Understanding the needs and expectation of the project’s six partner cities: a research conducted by the University of Leeds

One of the most ambitious undertakings of the IcARUS project is to conduct a state of the art review of research and innovation in the field of urban security over the last 30 years in Europe. The University of Leeds (UK) is in charge of this activity. Professor Adam Crawford and Dr Christine A. Weirich have written a detailed report on their progress so far. Here are the main points.

Identifying the partner cities’ main characteristics

An essential step in the preparation of the state of the art consists in identifying the characteristics, needs and expectations of the project’s core partner cities, Lisbon, Nice, Riga, Rotterdam, Stuttgart and Turin.  Together with local stakeholders, they will co-produce innovative urban security tools tailored to their specific contexts in the course of the project.

The research team set up by Adam Crawford, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Leeds and a long-time partner and expert for Efus, has thus conducted one-to-one meetings with representatives of the six cities, reviewed the documentation they sent, and compiled the results of a self-reporting questionnaire.

Main similarities among all six cities

All six cities are committed to working on urban security issues through local multi-stakeholder partnerships. All are keen to learn and share innovative practices and research and innovation in the field of urban security coming from other European cities as well as through the IcARUS project. They are also willing to implement the insights they will have gained through the project in their own local policies and activities.

Another common trait is that they are interested in conducting research to inform their new programmes or initiatives. Lastly, all six cities have specific needs that correspond to IcARUS’ four focus areas – juvenile delinquency, radicalisation, public spaces, trafficking and organised crime – and are interested in developing new strategies and practices in at least one of these.

Main differences

The first obvious difference is that the partner cities are located in six European countries, each with their own laws on crime prevention and urban security, and each with their specific governance model articulating the relationship and areas of competence between the national, regional and local levels. Another important difference between the six countries is the approach to urban security, with some more focused on policing, others on social and community issues, and still others on crime prevention. A third aspect is the organisation of law enforcement agencies and the competences and resources of national police forces vs. local ones.

Looking at local differences, an obvious distinction is the position and role of each city within their country and Europe. Indeed, two are capital cities (Lisbon and Riga) and one is a major European port (Rotterdam), which entails specific security challenges.

Lastly, two other interesting areas of difference is on the one hand the nature and scope of the local prevention partnerships (e.g., with other public institutions or civil society organisations), and on the other the amount and quality of crime and security data available at the city level.

Next Steps 

The next phase of the University of Leeds’ research and preparation work for the state of the art will involve data collection and the analysis of all the information collected since the end of last year.

• Read the full version of Professor Adam Crawford’s and Dr Christine A. Weirich’s contribution

Thinking out of the box: How the Design Thinking innovative approach shapes the project

Innovation is IcARUS’ raison d’être not only in what it will achieve – an innovative rethink of local urban security policies – but also in how it will achieve that. The partners have thus spent the past five months elaborating the project’s approaches through intense collaborative work. One key element is the Design Thinking methodology, an innovative process for designing human-centred solutions to complex problems. Design Thinking shapes the way the project will co-construct concrete and forward thinking solutions to urban security challenges, notably in the framework of the workshops to be held further down the line.

IcARUS seeks innovation. Not only does this project aim at original solutions, but it also looks at innovation in the process of designing these solutions. For the project’s consortium, this is a true journey from start to finish. Indeed, rather than following traditional approaches, the project’s methodology, titled Design Thinking, brings innovation in the way partners interact and co-create in order to deliver the project’s outcomes. Design Thinking is a methodology used by some of the world’s leading innovative brands and is taught at prestigious universities. Through the application of this human-centred methodology to urban security approaches, IcARUS seeks to enhance multi-stakeholder cooperation and create solutions that meet the collective needs of citizens.  The IcARUS partners have been focusing on this methodology from the beginning of the project, delving into the theory and exploring ways to adopt it.

