The society of control. Reading spaces and urban facts through the paradigm of transparency

Abstract

The concept of transparency is related to those of power, control and security to investigate how this has become, with today's normalization of state of emergency and logic of risk on global scale, a device that heterogeneous government institutions adopt in order to monitor flows, opinions and behavior of the population. The society of transparency, in economically and technologically more developed countries, is based on accessibility to data and people for the maintenance of the social-spatial order; it consolidates itself as a function of states of crisis and uses the digital space to regulate the physical one through technologies based on total visibility and transparency. This society acts on the population, which helps to consolidate it according to the narrative policy spread by institutions themselves.
The two case studies considered in the article, iBorder Ctrl, an experimental project funded by the European Union, and the experimental project designed by the Chinese government, Social Credit System, illustrate the relations between transparency, power, control and security, highlighting the repercussions of monitoring on accessibility to physical space.
In the context of SARS-CoV-2 health emergency, this order is increasingly consolidated through heterogeneous technologies for monitoring the population within a bio-security regime in which transparency plays a medical and preventive role.