Networked security in the colonial present: Mapping infrastructures of digital surveillance and control in São Paulo

Abstract

The saturation of urban space with all kinds of information and communication technology–driven security devices has long since turned into a recurrent topic of both human geography and critical security studies. However, comparatively little effort has been made to analyze these technologies and infrastructures in relation to their locally specific modes of deployment. This relative failure to account for technopolitical path-dependencies may result in unilaterally positivistic descriptions, when, in fact, there is no such thing as a technopolitically and/or semantically ‘virgin’ urban fabric waiting to accommodate a new securitarian blueprint. The present article aims to address this lacuna by analyzing the introduction of a ‘smart’ surveillance system in São Paulo, Brazil. Taking as its point of departure the condomínio fechado (the ‘closed condominium’) as a locally specific urban diagram, it sets out to trace the system’s implementation along the lines of a (post)colonial topology sorting bodies and organizing circulations according to a historically entrenched pattern of social domination. Accordingly, despite its failure to significantly reduce crime rates and raise the general level of public security, the system succeeded in further normalizing a configuration in which the obsession with personal security eclipses any potential for political transformation. Its implementation thus endorses a social status quo that is both structurally violent and profoundly unequal.

Keywords

Brazil colonialism surveillance technopolitics urban security

Introduction

In late 2014, Geraldo Alckmin, then governor of São Paulo, made a public announcement: his administration had acquired a license for New York City’s Domain Awareness System (DAS), a computer-driven surveillance and police intelligence tool devised to keep the United States’ financial capital safe from terrorist attacks (Levine et al., 2017). Originally developed as a joint venture between the New York Police Department (NYPD) and Microsoft Corporation, the DAS would be implemented in Brazil’s most populous state as a high-tech device facilitating police investigations and curbing street crime. Presented under the evocative moniker of ‘Detecta’, the system and its acquisition also embodied a mainstay of Alckmin’s re-election campaign, which had just begun. Boldly announcing the automatic detection of ‘suspicious’ situations by means of ‘smart’ CCTV cameras, Alckmin’s notable promise consisted in implementing an ICT infrastructure that would enable preemptive police practices – that is, arriving at the scene and apprehending a suspect before a crime occurs. Besides, the system was advertised as a potent means to accelerate and rationalize the department’s operational procedures, thus ensuring an altogether more lean and responsive police force to the benefit of São Paulo’s general population.¹

While Detecta soon became subject to sustained criticism owing to its reported lack of functionality, the state’s Secretaria de Segurança Pública (Secretariat of Public Security) kept defending the system as a centerpiece of the police forces’ daily operations, arguing that its monitoring capabilities had facilitated the apprehension of hundreds of criminals, guns, and stolen vehicles.² Meanwhile, Detecta’s implementation was soon echoed on the city level, when São Paulo’s new mayor João Dória assumed office in 2016 to immediately announce a series of novel surveillance measures to be coordinated by the municipal police forces, notably a drone unit and a public–private infrastructure initiative conceived to vastly increase the density of the city’s CCTV camera network (Netto, 2019). The corresponding declarations kept citing Detecta both as a technological device and as an operational principle of state-of-the-art policing, foregrounding claims of digital interconnectedness, information superiority, and institutional efficiency. Simultaneously, the persistent uncertainty concerning the system’s actual capacities turned it into a looming threat to all those groups and individuals insisting on the free appropriation of public space, whether through an overtly contestatory gesture of claiming the streets for the purpose of political protest or in the more mundane guise of the city’s countless ‘sidewalk existences’ comprising drug addicts, vagrants, and street vendors (Vieira, 2018).

Detecta’s implementation provides fertile ground for technopolitical analysis and critique, notably in terms of its performative qualities. As a rhetorical centerpiece of Alckmin’s re-election campaign, the system’s acquisition has been copiously exploited by both the government and its multipliers in the state’s media industry, who have sought to highlight Detecta’s technological sophistication and parlay the symbolic capital arising from its prominent place of origin. Evoking the ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ (Jasanoff, 2015) of a fully automatized, preemptive sovereign intervention, Detecta’s implementation would therefore display the government’s eagerness to equip São Paulo with the international benchmark in ‘smart’ surveillance and algorithmic policing – a maneuver devised to garner votes in a state that traditionally depicts itself as Brazil’s most ‘modern’ administrative unit, taking pride in its economic performance and its pioneering spirit as condensed in the myth of the heroic bandeirante paulista.³

The present article’s aim therefore consists in reconstructing Detecta’s emergence as a ‘charismatic object’ (Ames, 2014), notably by means of a meticulously staged media spectacle: from its acquisition to its official presentation and eventual implementation, Detecta has been an object of steady news coverage that, even after the system’s debunking as a techno-securitarian pipe dream,⁴ has fueled an imaginary of high-tech law enforcement, with palpable impacts on how everyday security is being conceived, experienced, and acted upon by certain parts of the local population. The underlying intuition is that, despite its multiple operational shortcomings, Detecta’s implementation has effectively contributed to further banalizing the ‘police vision’ of an advanced liberal ‘moral economy of safe circulation’ (Feldman, 2004: 333) in which any event of unexpected interruption is framed as a potential threat to be averted.

By reviewing some of the narratives, promises, and controversies accompanying the system’s implementation, the present article thus seeks to scrutinize Detecta as a ‘security device’ (Amicelle et al., 2015) whose specificity consists in its ontologically liminal character. Accordingly, analysis shall go beyond a narrowly technical assessment of Detecta’s operational ‘success’ and instead suggest a more encompassing examination of the system’s functionality. As condensed paradigmatically by Chamayou (2015: 15): ‘What is important is not so much to grasp how the actual device works but rather to discover the implications of how it works for the action that it implements’. Besides, the argument draws inspiration from Michel Foucault’s elaborations on technologies of government, noticeably concerning their sociotechnically assembled character (Lemke, 2018) and their latent ‘strategical’ dimension, which tends to complement and transcend their more apparent ‘tactical’ properties (Heller, 1996).

