Managing Safety and Security in the Smart City: Covid-19, Emergencies and Smart Surveillance

Abstract

The chapter examines the role and potential inherent in surveillance systems in smart cities today. The Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant restrictions to mobility, on the one hand, and the need for strengthened enforcement measures highlighted the already existing weaknesses and contingencies besetting surveillance in smart cities. The chapter makes a case that the adoption of smart city surveillance and infrastructure management systems may contribute to the improvement of safety and security in the smart city as well as to an overall enhancement of the smart city’s resilience. The discussion in this chapter focuses on the complex processes of data acquisition, data sharing, and data utilization to explain in which ways they all add to smart surveillance systems that—while aware of individual freedoms and privacy issues—contribute to the process of making a smart city resilient. To showcase the applicability of these findings, a wireless mesh network (WMN) surveillance system is presented.