Secure the city, revitalize the zone: Smart urbanization in Camden, New Jersey

“Smart city” agendas of information technology-driven governance are often aligned with neoliberal urban revitalization efforts, including the creation of new districts to attract multinational knowledge and innovation-focused industries. The redevelopment of Camden, New Jersey is typical of this, but exceptional as well. To attract over $2 billion in investment in specific zones, a citywide, multi-instrument surveillance network complemented a technologically-mediated community policing agenda. Camden’s “smart city” effort secured the area, controlling the circulation of residents and their use of the city, prioritizing the flow of capital into spatially-bounded zones. As these “smart” surveillance plans for urban revitalization become more common, critically engaging with the, in Camden’s case, policing and surveillance strategies underlying said zones is necessary to understanding the ongoing, evolving relationship between global enterprise and municipal governance. Over its first five years, the success of the surveillance-driven, community policing strategy in reducing crime was mixed, but it did succeed in shifting the narrative of Camden from disenfranchised to ready for business. Contrasting the reinvestment in premium districts with the installation of a citywide digitized security apparatus presents an opportunity to investigate the spatial, infrastructural, and militaristic context within which the rhetoric of and technologies of the smart city are deployed.