In this sense, a central intuition is that Detecta’s sociotechnical ‘translation’ into an urban setting characterized by a topological as well as infrastructural longue durée of colonialism and slavery brings about a series of effects that are not readily apparent in the system’s conceptual layout. Any critical analysis of Detecta’s local implementation therefore must reckon with functional deviations and excesses that, for the better part, are anything but arbitrary. As highlighted by Koerner (2001) in his reflections on Rio de Janeiro’s 19th-century imperial prison, the introduction of European-style panopticism did not exactly ‘fail’ as much as it paradoxically coalesced with the manifestations of a punitive state and a ‘slavocratic’ political economy characterized by an odd coincidence of physical proximity and social distance. In a similar vein, Detecta’s deployment shall be examined in relation to the insights it may yield into the technopolitics of urban security and surveillance in a major city at the postcolonial semi-periphery of globalized capitalism – that is, most importantly, how the system’s implementation dovetails with the various layers of historically entrenched power relations that impregnate São Paulo’s urban fabric in an utterly material sense.

Methodologically, the article draws upon both media analysis (news coverage and government reports) and ethnographic research conducted during a series of field trips between 2015 and 2017. As both the São Paulo police forces and the local security industry are infamous for their secretiveness, most first-hand observations quoted will have to serve as illustrative vignettes rather than full-fledged ethnographic accounts. Lacking regular and formalized access to politically sensitive contexts, my field research unavoidably had to follow a multi-sited approach in which a lack of data in one specific setting would be partly counterbalanced by insights gained in another. It can therefore not be disputed that the findings presented in what follows lack the degree of ethnographic saturation to be found in anthropologically grounded ‘thick descriptions’ of security practices as called for by Goldstein (2010, 2016) and exemplarily undertaken in Maguire et al. (2014). Meanwhile, apart from the fact that many crucial settings are hard to penetrate for independent researchers, the fragmentary outcome is not least due to Detecta’s elusive and ontologically ‘impure’ character. Amalgamating securitarian discourses, practices, and materialities, Detecta constitutes an eminently ‘messy’ research object that cannot readily be reduced to one specific phenomenological dimension and/or comprehended from any particular ethnographic vantage point. Therefore, rather than asking what kind of entity it is, it seems more promising to study what Detecta does – in line with analyses of (urban) infrastructure as a fundamentally relational phenomenon that escapes any attempt at ethnographic localization and/or semantic fixation (Larkin, 2013; Star, 1999).

In the following section, a brief review of the article’s main theoretical concepts will be provided before I embark upon a more in-depth analysis of Detecta’s implementation, notably by introducing the condomínio fechado (‘closed condominium’) as the hegemonic type of housing for São Paulo’s urban middle class. Combining a quasi-martial type of defensive architecture with a dense network of surveillance technologies, I argue, the condomínio fechado constitutes the focal point of multiple, increasingly deterritorialized attempts at comprehensive securitization. Meanwhile, the condomínio fechado also represents a vital remnant of Brazil’s colonial era and its idiosyncratic regime of circulations, which is crucial for understanding how Detecta interlocks with a longstanding tradition of dividing up urban space according to a locally specific hierarchy of race and class. In a second step, Detecta’s implementation will then be reconsidered in relation to the difficulties and shortcomings it had to face from the very beginning and how, despite its ostensible failure to meet its officially ascribed goals, its deployment nonetheless points towards an altogether ‘successful’ reproduction of historically established power relations under the pacifying slogan of encompassing security.

Liberal government and the technopolitics of urban security

Since the turn of the century, some of the world’s major cities have become veritable laboratories for state-of-the-art digital surveillance technologies, often justified in terms of the necessity to fight terrorism and crime (Bennett and Haggerty, 2011; Coaffee, 2021; Graham, 2011) and, more implicitly, the institutional need to ‘do more with less’ – that is, the requirement to provide security under conditions of tightening public budgets (Garland, 2001). Meanwhile, despite their apparent novelty, it is vital to acknowledge that the corresponding infrastructures and devices are but the latest instantiations in a long series of attempts to render the city a ‘secure’ setting in accordance with the demands of liberal government – that is, to enable, and indeed intensify, a regime of perpetual circulations while avoiding the socio-economic, sanitary, and moral dangers of stasis.

As elaborated in Foucault’s (2009) seminal reflections on the dispositifs of security as a distinctively liberal way of governing populations, the modern city as a paramount space of circulations represents a veritable incubator for new technologies of power. From sanitizing habitats and generating visibilities to regulating traffic flows and organizing multitudes in open space, civil engineers and urban planners have implemented a plethora of infrastructures and devices conceived to keep the city governable – that is, essentially, to incentivize a practice of freedom in accordance with the tenet of steady economic growth while preempting dysfunctional excesses such as insurgencies, violent crime, or begging and loitering. Drawing upon a notion suggested by Foucault himself, it can indeed be sustained that the main task of these techno-scientific ‘experts’ of liberal government consists in establishing an urban milieu conducive to stimulating and canalizing the ‘powers of freedom’ (Rose, 1999) upon which liberal societies both depend and thrive.

