"Safe cities", a long history
Living together also means, very basically, talking about politics, about our ability to organize life together.
At the foundation of political science or philosophy, Hobbes reminds us that the development of the State is linked to the need for security, because in the state of nature " man to man is wolf".
With the progression of liberal societies, everyone feels the ease of movement of people and materials, and the maintenance of security conditions is a strong issue. It is therefore not surprising that the "smart city" is developing particularly well in connection with the securing of our public spaces. We are thus seeing a proliferation of national or local initiatives around this theme:
- Barcelona (where cameras allow for the management of a wide range from traffic to security or waste),
- Singapore, one of the most advanced surveillance systems in the world,
- Nice, which has the highest number of cameras per capita in France,
- New York, which has deployed a real-time surveillance system that integrates data from security cameras and sensors.
This does not go without creating ethical debates. The means offered by digital technology (drones, cameras, facial recognition, IoT, AI, etc.) are probably infinite. And the level of acceptability of citizens is not as flexible: to what extent are we willing to hinder our freedom and anonymity in space in order to live there safely?
Egis intervenes on these issues worldwide, particularly in connection with the securing of mobility infrastructures as well as parking control, with security being a more or less secondary or avowed objective of the devices we put in place. We see that the acceptance and enforcement capacity of such means varies from country to country.
It is a long (love?) story between the city and security. The form and functionalities of cities historically depend on security issues: protective walls of medieval cities, large avenues to allow easy passage of police or the army in the modern city... Today, development based on a separation of flows and uses remains a norm that facilitates control, and cameras are now omnipresent in urban space. They make it possible to monitor but also to manage urban road traffic, coordinated and monitored by urban control centers. Drones could reinforce this system in the future.
Providing security is therefore one of the primary functions of the city, a sovereign domain. It is also an essential factor in the attractiveness of cities for investors and tourists. This function is becoming more widespread and developing thanks to new technologies.