Shaping future training sessions and workshops

Now that the methodology is set, they can progress to a more practical stage. Among the latest developments, Design Thinking will shape all the workshops that are planned for the near future and the years ahead.  The consortium partners have received guidelines on how to conduct and participate in workshops with the Design Thinking method. In particular, the method will ensure that all involved stakeholders express their views, that solutions are co-created, and that the sessions are successfully managed in terms of practical needs. Thus the exercises that will be proposed to workshop participants, or the values to be shared among the facilitators reflect the Design Thinking main concepts and foster successful exchanges of ideas in order to co-create possible solutions to problems.

Co-creation is indeed the term and the concept that leads IcARUS in the months and years to come. This means that the whole consortium of academic partners and partners representing local authorities and urban security practitioners will start discussing issues, problems to be addressed, and will try to find innovative solutions together. This is indeed the time of doing, and the entire consortium has been given the necessary tools to start practicing with and experiencing the methodology. The IcARUS partners will participate in comprehensive training sessions on the Design Thinking method. They will have an opportunity to go beyond the theory and apply it, develop appropriate skills, and bring into play all the main concepts IcARUS revolves around.

Embracing discrepancy and difference

All this, from the defining of the methodology to the practical guidance for workshops, highly benefits the pool of partners, especially now that the consortium is ready to enter a more practical stage where contributions from each and every participant are greatly welcomed and valued. The diversity of actors within the consortium should and will most certainly favour the generation of innovative ideas, as much as stimulate divergence, contrast and disagreement. The next steps consist in fact in acquiring specific skills for embracing discrepancy and difference while thriving in it. This is indeed one of the main reasons why it is relevant for the consortium to start experiencing the methodology via practical sessions.

Crucially, the time spent these past few months in defining precisely how we’ll use the Design Thinking approach in our work will also benefit the wider community of stakeholders. IcARUS aims at innovation and its method encourages to see things from different viewpoints. The switch in perspectives is the concept which this approach hinges on: partners are inspired to analyse problems from a different angle. In doing so, it will be easier to deliver innovative solutions, especially in the long run. Such original results achieved via this challenging, yet exciting methodology will benefit urban security actors, urban designers, members of municipal administrations, law enforcement agencies, and otherstakeholders, including civil society actors.

Turin: Juvenile Delinquency is a priority

The city of Turin, represented by the Department of Technological Investigations of the local police, is particularly keen to explore juvenile delinquency through IcARUS, as it considers that it can escalate into more serious crime if left to fester.

At a time when Turin is increasing the resources it allocates to urban security and safety, the IcARUS project provides the city with a valuable opportunity to expand its expertise in this area and improve the way it implements its security policies and strategies. Indeed, IcARUS explores two important pillars, research and innovation, which the municipality considers fundamental to successfully implement urban security policies and strengthen its capacity to mitigate emerging security risks or threats, ensure the safety of residents and securing its urban spaces from threats such as organised crime or terrorist attacks.

Tackling juvenile delinquency

As a partner in IcARUS, the city of Turin, and in particular the Department of Technological Investigations of the local police, is working closely with Efus and all other European partners on its chosen focus priority area, which is juvenile delinquency. It is looking to research, map out and eventually design policies that will effectively curb the growing phenomena of juvenile delinquency. Why? Because juvenile delinquency can fuel other urban security threats, notably radicalisation. The city thus considers key to prevent youngsters from behaviours that, if left unanswered, could escalate into more serious crime. Through IcARUS, the city is keen to tackle juvenile crimes such as stalking, bullying, robbery or theft under the threat of violence, which are too often underreported.  

The municipality is confident that the IcARUS consortium will produce comprehensive evidence-based research and design innovative technological tools tailored to the needs and context of each partner city. These in turn will be useful to other European cities faced with similar security challenges.

Stuttgart: remaining safe at a time of fundamental changes

Stuttgart, the capital of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg in the south-west of Germany (pop. 635,000) is well known for its spirit of innovation and optimism. Home to the German automobile industry, it consistently ranks as one of Europe’s most liveable and safest cities. We’ve met with Felix Grünwald and Gregor Belgardt of the municipality’s Crime Prevention Office. 

Why did the city of Stuttgart join IcARUS?