As argued by Joyce (2003) in his historical study of Victorian London and Manchester, the corresponding infrastructures of urban government may be considered as technopolitical inasmuch as their conspicuously material as well as ‘technical’ character would position them squarely beyond the sphere of politics writ large. Market halls, sewers, and traffic signs, but also representational devices such as maps and charts, could take effect precisely because their politically ‘neutral’ character would withdraw them from processes of public deliberation. In turn, their creeping advance would transform urban space into an increasingly moralized domain since they further facilitated the interpellation of sovereign citizen-subjects. As the city’s infrastructure grew more powerful and complex, its inhabitants became ‘freer’ in the specific sense that their conduct could be disaggregated into an infinite number of informed decisions that, eventually, were ascribed to a self-identical and morally responsible personality. The technopolitics of the liberal city are, in a word, eminently securitarian as they both enable and necessitate steady acts of self-government – that is, a collective practice of freedom that does not threaten the liberal raison d’état as it quasi-automatically centers around a ‘natural’ and therefore governmentally beneficial arithmetic mean (Foucault, 2009: 55–86).

In this sense, it may well be argued that the technopolitics of the contemporary ‘global city’, in the sense both of an empirical reality engendered by the historical advent of globalized financial capitalism and of a politico-economic ‘trademark’ sought after by municipal administrations all over the world, can be understood as a late-modern actualization of the mercantilist calculus described above. Equally confronted with the necessity to provide a milieu capable of ‘organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circulation, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad’ (Foucault, 2009: 18), the 21st-century’s metropolises compete over fluxes of people, commodities, capital, and ideas while simultaneously counting among the most vulnerable ‘soft targets’ of contemporary societies (Body-Gendrot, 2012; Coward, 2009; Graham, 2010). Likewise, the need to attract a highly skilled labor force makes cities invest in ‘quality-of-life’ policies that frequently amount to a politics of gentrification and displacement, and that usually imply the concerted deployment of ‘revanchist’ strategies to make public space less hospitable for the poor and the homeless (Albet and Benach, 2018; Smith, 2005; Vitale, 2008).

As the governmental technologies deployed to render public space more secure may acquire exemplary character and thus become commodities in their own right, recent decades have seen a growing international market for off-the-shelf security ‘solutions’ that have been tried and tested in a specific urban setting, most frequently in cities of the Global North, which still represent the benchmark for urban security policies in most of the world (Mitchell, 2010; Mitchell and Beckett, 2008; Swanson, 2007). It is noticeably in these instances of interurban technology transfer – which, in many cases, are overdetermined by centuries of (post)colonial power differentials (Graham, 2011) – that certain technologies may acquire ‘charismatic’ qualities – that is, a ‘promise of action’ (Ames, 2014: 208, emphasis in original) that transcends their sober materiality – thus making them fit into a certain hegemonic paradigm of ‘what it means to be modern’ (Larkin, 2013: 333). It is in this sense that, besides their immediate functional dimension, urban security devices often possess markedly expressive qualities that are commonly exploited by the various stakeholders involved in closing a deal (Boyle and Haggerty, 2009; Coaffee and Murakami Wood, 2006).

A final aspect to keep in mind consists in the fact that, despite its bet on governing by enabling a ‘natural’ equilibrium of circulations while abstaining from immediate governmental interventions, liberalism is well capable of transcending its self-imposed limitations towards a logic of sovereign exception, not as an aberration from its guiding principles, but rather as an inherent part of its securitarian calculus that paradoxically folds the sovereign decision back into the realm of differential normalities (Neocleous, 2008; Opitz, 2011). The correlate of this sovereign latency consists in a logic of social hostility against those subjects deemed unable and/or unwilling to make adequate use of their freedom – that is, to act as rational benefit-maximizers whose conduct evinces a certain degree of regularity and predictability. Indeed, it may be argued that the terrorist represents the most fundamental antagonist of liberal societies exactly because they do not worship life as a value in itself and therefore evade the grasp of biopolitical strategies (Prozorov, 2006). Under such circumstances, the technopolitics of urban security may well tip over into a hard-wired infrastructural ‘architecture of enmity’ (Amoore, 2009). Scanning the cityscape according to binary categories such as self/other, safe/risky, or normal/suspicious, many of the information and communication technology–driven security devices implemented since the turn of the century impregnate nominally civil settings with a quasi-martial logic of generalized distrust. Subliminally blurring the respective interests of government, business, and a fearful public, the infrastructures of ‘algorithmic war’ effectively contribute to ‘[reinscribing] the imaginative geography of the deviant, abnormal “other” inside the spaces of daily life’ (Amoore, 2009: 56, emphasis in original; see also Amoore, 2013).

Taken together, these preliminary conceptual reflections on the historical genealogy of urban security devices and their crucial role for contemporary forms of liberal government have shown how the modern city emerges as a paramount problem-space of flows and circulations. Its ‘technopolitical’ quality has profoundly moralizing effects as it withdraws the deployment of urban infrastructures from processes of public deliberation by rearticulating their governmental implications in the politically ‘neutral’ terms of scientific expertise and technological progress. In line with Foucault’s analyses of early modern security dispositifs, the regular function of urban security devices consists in providing a milieu that enables and fosters an ethics of freedom as a specific kind of self-conduct. The liberal regime of more or less subtle normalization therefore finds its limits where it identifies an ‘alien other’ (Garland, 2001: 135–137) that cannot readily be interpellated by the moral presuppositions of liberal subjecthood. As mentioned before, it is at this point that liberal statecraft may assume outright punitive and/or sovereign features as it rages against its supposed enemies.

