Consultative Committee of Cities Interview – Werner Van Herle

What does the city of Mechelen hope to bring to the IcARUS project?

Werner Van Herle, Head of the department for Prevention and Public Safety, City of Mechelen and member of the Consultative Committee of Cities: Mechelen understands and believes that urban safety is about what people need in order to be secure, feel safe and to enjoy their fundamental freedoms and rights. Local governments have an important responsibility in providing a safe environment for all residents. For over 20 years, the City of Mechelen has been investing significantly in an integrated urban safety and security programme. Innovation, experimentation and thinking out of the box are highly valued and key elements of our local strategy. We have quite some experience in developing new answers to challenging urban security threats, in particular regarding the four areas covered by the IcARUS project, which we are keen to share with the project partners.

What results do you expect from IcARUS?

Our expectations are high because the ambitions of IcARUS are high: custom-made solutions to security challenges through social and technological innovations. The project gathers an interdisciplinary  group of motivated experts who will be working together to achieve this ambition. This will create a unique learning environment in which we will find inspiration in order to fine-tune our local security approach.

What is the added value for your city of being part of the consultative committee of cities (CCC)?

We are greatly honoured to be part of the project’s Consultative Committee of Cities (CCC), especially given the fact that we are a small/mid-scale city as per European norms. As members of the CCC, we are part of the IcARUS consortium and will thus follow its work and results. It will also enable us to expand our international network and to be in contact with experts from other EU cities.

What other cooperation opportunities can arise from your involvement in this project?

Mechelen is part of the Partnership on the security of public spaces of the Urban Agenda for the European Union. We are coordinating action 5 on the measurement of social cohesion and how it affects urban security. In that respect we want to create a common method for local security managers to measure the impact of existing local social cohesion projects on real or perceived insecurity. A second objective is to provide a new perspective to find new solutions for complex social or insecurity issues by exploring the possibilities of the ‘Collective Impact Model’ – a framework for achieving large-scale systems changes in communities through coordinated multi-sector collaborations –, in an EU context. In other words, there are many links and synergies between the work carried out in the frameworks of the Urban Agenda and of IcARUS. Sharing this work might open interesting opportunities.