Felix Grünwald and Gregor Belgardt: Crime statistics show that Stuttgart is a very safe city. Indeed, it has consistently ranked as one of the safest large cities in Germany for quite a while now. Stuttgart is very proud of its track record in ensuring urban security and of the resulting high quality of life for its citizens. It therefore considers security and social cohesion as important fields of action. By joining IcARUS, the municipality intends to make sure that Stuttgart remains safe at a time of fundamental changes, not only in urban security but in society in general. To achieve this, international exchange and networking are more important than ever. Indeed, we can only do so by learning from other institutions and by sharing our own perspective and experience with others.

Stuttgart decided to focus on the issue of radicalisation. Why?

Processes of radicalisation are a significant danger to urban security and social cohesion. Regardless of whether people are radicalised by others or on their own, they pose a potential threat to our cities. The events of the past years revealed the massive perils caused by radicalisation processes. However, addressing radicalisation at the local level is difficult because of the widespread networks of possible offenders. By developing a local multi-stakeholder strategy to prevent radicalisation, IcARUS might provide an improved approach to de-radicalisation.

What are your expectations regarding the outcome of IcARUS?

Firstly, IcARUS will assess future challenges to urban security. While the project’s core documents already discuss current and future challenges to urban security, it might also be able to define and assess further challenges and problems. In addition, IcARUS provides an opportunity to engage in an international exchange and dialogue about the challenges that lie ahead. Its diverse consortium should prove a lively group of experts, willing to learn and inform others. The project’s aim to promote a multi-stakeholder approach, to tackle future challenges to urban security, is of high relevance to the city of Stuttgart. We think it is particularly important to create urban security tools that are based on the evaluation of past prevention programmes and that reflect current developments in science. In particular, we need such tools to prepare our urban security strategy for the future. The city of Stuttgart appreciates the project’s ambitious goal of enhancing and improving local approaches to urban security.

Riga: a holistic approach to the security of public spaces

Most European cities were built a long time ago, when nobody gave much thought to the safety of residents. Nowadays, cities are faced with new threats that have emerged in the present century, and Riga is no exception. We expect the IcARUS project will provide us with useful solutions as part of a multimodal approach.

The capital of Latvia, one of the Baltic states, Riga has a population of 637,931 according to the Central statistics office (2020), but it realistically has closer to one million on any given day if we take into account visitors who come to the city to work, study, shop or carry out administrative formalities.

Public safety in Riga is ensured by the Riga municipal police, whereas the national police is concerned by traffic control and the prevention of crime. Protecting public spaces is in the remit of Riga’s thousand or so municipal officers.

A priority: the protection of public spaces

Riga is a member of the European Forum for Urban Security (Efus) and regularly takes part in international projects in the field of crime prevention and urban safety. In the 21^st century, protecting public spaces requires that both city councils and law enforcement agencies adopt a modern approach and vision and exchange their know-how and experience. Furthermore, they need to build their policies on social and urban research, and to benchmark inspiring practices developed elsewhere in order to implement such policies. In this respect, we believe the IcARUS project will help us achieve our objective of strengthening the protection of our public spaces.

Adopting a holistic approach

Designing and managing safe public spaces is not only an architectural concern. It requires a holistic approach involving different stakeholders, i.e. urban planners, law enforcement, social services, local residents, etc. As many other European cities, Riga was built a long time ago, at a time when nobody gave much thought to the safety of residents. Nowadays, we are faced with new threats that have emerged in the present century.

In order to respond to such threats, we expect the IcARUS project will provide us with useful solutions as part of a multimodal approach that strengthens crime prevention through urban design, the use of CCTV, adequate policing strategies, etc.

We believe that cooperation among the IcARUS partners will be successful and will benefit us all, but the clear winners will (of course) be the citizens of our cities.

Rotterdam: an open window to the world

A thriving European port home to over 650,000 inhabitants, Rotterdam defines itself as a city open to the world. They detail their urban security priorities and the benefits of cross-European collaboration through IcARUS.

Rotterdam is honoured to work with all the partners in the IcARUS project. With 651,000 inhabitants, Rotterdam is a city with an open window to the world. It is constantly renewing itself, if only because there are five to six thousand newcomers annually. It’s a city of cultural diversity, home to 174 nationalities. We know how important it is to stay connected to the world, working together with other European cities as well as universities and research institutions on public safety and security.