It is against this backdrop of a technopolitical definition and enactment of urban security that the following section examines the condomínio fechado as a crucial manifestation of São Paulo’s securityscape, also and especially because it does not quite coincide with the paradigm of free and open circulations that has defined the ideal-typical liberal city for centuries. Indeed, as will be detailed, the condomínio fechado condenses and conserves a (neo)colonial regime of bodies and fluxes that refers back to the historical origins of Brazilian society at the sugar plantations in the former colony’s hinterland. This configuration is vital for understanding the meanings and manifestations of a ‘secure’ city as envisioned by, and built for, São Paulo’s white urban middle class. Representing both a topological model and an infrastructural substrate for Detecta’s implementation, the condomínio fechado thus lends itself as a prism through which the peculiarities of São Paulo’s securityscape may be discerned with greater acuity.

Security-as-domination: The condomínio fechado’s colonial heritage

Over the past few decades, Brazilian cities have witnessed the proliferation of an urbanistic paradigm that increasingly represents the universally accepted benchmark of comfort, security, and social distinction: the condomínio fechado (‘closed condominium’). This refers to developments whose widest definition entails a cluster of freehold residential properties set apart from their immediate surroundings by means of a physical barrier such as a fence or wall. Originally resembling North American ‘gated communities’ and their mimicry of a pristine suburban idyll, the concept soon underwent a process of ‘verticalization’, with the result that – especially in highly densified metropolitan areas – what is referred to as a condomínio fechado nowadays usually comprises one or several apartment tower(s) equipped with a range of security devices and boasting ‘exclusive’ amenities such as swimming pools, playgrounds, and gyms.

While early developments were almost exclusively conceived for and advertised to the urban high society, the condomínio fechado has subsequently undergone a process of successive ‘popularization’, with a growing market segment addressing clients ranging well below the upper-middle class. While such developments usually consist of smaller apartments and less extravagant facilities, they still reproduce the ‘defensive’ architectural configuration, hermetically separating private inside from public outside, thus sealing off the premises from its urban environment. It is not least owing to this process of market differentiation that the condomínio fechado has turned into São Paulo’s quasi-hegemonic type of housing, accounting for 37% of the city’s residential stock as of 2014 (Veiga and Rossini, 2014).

Despite the often martial aesthetics defining its outward appearance, it is vital to acknowledge that the condomínio fechado did not initially emerge in response to any noticeable increase in violent crime. Indeed, it was only from the early 1980s onwards that felonies such as homicide, rape, and robbery started to rise significantly in São Paulo, and even then most homicides occurred in the city’s poor peripheral neighborhoods. Instead, as Caldeira (2001: 256–296) makes clear in her discussion of the city’s ‘fortified enclaves’, the urban elite’s successive migration into an archipelago of heavily protected luxury retreats started off in the 1970s, coinciding with the mass arrival of migrant workers from Brazil’s poor northeastern states and the gradual dissolution of a longstanding segregational pattern juxtaposing a bourgeois center to a working-class periphery. With location successively losing its function as an indicator of class affiliation, fences and walls would increasingly turn into utterly physical, and therefore non-negotiable, markers of social difference (Requena et al., 2014). The condomínio fechado thus ‘reproduce[s] inequality both as a value and as a social fact’ (Caldeira, 2008: 65).

Although it frequently mimics European and/or North American aesthetics and architectural forms, the condomínio fechado has to be considered an emphatically local urban diagram⁵ insofar as its topological configuration patently mirrors and re-enacts the juxtaposition of casa-grande (the master’s ‘big house’) and senzala (the slaves’ ‘quarters’) as a recurring motif of Brazilian historiography. Introduced by sociologist-cum-historian Gilberto Freyre (2003) in his homonymous 1933 landmark study, the trope of casa-grande and senzala recounts the nation’s historical formation by revisiting the fazenda (i.e. the sugar-cane plantation) of northeastern colonial Brazil as the setting in which a peculiar kind of sociality first took hold, that is, the close physical proximity between white landowning families and their Afro-Brazilian slaves.

According to Freyre, the intimate coexistence of the master and his slaves gave rise to recurrent practices of racial intermixture and, eventually, a uniquely Brazilian state of democracia racial (‘racial democracy’) in which, unlike in the United States with its ‘one-drop rule’ regime of inherited racial identities, civil status would eventually cease to depend upon one’s ancestry (Schwarcz, 2012). Likewise, as argued by Raymundo Faoro (2012) in his 1958 classic Os donos do poder (‘The Holders of Power’), the fazenda economy facilitated the emergence of a ‘patrimonialist’ society in which a rural aristocracy was able to seize the colonial state for its own purposes. In a paramount example of what has been described as colonial ‘private indirect government’ (Mbembe, 2001: 66–101), the fazenda thus heralded a ‘fractioned’ or ‘complementary’ type of sovereignty that would complicate any clearcut distinction between public and private interests, and that notably became manifest in the punishment of fugitive and/or unruly slaves (Koerner, 2006).

While the trope of a ‘racial democracy’ has been debunked by various studies highlighting the persistent structural racism that defines Brazilian society to the present day,⁶ in the present context the juxtaposition of casa-grande and senzala remains instructive inasmuch as the condomínio fechado perfectly embodies the semi-permeable regime of circulating bodies and the odd simultaneity of physical proximity and social distance characteristic of the traditional fazenda. Addressing a clientele accustomed to employing domestic servants, the prototypical condomínio fechado comprises two separate circuits, one for residents and another for domestic workers, building staff, and external service providers. Depending on the condomínio’s size and the market segment it caters to, this principle may go as far as involving two entirely detached staircases. Meanwhile, in less exclusive developments, it boils down to separate main entrances and the iconic two sets of elevators, one labeled serviço (‘service’) and the other social (‘social’ – that is, reserved for residents and their visitors).

