City-as-Prison: A Panoptic Reading of Urban Logistics

Abstract

Digitalization has become a central driver of contemporary urban governance, reshaping how authorities regulate movement, allocate resources, and manage public space. While often portrayed as innovation-led progress, these systems carry far-reaching implications for social order, accountability, and individual autonomy. Acknowledging these tensions is essential to understanding the political stakes of technologically mediated urban life. Within this context, the contemporary city increasingly operates as a logistical apparatus of control, where the apparent fluidity of human and products circulation conceals a deeply disciplinary infrastructure. Ostensibly neutral urban components—digital platforms, delivery hubs, and surveillance technologies—participate in an invisible regulation of behavior within the paradigm of the city-as-prison. This panoptic dynamic, sustained by the promise of efficiency, simultaneously reinforces spatial and social segregation. Logistics, far from being a mere functional layer, emerges as a central vector of urban power. Yet, against this technocratic rationality, forms of resistance are taking shape—challenging the algorithmic governance of urban life. Participatory platforms, tactical interventions in public space, and the subversive repurposing of urban data express a collective desire to reclaim control over city resources. These initiatives go beyond critique; they articulate an alternative vision of urbanity grounded in transparency, collective deliberation, and spatial justice. By bridging infrastructural critique and democratic experimentation, the article argues that urban technologies can be reconfigured beyond their instrumental logic.

Keywords: Algorithmic governance, City-as-prison, Digital infrastructure, Panopticon, Resistance, Surveillance, Urban logistics

DOI: 10.7176/JRDM/96-01

Publication date: November 30^th 2025