Page 154 - The Disneyization of Society

CONTROL AND SURVEILLANCE

gain entry, are not allowed to proceed further. The homeless and others who may
be a source of concern to shoppers, such as groups of rowdy teenagers, are likely
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to be evicted, if indeed they have succeeded in gaining entry. At the same time,
surveillance is also often regarded as for consumers, since its prevalence in the
obtrusive form of security guards and CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras is
widely regarded as creating a sense of security and safety. Creating such a feeling
of security is typically viewed as desirable since it allays consumers’ anxieties so
that they can proceed unhindered with their consumption projects. The CCTV
system at the MetroCentre, for example, was designed ‘to protect the landlord’s
investment and the safety of shoppers’. 34
Certain groups are particularly likely to be watched by security guards in shop-
ping malls. Security personnel are believed often to harass teenagers. 35 Ethnic
minority teenagers are believed to be particularly likely to be trailed by guards. 36
This tendency was found in a study of two London shopping centres, even
though one of the shopping centres (Wood Green) has a high proportion of black
and working-class consumers. 37 Hybrid consumption sites like malls, amusement
arcades and similar leisure outlets of interest to teenagers tend to be placed on the
periphery so that they minimize the potential for overspill into the main shop-
ping areas, pointing to a further way in which control of movement underpins
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such settings. Some managers of malls have even attempted to control the hours
that teenagers are allowed to shop without adult supervision.
A Times journalist has described Canary Wharf – a hybrid consumption site in
London with offices, apartments, health clubs, restaurants, and shops – as like a
gated community where the private security guards check all arriving vehicles. He
goes on to write: ‘Naturally, it is covered by a rash of CCTV cameras, making sure
people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, going to work, leaving work,
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spending money’. The various security precautions malls introduce are meant to
create a sense of personal safety so that people can visit and consume in a place
that is free of the worries that many see as present in city centre shopping areas.
On the anniversary of the 10th birthday of the MetroCentre in Gateshead, one
journalist reflecting on this and other British malls at the time (such as
Meadowhall near Sheffield, Merry Hill near Dudley, and Lakeside in Essex) wrote:

Enclosed and video-scrutinised, the new centres make people, especially women, feel safe. Shoppers
and browsers walk down the arcades of Lakeside or MetroCentre with happy smiles on their faces.
They have dressed up to come. There are no panhandlers, no alkies, no sad folk peeing on the street.
Women don’t need to carry their shoulder bags across their chest. American malls started the fash-
ion for glass-sided crawler lifts, not because of the view out, but because of the view in. Rape is
unlikely in a glass elevator. 40

The mall’s surveillance practices are thus widely viewed as offering the consumer a
security that contrasts with the perception of the city centre as a risky shopping
venue. Whether these perceptions, which malls are to a large extent complicit in
promoting, are based in fact is a moot point. For example, in spite of its exclusion