Infrastructure & Cities

Resilient cities: Extending public services with digitally empowered citizens

March 22, 2016

Global

March 22, 2016

Global
Becca Lipman

Editor, EMEA

Becca is currently a supporting editor and writer for The Economist Intelligence Unit's thought leadership division in the Americas and EMEA. Her primary focus is on healthcare policy and financial market trends. She has also recently developed research programmes that analyse themes in infrastructure and smart cities, as well as C-suite perspectives on talent strategy, small business and IT development. 
 
Before joining the EIU in New York, and later in London, Becca worked as senior editor at Wall Street & Technology where she reported on IT advances in capital markets. She previously held posts as lead editor for a US stock brokerage. Becca earned her bachelor’s degree in both economics and environmental studies from New York University.

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Becoming resilient to crime in surging cities

Constant vigilance and insightful analysis are a government’s best defences against crime. Easier said than done. With limited human and digital resources, many cities are beginning to solve crimes, and avoid the conditions that enable them, by tapping into the eyes, ears and phones of their best and most abundant asset: citizens.

Today’s technology provides citizens with a wealth of tools to report problems with safety conditions in real time to help police and other public-safety officials become more informed. Delhi, India, for example, is a bustling metropolis with a rapidly growing population—it also recently reported a stunning 99% year-over-year increase in crime. The city government is now actively collecting crowdsourced security data from a number of map-based apps that citizens use to flag problem locations, including issues of lighting, security, unsafe road and sidewalk conditions, availability of public transport and perceptions of safety.

While some early successes from the crowdsourced data include expanded lighting and added CCTV cameras in a few troubled neighbourhoods, the city hasn’t cracked the code. Kalpana Viswanat, founder of one New Delhi safety-reporting app, SafetiPin, is quick to point out that the data collected by its app are too incomplete by themselves to drive more significant government decision-making. The UN Habitat and its Safer Cities Programme have partnered with SafetiPin to launch its approach in other growing and resource-strained cities such as Bogota and Nairobi. But the UN, too, is aware of current data’s limitations. UN Habitat has started to collate the app’s local data with city victim surveys, other crime observations and national statistics. This effort highlights that no one stream of data will prove to be the tipping point in creating meaningful change.

Putting the pieces together

To most effectively put information to work, governments must create and be able to act on a holistic operating picture. Thus, they must have information about current conditions and city resources and be able to analyse all that information in the context of municipal transactional systems like case management and crime information, emergency and non-emergency service logs and so much more.

Too often, however, agencies keep their data in silos, including data from citizens, smartinfrastructure sensors, public records and police and fire department records. This results in patchy and incomplete outputs. Unlocking and combining that data within a mutually accessible, enterprise-wide knowledge management system—one that can offer new insights into the conditions under which crime most often occurs—can help everyone put resources where they’ll engender the most public benefit.

CENTRIC, an applied research centre at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, is working to address silos. The centre has been extensively researching situations of crime and crisis, including terrorist incidents, mass shootings and natural disasters. Working with a number of government agencies, private enterprises and law enforcement entities, its director, Babak Akhgar, has explored how to more successfully harness crowdsourced data, process them to create “situational awareness” for the agencies and then effectively deploy resources. This can include first responders—fire, police, emergency medical workers—using cameras to send images to a command and control centre and combining this information with social media feeds and CCTV camera feeds to ensure that leaders have a real-time understanding of the situation and of needed resources and know the location of those resources.

Mr Akhgar describes the case of a gas explosion in New York City, when command-and-control was able to use data and sophisticated analytics to prepare local hospitals, direct traffic and alert the civil aviation authority of possible risks. “All of these capabilities started with collecting the information,” he says.

The challenge for cities is to manage the volume, velocity and variety of inputs. “You are dealing with a ginormous volume of data,” Mr Akhgar says. “You are dealing with many different formats and the speed it’s coming in is so fast.”

And, while these days citizens frequently make use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, Mr Akhgar reminds us that the go-to social media will surely change: “Today Twitter or Facebook are fashionable. Tomorrow it may be something else. We are less concerned with the specific platform. We are just concerned with how to pull out the best of the data.” The mountain of fragmented, unstructured data useful to agencies will continue to grow. The challenge is to build more, and increasingly effective, platforms that focus on achieving broader government goals.

Looking ahead

Citizens around the world are getting impatient. A citizen who reports unsafe conditions through social media, official channels or a mobile app should expect an intelligent and timely response from the appropriate city agency. That so many cities still falter is particularly concerning when incidents are life-threatening. What is also true, however, is that these cases can be especially complex, involving many agencies that need to collaborate and move quickly.

Juma Assiago, coordinator of the UN Habitat Safer Cities Programme, says one obstacle local communities continually face is a lack of confidence that the information citizens provide will be acted upon or that city leaders will be held accountable. Mr Assiago insists that “it is not only a question of political will, but also of being technologically empowered.” That can change, he asserts: “The capability is here,” but investments must be made. “It’s now up to the government agencies and the civil authorities.” Cities must now all face the question of how resilient against crime they are willing to be.

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