Smart cities – Smart risk?
D
efinitions of ‘smart cities’ are unclear: they often refer to webs of critical systems or are
seen as short or medium-term transformation programmes that adopt new technologies instead of focusing on the long-term goal of successfully integrating systems to achieve resilience.
If a developer is to adopt this longer-term strategic approach, an understanding of what makes a city ‘smart’ is clearer: the ability to collect, integrate and use information from their critical infrastructure and systems allows the developer, and the city, to optimise resource usage, to plan critical interventions, to respond to incidents, and to support post-event recovery.
How will risk differ, if at all, in a ‘smart’ city?
Increasing reliance upon centralised information management and storage, data ownership, automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, data-privacy, and regulation legislation, will change the way society functions. These advances could act as a risk enabler. New technologies will challenge our understanding of how smart cities operate and how we can respond to threats in the most effective way.
Smart city information networks are likely to attract traditional, physical threats, both criminal and terrorist in nature. But nothing is, at this stage, unmanageable, if effective risk management programmes are in place.
Smart risk management: Implementing resilience plans
An effective implementation structure should consider the urban environment in terms of both the ‘characteristics’ and the ‘performance’.
However, developers must start with the threat environment, aiming to:
• Understand the threat and risk exposure
• Develop a national resilience strategy with ‘smart city’ concepts integrated
• Adopt a requirement-led approach to the collection of data to inform decision making
• Develop a ‘smart city’ security and resilience master plan
Command and control
The success of any smart city initiative will be determined by the effectives of the command and control networks and systems. The use of AI-based data analytics, machine learning and self- healing adaptive networks will be essential to ensure that data can be analysed rapidly.
Data from seemingly unrelated systems can be integrated and analysed, providing indicators of issues, incidents, or crises: this could include insights into water and power usage, telecoms networks, social media, or even surge demands on services like Uber. The rapid advancement in technology in the last thirty years shows no sign of slowing and we are at an exciting dawn for the future of our urban centres.
Whether it is autonomous ground and air vehicles or self-directed, independent machine-based decision making, our cities will look very different thirty years from now.
If you would like to learn more about smart cities and how to build resilience into the smart city agenda, visit Control Risks at MIPIM in Cannes from 10-13 March 2020, stand number P-1. E 25.
www.controlrisks.com
18 © CI TY S ECURI TY MAGAZ INE – S PRING 2020
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