Governing Habits in the Simulated City

This chapter considers how habits in the city become the objects of machinic forms of surveillance and some implications of these transitions in terms of urban relations and social justice. Surveillance is as much the outcome of habits being programmed into the operating scripts of various technologies, as it is driven by a desire to better learn and shape urban habit forms. The chapter describes the movement towards a watching apparatus that is predominantly constituted and operationalized by digital devices, data and software. A case study illustrates how authorities in Darwin, under the promissory nomenclature of urban smartness, attempt to contain what they frame as the bad habits stemming from marginalized black presence in the city. Also evident in this example is the desire to capture new forms of value that emanate from encounters between human and non-human agents and to stimulate and better orientate the good habits of privileged urbanites. The chapter then speculatively considers how the global event of COVID-19 has come to redefine urban habits, providing a catalyst for the emergence of an expanding array of dis-ease surveillance technologies (French and Monahan, 2020), which seek to disturb entrenched habits of proximity and contact.