents to build barricades during protests, but also for the city to tackle armed uprisings. So when you mention "New Military Urbanism", perhaps, echoing Kola's comments, to an extent it is another layer of the preexisting forms military urbanism that are encoded in the particular built form of the city.

(3) What is the current arsenal of countermeasures against urban "dataveillance"? You mention anti-tech resistance by activists who work against forms of social control. Perhaps I'm just curious about this as I cannot think of examples, but also this could be an interesting thing to add to the paragraph—if we are critical towards these emergent forms of urban surveillance, what are the ways we can resist them, disable them, or perhaps at least, as Ruben notes in the comment, slow them down?

Got a few more minor notes/thoughts, will try to formalize them in the following days, here URL or IRL in Berlin ; )