Unmasking the Power Struggles and Urban, Economic and Social Change Encapsulated in the "Digitalisation" of Urban Security

“Digitalisation” entails a rather teleological and techno-deterministic approach of social change. Furthermore, digitalisation is often connected to values such as automation, optimisation, efficiency, promoted by many firms selling digital technologies. This paper takes an empirical standpoint, rooted in social sciences’ methods and theory, to analyse the processes of “digitalisation” in urban security. What social processes and transformations are masked by this term? And, in turn, what does this reveal about the imaginaries and practices generally subsumed by this concept? To answer these questions, I draw on interviews with local public authorities, police representatives and private firms developing digital projects for urban security; the analysis of the firms’ products; ethnographic observation of the use of these technologies and of events promoting them, in France and in England. I will first present public authorities’ and private firms’ discourses around the digitalisation of urban security, which promote more efficiency in times of reduced public spending and of supposedly increasing safety issues (knife crime, terrorism, wars, etc.) and crisis. Drawing on economic and urban sociology, it will then develop two aspects this “digitalisation” process uncovers: 1. the changing power dynamics within the French and British security market, where national firms are increasingly challenged by the arrival of foreign (American, Chinese) firms and with digital firms (Amazon, etc.) trying to access a market until then dominated by military and surveillance firms. 2. The struggle between different groups of security professionals to define what urban security should be, and who is being protected – digital tools being a resource in their power relations. Ultimately, this paper testifies to the social, economic and urban transformations that the term “digitalisation” fails to encapsulate. It also emphasizes the unevenness and non-linearity of these processes in the diverse cities studied, linked to power relations and inequalities in localised contexts.