Surveillance of cities is a major topic in contemporary urban sociology and criminology. Both threats to personal safety and new forms of social control such as video surveillance or the deployment of private security are seen as a menace for the traditional public character of the European city. On the one hand, surveillance can endanger anonymity in public places and access to public places as the two main characteristics of public space. On the other hand, personal fear of street crime also inhibits free access to public spaces. Otherwise the public discourse of a general decay of public space seems to be curtate. The dialectic between public and private sphere is a complex constitutional factor of European cities, and privatisation of public spaces, for example, implies more than just a legal transformation of a geographically restricted territory.