Safe then Smart: How Do You Know When Your City Is Smart?

In part four of this blog series, I look at how we can measure when cities become “safe and smart” and thus create beneficial outcomes for citizens. Click the links to read the previous posts in this series:

• Part 1 Safe then Smart: The Roadmap to Smart Cities
• Part 2 Safe then Smart: The Stages & Drivers of Safe Cities
• Part 3 Safe then Smart: Roles, Responsibility & Privacy for Safe Cities

I’ve also included key takeaways from each of the above posts at the end of this one.

Evaluating the Impact of Safe and Smart City Projects

The benefits of safe city projects can be broad and difficult to quantify. However, the goals of “safe city” and “smart city” projects range from reducing crime rates and improving public safety to driving economic growth and improving general citizen wellbeing. There are four key indexes for measuring the success of these city initiatives that can be derived from an aggregation of public data and commissioned citizen surveys, and by measuring municipality investment, safety results, social benefits, and economic benefit.

• Municipality investment: measures the level of an administration’s continued commitment to safe and smart city ICT solutions, the level of ICT competence, the resources allocated to public safety, and the coverage of physical security and critical communications equipment. World-wide research from the IHS Markit research paper The Benefits of Safe Cities has indicated the safety result, social benefits and economic benefits generated by a safe smart city project are greatly dependent on the national and local government investment.
• Safety result: measures the level of crime; the risk to individuals and property from disorder, protests, security issues, and major crimes; the public’s perception of crime; and the police department’s ability to respond to these events quickly and effectively.
• Social benefits: measures social benefits such as the ability to enjoy entertainment, leisure, and sporting events safely; the public’s appreciation of the government, municipality, and police based on their response to security, and whether talented employees are moving to the city.
• Economic benefit: measures economic benefits such as job creation, business expansion, personal wealth, and prosperity; spending on tourism and retail; employment rates; city investment; and the risk to and prevention of serious economic challenges.

Takeaways So Far

• Part 1: A safe city is an essential pillar of supporting the future development of your future smart city. Huawei’s safe and smart city solutions provide a range of capabilities such as effective emergency communications, predictive analytics, data center consolidation, cloud for municipality agencies, big data, and real-time response.

• Part 2: Huawei’s safe city solution integrates information from disparate technologies and government departments responsible for citizen safety by improving the key stages of public safety. These are: Prevention, Detection, Response, Recovery & Integration.

• Part 3: Technology vendors aren’t the only stakeholders in safe cities. The other key players are governments, municipalities, and citizens.

• Part 4: The success of a “Safe then Smart City” project needs to be measured. I’ve given the tools of how to do so above.

Click the link for more information about Huawei’s Smart City solutions.

Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.