Surveillant Movements: Policing and Spatial Production in East German Housing
Abstract
This paper examines the Stasi’s housing district surveys as a particular genre of East German state surveillance and explores the spatial modes and strategies through which East German state power operated in housing settlements. Analyzing the ways the East German secret police reproduced and used the built environment, I demonstrate that East German architecture both facilitated and complicated methods of state surveillance, ultimately resisting the panoptic aspirations of state power. I thus argue that Michel Foucault’s analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which continues to be one of the leading models for interrogating the relationship between architecture and surveillance, does not fully elucidate the spatial practice and efficacy of surveillance in the GDR.