Abstract
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras are a ubiquitous part of urban life in Singapore, with the government planning to double the current 90,000 police CCTVs in public spaces to 200,000 in 2030. Likewise, these CCTVs are becoming more technologically advanced and digitally connected under Singapore’s Smart Nation Initiative. Smart CCTVs have been found to be useful in increasing public safety and have been beneficial to the community. However, recent studies on hostile architecture highlight that CCTVs can also be sources of hostility in the urban landscape. Thus, this framework was used to analyse smart police CCTVs (PolCam) as a form of hostile architecture from the perspective of Singaporean citizens. Through a multi-methods approach consisting of fieldwork in Geylang’s Liquor Control Zone (LCZ), an online survey, and semi-structured interviews, two distinct findings were concluded from this study. Firstly, it was difficult to distinguish between a smart PolCam from a non-smart model and discern the spatial patterns behind the distribution of PolCams within Geylang’s LCZ from cursory observation. Secondly, the survey and interviews underlined that although Singaporeans mostly felt that CCTVs could have hostile traits, they did not relate it to the definition ascribed to traditional hostile architecture. Rather, they believed that the communal benefits arising from the presence of CCTVs in public outweighed their potential drawbacks on an individual.