I suppose where there's capital there are cameras.
Of course with the move to IP cameras and cloud services, these increasingly become defacto centralized.
I used to be able to navigate London from cash and my memory. After a long time I found that's no longer possible. Less centralized municipal systems used to work, like the author said, and you add, corporate and business is private interest but also defacto centralized. For a densely populated area undergoing civic transformation, Londoners were genuinely helpful, or genuinely not. I admired both.
I also heard it said somewhere, residents are like software, and the city is the hardware. In London, I feel hardware is becoming the problem to live life, not software.
For the first time I went to Borough Market, cash, simple, person to person. IMO, maintaining redundancy in municipalities builds character and is under-looked. Centralization is overlooked.