Although São Paulo’s municipal administration has long since passed a law explicitly prohibiting discriminatory behavior on a condomínio’s premises, the built structure’s perseverance effectively helps to perpetuate the relations of super- and subordination that pervade Brazilian society both inside and outside the condomínio’s boundaries (Holston, 2009: 275–284). It is in this sense that the condomínio deserves critical attention not merely as an architectural remnant of Brazil’s colonial past, but indeed as a thoroughly material actant that actively enforces and normalizes a historically inherited pattern of spatial segregation and the corresponding regime of social stratification. While this affirmation does not preclude all kinds of counter-conducts ranging from minor laxities to outright acts of disobedience and subversion, it still sustains that the condomínio topology patently benefits the vested interests of the urban elite while exploiting and degrading the city’s marginalized working class.

Whereas the condomínio fechado thus condenses Brazil’s colonial longue durée and the pattern of social and racial domination it inevitably entails, it is fair to say that it also represents a peculiar type of cruel attachment (Berlant, 2011) in which the stale promise of absolute security is delivered at the price of outright political apathy. In this sense, it embodies a specific mode of psychic suffering in which a commodified ‘administration of discontent’ has eclipsed any genuine desire for political change (Dunker, 2015: 55). Having thus turned into an ‘obscene obligation of happiness’ (Dunker, 2015: 81) despite the violent inequalities that characterize Brazilian society both past and present, the condomínio ultimately typifies São Paulo’s transformation into a – however peripheral – full-fledged ‘global city’ in which any promise of catch-up development has been overwritten by an outright affirmation of social exclusion as a non-negotiable fait accompli (Fix and Arantes, 2004). As a not-so-subtle attempt to keep the wretched and the poor at a distance while exploiting them as a low-cost labor force, and providing its inhabitants with privileged access to the city’s main assets, the condomínio thus epitomizes a specifically Brazilian instantiation of a ‘medieval modernity’ in which, rather than guaranteeing an equal and encompassing set of rights and duties, urban citizenship effectively decomposes into a dispersed patchwork of semi-sovereign spaces and territories whose organic coherence can no longer be taken for granted (Alsayyad and Roy, 2006; Holston and Appadurai, 1996).

Against this backdrop of a geographically fragmented ‘differentiated citizenship’ (Holston, 2009) and its far-reaching implications in terms of the organizing of access and the governing of circulations, it is hardly surprising that the condomínio has become a focal point of multiple securitarian projects and interpellations. In an effort to prevent burglaries and assaults, São Paulo’s police forces publish manuals with security advice for condomínios on issues that comprise technical aspects such as the deployment of CCTV systems and electric fences as well as ‘softer’ factors such as employee background checks and the handling of ‘suspicious’ situations (Polícia Militar do Estado de São Paulo, n.d.). Such public appeals for vigilance and caution are routinely echoed by real estate syndicates, according to whom ‘security is the essence of life in condomínios’ (Sindicond, n.d.: 15). Explicitly and specifically addressing caretakers, building staff, and residents, the corresponding brochures and courses demand a joint effort so as to ensure ‘not only the sensation, but the absolute certainty of tranquility and security when the residents access their property’ (Sindicond, n.d.: 4). Symbolically opposed to a public space perceived as inherently violent and anomic, the condomínio is thus depicted as a family-friendly safe haven by public authorities and private stakeholders alike. Such an account squarely omits the recurrent incidences of deviant behavior adopted by residents themselves, not to mention the cases of domestic violence that habitually occur within the condomínio’s perimeter (Caldeira, 2001: 274–282).

In accordance with Brazil’s expanding private security sector and the latter’s steady process of internal differentiation and professionalization (Vilar, 2012), the condomínio has also turned into a profitable market for all kinds of security firms, whose activities span the range from the provision of personnel services such as doormen and guards to more ‘technical’ utilities encompassing alarm systems, CCTV cameras, and access-control devices. Given the unprecedented proliferation of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) since the turn of the century, it is especially the electronic security industry that has been able to capitalize on the condomínio as a unique opportunity to merchandise its products. Meanwhile, the increasing deployment of ICT-driven ‘security solutions’ and their capacity to reduce the cost of human labor has patently contributed to making the condomínio lifestyle accessible for an ever-growing share of São Paulo’s urban population. It is thus fair to say that the real estate industry on the one hand and the electronic security sector on the other have entered into a quasi-symbiotic relationship, which could be witnessed when Selma Migliori, president of Brazil’s electronic security business association, was awarded the real estate sector’s Top Condomínios award in 2020.⁷

Indeed, it appears increasingly plausible that the elective affinity between both sectors points toward the condomínio’s successive deterritorialization – that is, most prominently, its partial conversion into a multiplicity of ‘splintering’ digital infrastructures and mobile devices as a hallmark of contemporary hybrid urbanism (Graham and Marvin, 2001). Both complementing and transcending its physical walls, the fantasy of a digitally enhanced ‘smart’ condomínio would thus consist in both a remotely accessible and controllable property and, albeit more implicitly, a securocratic reappropriation of urban space under the auspices of an eminently particularistic as well as privatist instantiation of public order. Following a logic of emergent and mobile ‘security spheres’ rather than the rigid topology of in- and exclusion evoked by the metaphor of a neo-medieval ‘fortress city’, the deterritorialized condomínio entails an ICT-driven fragmentation of public space. It ultimately points towards a ‘foamy’ texture of securitarian co-fragility – that is, a configuration in which ‘immunity and integrity are not to be gained from the submission to a larger whole, but must be achieved as the outcome of a personal effort of seclusion by each co-isolated subject’ (Klauser, 2010: 337).

