Enzo Peduzzi, Director of Industry Affairs, Siemens Building Technologies, and President of Euralarm believes that the concept of the smart city provides one answer and its primary mission is to distribute existing resources efficiently. Networking individual supply systems through technical solutions should enable cities to respond dynamically to temporary demands, thus preserving their functionality.

Peuzzi finds that there is a clear correlation between the size of a city and its crime rate. 80 percent of recorded crimes occur in cities that account for a total of 50 percent of the world’s population. While that may be normal for tightly-packed urban areas, countermeasures are still needed to protect life and property as elementary freedoms and values.

The World Bank has estimated that, depending on the country, the total cost of crime can be as much as 25 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP). According to the European Commission, even the comparatively safe European Union spends at least five percent of its gross domestic product on costs resulting from crime and natural disasters.  If city planners fail to guarantee safety, security, and  supply, investors look elsewhere and highly qualified workers move to where they can expect the highest quality of life. To keep pace with global competition, cities have a vital interest in meeting these challenges.

The concept of the smart city promises to improve the quality of public and private services through digital technologies. At the same time, the city’s costs and consumption of resources drop.  Among the most pressing issues large cities face are the constant rise in traffic, energy use and emissions, the security and safety of the population, a reliable high-speed network, and finally, how to finance it all.

In spite of everything, however, there is no consistent definition of what a smart city really is. Different companies and business media have named initial indices. But those indices are as different as night and day, and hence inadequate in order to compare individual locations and their “smart city” qualities with any transparency. "But a city that is not safe and secure  cannot be smart. So the smart city approach must be seen more holistically" says Enzo Peduzzi, who believes that comparable and transparent benchmarks must be created while at the same time taking into account elementary safety and security standards.

Investors and experts need transparent key performance indicators to be able to assess smart cities and only then will it be possible to make systematic progress. Initial results are already in evidence. The Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a special UN organisation, offers technical reports and specifications, such as in the areas of cyber security and data protection. In addition, a number of different KPIs have been defined to help rank smart cities in areas such as telecommunications.

The ITU defines the smart city: “A smart sustainable city is an innovative city that uses information and communication technologies (ICTs) and other means to improve quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services, and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social and environmental aspects.”

Likewise at the international level, the International Standards Organization (ISO) has defined in ISO standard 37120 a total of 100 indicators for measuring city services and quality of life. 11 of them revolve around safety and security. This includes indicators that target security, fire safety and crisis management as well as water, energy and transportation. That makes ISO 37120 the only standard with KPIs appropriate for measuring the degree of security and safety in cities on a comparative basis. Approximately 250 cities in 80 countries are participating in the introduction of this standard, including London, Shanghai, Toronto and Rotterdam.

The fact that ISO 37120 includes diverse safety and security indicators is no accident. Siemens security systems specialists actively contributed to the development of the standard in the relevant work groups. This led to the development of measurable and meaningful security standards.

The city of the future needs smart, secure and resilient infrastructure solutions. An urban  community can only function properly if normal life can resume as quickly as possible after an incident, such as a major fire or terrorist attack. Ideally, however, such incidents should be prevented in the first place. This requires intelligent linking of individual subsystems and taking advantage of the resulting benefits. Interoperable systems offer safety, security and stability for critical infrastructures such as airports and data centres.  The security industry already has countless solutions in place to solve these challenges and the  task is to logically embed these solutions into a “smart city” context. This requires integrating a variety of systems – communication, automatic alarm, information and video surveillance systems – into a central command and control platform to ensur comprehensive and consistent incident response. Therein lies the heart of a smart, safe city.

Peduzzi concludes. "The smart city concept will revolutionise urban life much like the industrial revolution did. To shape this revolution successfully and for the good of all, it is absolutely essential to create the proper foundation from the start. Safety and security must not be left until the end of the process."