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Drawing on public–private circuits for urban surveillance in Recife, Brazil, this article unpacks how camera operators and ordinary residents are sensorially attuned to what constitutes a threat to urban order, from the perspective of state security governance. Through the notion of sensory enskilment, the piece delves into how surveillant civilians learn to distinguish such threats in digitally mediated urban sightings. By attending to the development of scopic skills in everyday surveillance contexts, I shed light on how security events become visible and legible across communities of practice, contributing to the formation of policing subjectivities and the maintenance of broader regimes of vigilance. The analysis draws on qualitative research on two sets of sites that cultivate civilians' visual skills around urban security: video‐surveillance control rooms managed by the security secretariats of Recife and Pernambuco, and WhatsApp groups dedicated to the policing of specific territories. This article seeks to deepen recent debates on how vertical and lateral forms of surveillance shape political communities and sociospatial divides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue departs from the premise that the sensible dimensions of urban (in)security shape lived and embodied experiences of the city in ways that reflect and affect social and spatial forms of control, belonging, and inequality. As visceral as they may seem, we also contend that these sensorial registers of (in)security are far from given: they are learned and taught, whether consciously, or otherwise. Drawing on ideas of enskilment and apprenticeship, the articles that make up this thematic collection engage the sensorial attunement of urban dwellers to how risk and safety look and feel in a diverse set of cities. Rather than an end, this approach is a means to deepen our understanding of how processual, everyday geographies of inequality are reproduced in practices and imaginaries of urban security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]