A safety programme that is renewed every five years

Working on safety and security in Rotterdam is a joint effort, which involves many organisations. Besides the police, residents, private security firms and entrepreneurs also work with us on safety and security issues. They help us to find solutions to the problems we face as a city.  Universities and applied science institutions help us with research and (academic) insights and perspectives to improve our policies. The IcARUS project brings along the European dimension.

The Rotterdam city council adopts a new safety programme every five years, which includes, among other things, the more long-term ambitions. Secondly, a customised approach has been developed for each of the city’s 71 neighbourhoods. The municipal departments, police, the public prosecution service and residents work closely together on common problems to find suitable solutions. Private parties, such as housing corporations, entrepreneurs and schools are also involved in this approach.

An original safety evaluation tool

In addition to tackling the problems in the neighbourhoods, we developed an instrument for measuring the perceived safety of local residents titled the ‘Neighbourhood Profile’. We conduct a Neighbourhood Profile twice a year. This evaluation tool maps out the safety, social and physical situation of a neighbourhood and produces a visual chart. It is based on objective data from the police and municipal departments regarding reports from the public, and on the opinion of citizens themselves. The scores not only show which neighbourhood has a problem, but which problem is the most acute. The scores are allocated per theme, such as burglary and violence. Over the years, the importance of an integral approach – and with it an integral monitor – has become increasingly clear.

Safety issues cannot be resolved by simply focusing on safety: it is necessary to also take into account social and physical indicators. The neighbourhood profile also makes it possible to see the scores for each of the 71 Rotterdam districts, to establish comparisons, and to precisely know which safety problems are an issue in each district. It also signals the tasks that each district faces. We are aware of a possible gap between the objective numbers on safety and the subjective perception of local residents, which is also important to us.

The benefits of collaborating with other European cities

The Rotterdam safety approach priorities include, among others, those of the IcARUS project, as well as radicalisation, trafficking & organised crime, juvenile delinquency and public spaces. Public space is the domain where all safety and security measures come together, and also where the online world meets the offline world / reality. Cities are the ‘hands-on’ experts when it comes to safety and security. Collaboration between cities in Europe and around the world is extremely important for the future of our cities, working together to develop new approaches in the areas of counter terrorism, organised crime, radicalisation and cyber resilience. Cities will only be able to continue playing this important role if we listen to each other, share new insights and make sound agreements with one another. In this respect, the IcARUS project as well as Efus are important platforms to work together in Europe.

IcARUS will give us an overview of the best security policies over the last 30 years. We will be able to rethink and adapt existing tools and methods to remain a resilient city. A socially, physically and digitally resilient city takes action to reduce the vulnerability to risks and threats and knows how to limit the impact of incidents. A resilient city knows how to recover quickly when unforeseen events happen at international, national, regional and local levels.

Nice: pioneering new urban security solutions

One of the partners of the IcARUS project, the French city of Nice has long been forward-thinking in its local urban security policies, an area which is a top priority for Mayor Christian Estrosi.

The ‘capital’ of the French Riviera, Nice is the fifth-largest city in France and the second-largest on the French Mediterranean coast with some 350,000 inhabitants. Beyond the city itself, the agglomeration of Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur gathers 49 towns, totalling about 550,000 inhabitants. Nice’s Mayor, Christian Estrosi, who is serving his third mandate, is also President of the Métropole Nice Côte d’Azur.

High-tech municipal police

Nice has the largest municipal police in France, since the hiring of 59 municipal police officers in 2018 and 2019. The municipal police staff now totals 455 police officers and 183 public road surveillance officers (agents de surveillance de la voie publique, ASVP).

The Mayor of Nice considers urban safety as a top priority of his mandate and has long argued for more powers to be given to municipal police forces. As such, the municipal police has recently been equipped with body-worn cameras. The Nice Municipal Police was also the first in France to have its own Twitter account, providing information on its activity, giving advice to citizens and answering their questions.

