Do you speak IcARUS? Why the project has created a common glossary of terms

The IcARUS consortium is large and varied, gathering 6 municipalities and 11 institutions from 11 countries as well as an Expert Advisory Board and a Consultative Committee of Cities. Each partner has knowledge and experience of urban security issues but at varying degrees and obviously in different circumstances. Does juvenile delinquency for example – one of the project’s four focus areas – have the exact same meaning in Greece, the UK, Germany or Spain?

The consortium thus decided early on that one of the first things to do was to agree on the meaning of the project’s key terms and make sure everybody is speaking of and working on the same things. This goes well beyond the definition of terms per se. Behind the words and the meaning we give them lies a whole philosophy, a way to frame issues and clues as to how to tackle them. For example, when we speak of managing public spaces, do we mean relatively simple things such as providing public benches or ensuring that there are no physical obstacles to the flow of pedestrians, or do we mean in a much broader sense managing a city’s public spaces so that they contribute to social cohesion? Ask the question to a group of local authorities, academics, private businesses and civil society organisations and you are sure to fire a rich debate.

A creative and learning process

The IcARUS project did just that in a process that was driven by the University of Leeds. Over a period of about three months, they analysed academic publications in order to define a common meaning for:

• the project’s four focus areas: preventing and reducing juvenile delinquency, radicalisation and organised crime as well as managing public spaces;
• a series of cross-cutting themes: governance and diversification of actors, cyber/technology, gender issues, and transnational and cross-border issues;
• three key terms and expressions: urban security, crime prevention strategies, and multi-stakeholder partnerships.

They proposed a series of carefully argued definitions, which were then submitted to the project’s consortium and fine-tuned through a series of back-and-forth feedback. Apart from producing a glossary that will be used by the partners during the duration of the project, this process fostered dialogue among professionals who do not usually communicate much, or at least not on such conceptual issues, and was thus fruitful as such.

Indeed, it reflected the co-production process that IcARUS and Efus advocate for urban security policies and actions, which brings together local stakeholders from diverse backgrounds. Creating the glossary was in itself a ‘multi-stakeholder approach’ and thus gave the partners, in particular the six municipalities, ideas on how to do this concretely when dealing with urban security issues at home. Also, the process itself mirrored the Design Thinking methodology used throughout the IcARUS project in order to produce innovative solutions to urban security problems based on the end-users’ real needs.