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Paper short abstract

In regenerating urban spaces, so-perceived ‘security problems’ are increasingly addressed through surveillance cameras. Drawing on fieldwork in a stigmatised neighbourhood in Antwerp, this paper explores how Moroccan-background young men collectively respond to these cameras’ racialising gaze.

Paper long abstract

In regenerating postcolonial cities, youths hanging out in public space are increasingly regarded as a ‘security problem’. This is particularly the case when it concerns young men of colour in underprivileged, densely populated neighbourhoods, for whom – being excluded from mainstream leisure activities – a square or street corner often serves as a ‘backyard’. To address these men’s so-perceived threatening and ‘nuisance’-causing presences, governmental bodies increasingly employ surveillance cameras. This paper explores how these men experience, respond to, and navigate these cameras, drawing on fieldwork with Moroccan-background youths in the Belgian city of Antwerp.

Antwerp has – with 819 cameras – Belgium’s most extensive police camera network, concentrated around ‘high-risk’ areas. I zoom in on one such area, the neighbourhood of Borgerhout, where many young men of Moroccan descent hang out in public space. While most Borgerhout residents feel secure/unaffected by street cameras, for these youths, the cameras generate profound affects of insecurity: they are white and un/inhuman ‘angry eyes’, specifically targeting them. First, I demonstrate how the cameras thereby ‘re-interpellate’ them as a stigmatised-cum-racialised subject – a ‘Moroccan’. Then, drawing on mapping activities that civil society partners and I conducted with these young men, I illustrate the various ‘care-full’ tactics of counter-surveillance they have developed to navigate the cameras. I show how they have crafted, both individually and collectively, ‘tactics of watching’ and ‘tactics of moving’ in public space as a way to care for one another and protect one another from the disrupting, dehumanising, and racialising camera gaze.