As shall be argued in what follows, there are plausible reasons to understand Detecta’s implementation along similar lines – that is, as a deterritorializing extension of the condomínio’s eminently privatist way of governing circulations, organizing encounters, and defining threats. Against this backdrop, the proliferation of public–private security partnerships under the banner of community policing schemes deserves particular attention as it bespeaks a proximity between law enforcement agencies on the one hand and a specific instantiation of ‘civil society’ on the other. Likewise, Detecta entails a potential for commercial spillover effects, which makes it a promising asset for São Paulo’s electronic security industry. Keeping in mind Amoore’s (2009) affirmations concerning the blurring of both actors and interests in contemporary assemblages of ICT-driven surveillance and control, analyzing Detecta’s sociotechnical articulation with São Paulo’s urban securityscape may thus provide crucial insights into the materialization of security as a neocolonial project of social domination.

Securocratic appropriations: Detecta’s public–private rollout

Despite the above-mentioned debunking by São Paulo’s board of audit and various local news media soon after the system’s official presentation, Detecta did not cease to inspire securitarian desires and ambitions. One feature in particular appealed: just like the NYPD’s Domain Awareness System, whose functionality would be guaranteed by a series of Manhattan-based enterprises providing access to their CCTV devices, São Paulo’s secretariat of public security presented Detecta as a powerful facilitator of ‘surveillance partnerships’ between civil society and the public police forces. As a consequence, it was announced that private businesses, neighborhood associations, and even individual landlords would be invited to connect their CCTV cameras to the system, thus creating an increasingly dense surveillance network throughout the city and the whole state (Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 2017). It was this discursive framing as a ‘participatory’ surveillance device that effectively generated Detecta’s lure as a decidedly communitarian security measure, not to mention the associated economic opportunities for security firms both local and international.

Regardless of the government’s patent incapacity to get the system up and running for investigative purposes, Detecta thus turned into a synonym for the ‘smart’ surveillance of condomínios, residential streets, and whole neighborhoods by means of a technologically augmented cooperation between local residents and the state’s police forces. The government’s underlying rationale was straightforward: with an estimated 1.5 million privately operated cameras,⁸ the city of São Paulo would offer a virtually unlimited repertoire for increasing Detecta’s surveillance capacities without the need to spend scarce public money on acquiring and installing new CCTV devices. Accordingly, the Secretaria established partnerships with a variety of private and/or non-state institutions, such as the state’s largest real estate syndicate, a series of neighborhood associations, and the University of São Paulo’s main campus. Likewise, a variety of ICT companies appeared on the scene promising to ‘bridge the gap’ between the police forces’ command and control center and the privately operated surveillance cameras in the respective neighborhoods.⁹

What resulted from this tendency to (re)conceive Detecta in terms of a series of public–private surveillance partnerships was an eminent proliferation of the stakeholders involved and the program’s further fragmentation along multiple, occasionally conflicting lines of interest. Perhaps most palpably, certain well-off neighborhoods sensed their chance to augment security by subjecting their streets to the police forces’ vigilant gaze. This could be observed most prominently in Morumbi, an upper-middle-class neighborhood (in)famous for its immediate vicinity to some major favelas. Home to several comparatively well-organized and politically well-connected neighborhood associations, Morumbi was chosen to implement a ‘pilot project’ of Detecta’s surveillance partnerships, and residents were quick to define a series of neuralgic spots that would be subjected to CCTV surveillance (Associação Cultural e de Cidadania Panamby, 2016).

A similar project was announced in Vila Madalena, a bourgeois-bohemian neighborhood to the west of downtown São Paulo. Experiencing annually growing crowds of weekenders and carnival revelers, the neighborhood association had resolved to install an array of cameras to monitor the multitude during carnival. Founding a partnership called SegD’Boa (a wordplay meaning both ‘stay well’ and ‘good security’), the association would share the footage with a range of public institutions, counting upon the technical support of various private security companies specialized in CCTV devices. As sustained by the project’s main coordinator:

The core legacy of SegD’Boa is to show that society can make a substantive contribution, without spending a lot of money. And, principally, to remain independent of public authorities when it comes to achieving security and orderliness in your neighborhood, in your street. So SegD’Boa is here to invert the parameter according to which everything comes from the state. In fact, it is quite the opposite: everything comes from society.¹⁰

The case of Vila Madalena soon became an oft-quoted ‘success story’ of ICT-driven, bottom-up securitization at the community level, especially after the Canadian IT multinational Genetec stepped in to turn what had been a makeshift arrangement into a permanent configuration that noticeably benefited from the company’s established proximity with Microsoft. On a Genetec-run homepage presenting ‘smart city’ projects around the world, Vila Madalena is described as a pilot scheme to be scaled up to the whole city, and it is stated that ‘with the help of technology systems from Genetec and Microsoft, SAVIMA [Vila Madalena’s neighborhood association] has the potential to address the safety and security needs of the neighbourhood while acting as a testing ground for the potential resilience of São Paulo as a whole’.¹¹ Likewise, SegD’Boa soon turned into a proper company, offering its technical expertise to other neighborhood associations planning to implement surveillance partnerships with the Secretaria, noticeably in the upper-class neighborhoods of Planalto Paulista¹² and Alto de Pinheiros.¹³

Concerning the surveillance partnerships’ effective purpose, while one should remain wary of indiscriminately lumping together the specific socio-spatial contexts in which the scheme was supposed to be implemented, a valuable conceptual lens may be gleaned from two SAVIMA members whom I interviewed. For them, Detecta’s implementation would literally result in a condomínio aberto (i.e. an ‘open’ condomínio), which would establish a corridor of civility against the nuisances of Carnaval:

Cássio, talking about the necessity to monitor Vila Madalena’s street carnival:

These guys just come here to sponge off what Vila Madalena has to offer. This type of people, these street vendors, they sell drinks illegally, without hygiene, even to adolescents, but they don’t contribute anything. . . . There’s no hygiene, there’s no guarantee that they respect the law, you see? So it is in this sense that we say that these people aren’t welcome. Everybody’s welcome because Vila Madalena – which, as we said, we are going to transform into an open-air condomínio – is open for everyone to visit, irrespective of people’s class background. . . .