Call terminals in public spaces

Following the October terrorist attack in the Notre-Dame Basilica, in the heart of the city, the municipality decided to increase the number of emergency telephone terminals installed in various public spaces and connected to the municipal police. The first ones were installed last year. Indeed, the one on avenue Jean Médecin was activated by passers-by during the attack in the basilica, which allowed municipal police to quickly intervene. In the wake of the attack, the municipality also decided to install 170 bollards in front of schools, colleges and high schools.

Now, one of the municipality’s key projects is to create a joint police command centre that will be shared by the local and national police forces. Titled the Urban Hypervision and Command Centre (CHUC), this shared equipment will further enhance the level of urban security and its perception by citizens by promoting an innovative governance model for all security actors involved in planning, providing and evaluating safety at the local level.

Involvement in other European projects

As we’ve seen, urban security is a top priority for the municipality, which is why it welcomed to opportunity to join the IcARUS team and share and improve its knowledge, technologies and experience in this field. This project will complement the activities carried out under the PRACTICIES (“Partnership against Violent Radicalization in Cities”) European project on the prevention of radicalisation, in which both the City of Nice and the Métropole were partners  until its conclusion in April 2020. Furthermore, Nice is coordinating the Partnership on the security in public spaces of the Urban Agenda for the EU together with Efus and the City of Madrid.

The city of Nice highly appreciates to work with all the partners of IcARUS, an interesting project that will lead to innovative and efficient solutions to improve urban security.

Community policing in Lisbon – Sustainable local partnerships for safer neighbourhoods

Implementing a community policing model is a challenge for police forces and their partners in governmental agencies, municipal services and more broadly civil society because it requires a relationship of trust and long term commitment. In the past decade, the Lisbon Municipal Police (LMP) has been implementing a community policing model based on the active involvement of local partners and citizens, using an innovative methodology to build and sustain such partnerships over time.

Developed by the LMP in close collaboration with local partners, this methodology consists in jointly preparing the induction of community policing officers to a new territory. Before their deployment, the LMP and local partners work together on a joint planning process in order to prepare and support the officers’ work. It consists of four steps: i) establishing the police-community safety partnership; ii) building a local safety audit; iii) identifying the community policing team profile, and iv) selecting and training the community policing team.

Monthly meetings to identify local concerns

Once the safety partnership is set up, the partners meet once a month to produce an updated safety audit of the neighbourhood and identify the residents’ main security concerns. They then determine the police officers’ profiles that are best suited to the neighbourhood’s specific needs. This in turn guides their selection and training.

A particularly interesting aspect is that the training course includes not only the police officers, but also local stakeholders and representatives of local residents. This allows them to exchange early on and to better understand their respective needs and priorities, which is key to effectively co-produce community safety.

Once this participatory planning phase is completed, the new community policing team is ready to patrol daily their assigned neighbourhood and to network with the safety partnership.

This process ensures all the involved parties, in particular local residents, appropriate the community policing project, thus contributing to its sustainability over time. The responsibility for successful implementation on the ground is shared and thus the project belongs not only to the police, but also to the whole local partnership.

Focus on young people and on safe public spaces

However, there are key target groups that the LMP still needs to include in this process, namely young residents and urban planners. Indeed, it is necessary to develop effective strategies for working with young people and preventing risky behaviours, and on the other hand to foster collaboration between urban planners and the police when designing safe public spaces. In particular, the police’s perspective and know-how should be integrated into the planning of municipal urban projects.

The IcARUS project represents an opportunity for the Lisbon Municipal Police to further explore these issues. It will allow us to develop new tools and approaches, in particular in these two areas. Learning and sharing good practices with other European cities and academia through IcARUS will be crucial to equip the LMP with a set of innovative preventive tools that community policing teams can use to prevent risky behaviours among local youngsters and work more efficiently with urban planners when planning and designing safer public spaces.

Ensuring that IcARUS complies with high ethical and legal standards

The interest in ethics, in other words, critical reflection on how to differentiate what is right from wrong, what is proper from improper, or what is fair from unfair, to mention just a few of its main objectives, has accompanied humanity throughout its history. This has contributed to defining what traditionally has been called ethos, in other words the way of understanding life in society, the behaviour of the people who make it up or the laws that govern us.

