Toward the Safe City Index Development: Infrastructure Security Indicators

Abstract

Cities all over the world are suffering from various and multiple problems and crises that are estimated to increase if there are no practical and realistic solutions that reflect the real needs of the city. These solutions should be able to predict future challenges, despite the cities’ struggle to improve and enhance their economic, social, environmental, and security goals besides the strategies necessary to achieve them. Accordingly, many concepts have emerged to find solutions that help cities to overcome the challenges they face. Among these are the concepts of the resilient city, the safe city, the smart city, etc. Each concept has established its own index that provided a vision of how to solve problems and face challenges and crises in order to develop the city. Nevertheless, big gaps have appeared in cities with the spread of unpredicted challenges and threats inside them,. Accordingly, the cities’ authorities and local communities are obligated to comprehend how their cities are performing, where advancement is being made, or where failure appears in their systems after-shocks. The research seeks to develop the “infrastructure security pillar” within the safe city index, in particular. This is achieved through a thorough reviewing and crisscrossing of the infrastructure indicators in the safe, resilient, and smart city indexes. The research concludes subdivisions to the infrastructure security pillar presented by Ecosystem, Transportation, Energy, Water & sewage, Disasters & threats, and Security system. Each has its own extracted indicators based on the intersection of existing ones, as well as the modification and addition of others. This development helps to achieve integration between the prevailing concepts towards a safer city performance. This development can be used to assess safety parameters in existing cities.