THE POLITICS OF SIGHT/SITE: LOCATING CAMERAS IN VANCOUVER’S PUBLIC SPACES Kevin D. Haggerty, Laura Huey and Richard V. Ericson w ABSTRACT This chapter is about the politics of surveillance and more specifically about the politics of siting public closed circuit television (CCTV) systems within urban neighborhoods. Through an exploration of political contests waged around attempts by local police to install public surveillance systems in the City of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Granville Mall districts, we argue that the success of public surveillance proposals is hardly inevitable. Instead, a combination of local factors play vital roles in variously supporting or constraining such attempts. Although this present chapter can be read as providing a useful counterpoint to the dominance of accounts about such developments in Great Britain, where public CCTV is a routine fact of daily urban life, we conclude on a cautionary note: with the current proliferation of public and private forms of surveillance throughout urban spaces, surveillance analysts risk missing the forest for the trees if we only concentrate on the fate of one surveillance tool or tactic. Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 10, 35–55 Copyright r 2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1016/S1521-6136(07)00202-3 35