Lucas adds:

. . . but with security!’ (Interview 1)

It is in this sense that the notion of the condomínio aberto may be understood as typifying a middle-class desire to ‘urbanize’ the condomínio logic, thus enforcing a spatial arrangement and scopic regime that effectively invisibilize class divisions and transform public space into a staging ground of pacified and politically innocuous conviviality. Against this backdrop, it is significant that the SAVIMA members quoted street vendors as a major nuisance to be inhibited, thus chiming in with municipal policies aiming at the criminalization as well as marginalization of informal commerce (Hirata, 2014). Class background is only irrelevant as long as everybody complies with a sanitized code of conduct that quintessentially accommodates middle-class ideations of hygiene and orderliness, whereas the informal selling of drinks and snacks during the carnival season constitutes a vital source of income for thousands of working-class families. Despite claims to the contrary, the assumption that Vila Madalena’s condomínio aberto effectively shares in the disciplinary and exclusionary logic of its ‘closed’ namesake is therefore no idle speculation.

While in Morumbi residents were somewhat less explicit concerning their plans to reconfigure their neighborhood in the image of the condomínio, in the present context it is symptomatic that the region was chosen to implement Detecta mostly owing to the fact that it had been the stage of a strikingly similar endeavor already. Named the rede comunitária de segurança (community security network – RCS), the scheme would essentially represent a technologically enabled surveillance partnership between the local police station and the region’s many condomínios. The core idea consisted in mobilizing both the condomínios’ concierges and their CCTV devices as sociotechnical ‘allies’ of a truly situational police work. Every time a concierge would spot anything ‘suspicious’, they would inform the local police station via a Skype call (a computer was installed exclusively for this purpose at the police station). The responding officer would then be able to access the condomínio’s Internet Protocol (IP) cameras and remotely assess the situation before eventually dispatching a patrol car.

Despite its rather short lifespan, the RCS stands out since it represents an early attempt to enroll the condomínios’ security infrastructure, thus facilitating policing throughout the whole neighborhood. While in Morumbi there was no explicit talk of a condomínio aberto in terms of a socially pacified public space, it is nonetheless noticeable that the condomínio, understood as an assemblage of security technologies both human and non-human, would serve as a securitarian bridgehead from which the neighborhood’s territory could be reclaimed from anomy and lawlessness. Indeed, by mobilizing the concierges’ perception of what constitutes ‘strange’ behavior or a ‘risky’ situation, the system would draw upon a site-specific phenomenology of suspicion emerging at the interstices between the concierges’ common knowledge and the police officers’ ‘professional’ gaze. The ‘condominization’ of nominally public settings would thus have to be conceived in terms both of an increased moralization of spaces and conducts and of a quasi-rhizomatic outgrowth of the condomínio’s multiple security devices, sooner or later linking up with the police forces’ very own infrastructures of surveillance and investigation.

While the ‘surveillance partnerships’ emerging in Morumbi and Vila Madalena have, to date, yielded questionable results and sparked a whole series of controversies concerning the system’s technical as well as institutional implementation, it is noteworthy that Detecta’s incipient manifestations have all materialized in São Paulo’s southwestern region, along a corridor that includes some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods and that has been a prominent setting for real estate speculation since as far back as the 1920s (Rolnik, 1997: 130–136). Whereas generalizing depictions ought to be met with caution, there is thus a certain degree of evidence that a historically entrenched pattern of urban development – that is, the emergence of wealthy residential enclaves receiving preferential treatment from the public authorities – recurs under conditions of digitalized information and communication infrastructures. This new variant would promise a technically induced convergence between an economically well off and predominantly white instantiation of ‘civil society’, on the one hand, and the institutions of the Brazilian penal state, on the other.

While São Paulo contains many other regions where violent crime, including rape and homicide, is much more prevalent, the deployment of the city’s much-vaunted new surveillance tool so far seems to coincide with the spatial fault lines between members of different social classes and their respective modes of inhabiting the city. It is thus indicative of the security predicament facing São Paulo’s (and Brazil’s) middle class: yearning for a state of protected seclusion while simultaneously depending on the urban (sub)proletariat as an auxiliary army of cheap domestic labor. The line of demarcation separating masters from servants thus has to maintain a certain degree of permeability and therefore depends on a steady regime of both surveillance and policing. Indeed, the centrality of the concierges’ ‘lay expertise’ in the case of the now-defunct rede comunitária de segurança points towards the perceptual challenges at stake in distinguishing between beneficial circulations and detrimental transgressions. Despite the promise of automatically identifying ‘suspicious’ behaviors that also played a crucial part in the pitching of Detecta, there are phenomenological nuances that ultimately escape the automatized procedures of algorithmic pattern recognition as they unfold in settings that are defined by their incommensurable ethnographic specificity.

Despite this quasi-anthropological caveat concerning the purported capacities of ICT-driven surveillance technologies, it can thus be affirmed that Detecta’s implementation so far has dovetailed with São Paulo’s public–private surveillance infrastructures as they have emerged during the sociodemographic and urbanistic reconfiguration of the city that has been taking place since the 1970s. While the program’s patchy deployment and its notorious functional shortcomings stand in the way of drawing any definite conclusions, its broad implications seem clear. Rather than transforming São Paulo into a safer city for all of its inhabitants, Detecta’s preliminary manifestations point towards the effective replication or even intensification of a firmly established securocratic pattern. This amounts to the perpetual re-enactment of a decreasingly self-evident, and therefore increasingly fragile, boundary separating the city’s ‘proper’ citizens from its subaltern masses.

