Smart Cities Initiative – Viseum Safe Cities

Which comes first? A Smart City or a Safe City? Some Smart Cities Initiatives believe that Safety and Security is merely one equal subset of the Smart City Concept. Viseum believes that public safety and security come first. Without safety, people care little for anything else. They contribute little to a smart city.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow would certainly agree. Maslow posited that people have a basic Hierarchy of Needs. At the basic level, those needs are physiological and fundamental to survival (food, water, shelter, etc). However, immediately after those basic needs, in Maslow’s opinion, came the need for safety and security. People must first feel safe and provided for. Only then do they contribute to wider society and improve life in their home town.

Our work around the world supports this. The safe city capability must come first. Consider the many national conflicts, civil wars and revolutions around the world. A government in conflict can lose the ability to provide for its citizens. Those citizens then focus only on food, water and shelter for their families. With the rule of law removed, the law of the jungle is never long in being established.

Conventional video surveillance and overloaded staff cannot cope with these demands. Theft, looting and conflict then flare up. People struggle to secure the basics they need. This can very quickly lead to economic damage and national decline. Conversely, when people feel that they and their families are safe, they aspire to greater things. As they strive for self-improvement and greater prosperity, they make an economic contribution to their home city and society.

Smart Cities Initiative

Stuart Thompson, President of the Viseum UK Group and CEO of Viseum International Limited, saw this in the year 2000. Conventional video surveillance had failed to deliver the safety people hoped for, at home or abroad. He invented the Intelligent 360 Security Camera and Intelligent Video Management System to address these shortcomings. That work led to Community SafetyWatch, arguably the forerunner to safe cities.

Within this blog, we will be considering the various challenges posed in delivering a Safe City, so that it can become a Smart City. We will also report on Viseum work in safe city projects around the world, covering mobility, transport, structures and physical infrastructure, to name but a few. A city that uses Viseum AI Situational Awareness soon becomes a Smart City. Authorities learn to use its spare capacity to manage infrastructure, transport and the municipal workforce.