A management plan for the project’s ethical aspects

The concept of ethics has been under study for years. In the Horizon 2020 programme all research and innovation activities must comply with ethical principles and relevant legislation at national, European and international level. Since 2014, ethics has become a cross-cutting/multidisciplinary and essential aspect within this programme, reaching its highest point from 2018 onwards, when the new regulations on privacy (General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR) in the European Union came into effect.
There are two main areas of reflection in the field of ethics. The first includes the more traditional or cross-disciplinary ethical issues, such as the participation of children, patients or vulnerable groups, the use of human embryonic stem cells, privacy and data protection issues or research on animals and non-human primates, among others.

The other focus area refers to the ethical problems arising from advanced technologies whose deep social impact we are not yet able to estimate precisely, as is the case with Artificial Intelligence, Big Data or Blockchain.
In projects such as IcARUS, in which research includes not only the more traditional academic aspects, but also the development of new tools and technologies as well as the participation of different European Union countries, it is essential to have a management plan or the project’s different ethical aspects, which must also be in harmony with the different national legal frameworks.

Detecting new ethical challenges and evaluating their social acceptability

In this sense, and looking into the activities that Plus Ethics will carry out to ensure the ethical approach of this project, it is important to keep in mind that the IcARUS partners will face complex legal ecosystems where values are constantly evolving, and therefore that their success depends on knowing how to make decisions and what to choose to adapt to the conditions of their environment.
To overcome these challenges, Plus Ethics will develop a document formalising the project’s values and as well as the researchers’ commitments as regards their behaviour. The aim is to achieve the most appropriate behaviours, notably concerning interpersonal relationships, and results by the implementation of adapted codes of good practices and a Privacy-by-Design model.
Furthermore, since IcARUS’ area of intervention is urban security, it is essential it includes the detection of new ethical challenges and the evaluation of their social acceptability.

With the aim of obtaining scientific evidence to allow us to detect new specific moral needs and the acceptability and social impact of the tools and methods developed by IcARUS, Plus Ethics will develop an empirical ethical study for the evaluation and identification of the different kinds of elements associated with new relevant ethical dimensions, as well as the social acceptability of the implementation of IcARUS.
In this regard, a survey will be designed to evaluate the main socio-economic, moral and legal factors underlying both the project’s design and its impact on society that reveal new aspects and challenges to be taken into consideration. The results will help us know how we should reorient the design of IcARUS in order to adjust it to the new ethical needs and increase
its social acceptability.
In summary, Plus Ethics is committed to developing ethics for real life, so the ultimate objective is to conduct a comprehensive Ethical, Legal and Societal Impact Assessment, which will ensure that the IcARUS outcomes do not infringe on the fundamental rights of subjects in relation to ethics and privacy.

Testing, implementation and evaluation of the tools

The six partner cities and their local security practitioners will test and implement the tools that were collectively selected in the previous stages of the project. Each tool is designed to respond to one of the four security challenges identified by the cities.
The cities will focus on the following areas:

• Designing and managing safe public spaces: City of Riga, City of Rotterdam;

• Preventing Radicalisation leading to violent Extremism: City of Nice, City of Stuttgart;

• Preventing Juvenile Delinquency: City of Lisbon;

• Preventing and reducing trafficking and organised crime at the local level: City of Turin.

The cities will integrate the chosen tools into their local strategy for their respective focus area and identify relevant local stakeholders which take part in the implementation process.
Local practitioners and stakeholders of all six cities will participate in training sessions, learning how to use the chosen tools. The six cities will lead demonstrations of the tools in their focus area, testing the selected practices within the realm of their local security contexts. The implementation will entail a continuous process of testing, adaptation and evaluation.
The cities will host learning sessions to present the results of their demonstrations to associated cities and experts. IcARUS will develop guidelines as well as training procedures to ensure the dissemination of the tested and evaluated tools and practices to other cities and local authorities.