Conclusion

We now return to the present article’s point of departure: the technopolitical ‘translation’ of a nominally liberal security device into a setting characterized by a quasi-colonial regime of urban segregation. Despite the system’s failure to live up to the grandiose promises made upon its presentation, it can be sustained that Detecta’s incipient implementation has so far occurred along the lines of a historically entrenched hierarchy of both race and class, notably in how it defines urban space as both an enabling substrate to and a material sedimentation of social praxis. Echoing the colonial diagram of casa-grande and senzala, the condomínio fechado thus re-enacts the Brazilian plantation as a profoundly ‘paranoid institution’ (Mbembe, 2017: 19), organizing modes of perception and structuring forms of agency as it literally puts every body in its respective place.

Apart from its notorious lack of functionality, what is conspicuous about Detecta’s deployment is therefore its seamless absorption into a configuration in which the governmental rhetoric of encompassing security so palpably resonates with the vested interests of an established social elite and the concomitant endeavor to either pacify public space according to a markedly privatist logic or abandon it altogether. As shown above, Detecta’s prospective implementation as a series of public–private partnerships between the state’s Secretaria de Segurança Pública and some socio-economically privileged neighborhood associations bears ample witness to this fact. It also bespeaks just to what extent the slick spectacle of ‘smart’ surveillance and high-tech law enforcement lends itself to obscuring the perpetuation of a decidedly more prosaic arrangement in which the promise of a democratically empowering urban space is obstructed by a maze of (semi-)private protected enclaves and the proverbial ‘right to the city’ remains anything but inclusive (Earle, 2017). The system’s deployment therefore has to be read as yet another instantiation of São Paulo’s historically entrenched growth pattern, in which particularistic claims all too often trump, undermine, or distort attempts at articulating an emphatically public urban planning agenda (Caldeira and Holston, 2005; Holston, 2009; Rolnik, 1997).

Rather than a Deleuzian society of control and its supple texture of ever-shifting ‘modulations’, Detecta’s implementation thus evokes Graham’s (2012) notion of a ‘digital medieval’ as an odd coexistence of patently incommensurate security logics, notably of fortification/stasis, on the one hand, and permeability/circulation, on the other. Coinciding with Fix and Arantes’s (2004) characterization of contemporary São Paulo as an urban ‘platypus’ defined by the spatio-temporal coincidence of seemingly asynchronous developmental stages, Detecta’s empirical materialization (including its multiple shortcomings and its patent failure to perform in accordance with the government’s public affirmations) thus condenses the necessarily provisional and technopolitically awkward articulation of a governmental program. As pointed out by Lemke (2016: 91–94), this makeshift assemblage may well integrate a whole series of ‘breaks’ and ‘gaps’ as it attains an altogether more strategic dimension. Keeping in mind literary critic Roberto Schwarz’s (1992: 28) observation that, in Brazil, ‘liberal ideas could not be put into practice, and yet they could not be discarded’, rather than describing Detecta’s truncated implementation exclusively in terms of deception and deficit, an intellectually more fertile approach would consist in reflecting upon its generative qualities. This entails exploring how São Paulo, as the southern hemisphere’s largest city, might indeed represent a technopolitical laboratory of contemporary securocratic government, or, at least, how it could serve as a prism through which comparable dynamics in different settings can be grasped and criticized with greater acuity.

Thus, in accordance with Grove’s (2019) claim that statecraft in the Americas (both North and South) remains thoroughly indebted to a state of quasi-permanent counterinsurgency as the very essence of settler colonialism, recent analyses of US domestic security policies have repeatedly highlighted their politically fraught genealogy, especially when they are couched in a vocabulary of epistemically ‘neutral’, and therefore morally innocuous, digital devices (Benjamin, 2019; Harcourt, 2018; Jefferson, 2020; Scannell, 2018). As opposed to the still common cliché of a technopolitically ‘pure’ metropolitan template and its subsequent adulteration in the (post)colonial periphery, it thus remains vital to expose how the Global North’s supposedly liberal technologies of urban government have been contaminated with markedly non-liberal rationales from the very beginning, decidedly earlier than the sovereign excesses defining the securocratic ‘new normal’ after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (Goldstein, 2010). Against this backdrop, rather than representing a curious anomaly, Detecta’s institutionally haphazard and politically dubious implementation might indeed reveal much about the contemporary state of urban security policies in much of the world. The main difference between specific ‘cases’ of technology-driven urban securitization would then consist less in any categorical juxtaposition of geopolitically discrete national entities and their respective technopolitics, and more – and quite banally – in the amount of resources spent on digital infrastructures, technical expertise, and public relations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Frank Müller and Matthew Richmond for their tireless editorial support. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive evaluations of my article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The present article draws upon research conducted for my PhD (doctorate in cultural and global criminology) that was financed by an EMA Erasmus Mundus/Erasmus+ grant.

ORCID iD

Claudio Altenhain

Notes

Claudio Altenhain can be reached via claudio.altenhain@posteo.de.

Interview cited

1. Cássio Calazans de Freitas, president, and Lucas (surname not provided), affiliate, SAVIMA, SAVIMA office in Vila Madalena, São Paulo, 26 September 2016.

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(2016) Projeto SegD’Boa SAPP. Available at: http://www.sapp.org.br/sapp/wp-content/uploads/Sapp_projeto_para_o_bairro_detalhamento.pdf (accessed 23 November 2021).