Smart Urban Security and Event Resilience (SURE) Journal 1: How Tampere is intervening in the area of urban security and daily city resilience through the lens of event management

SURE stands for Smart Urban Security and Events Resilience. Through focusing on events taking place in Tampere Central Square, the (newly constructed) private Uris Live Arena and Tampere Ratina Stadium the project aims to:

• increase cross-sectoral preparedness to threats against public spaces and other urban security risks,
• advance Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology around pubic surveillance and
• improve risk management and reduce vulnerabilities in daily life.

Why events?

Events, whether small or large, constitute a key component of city-life and when large enough they can truly disrupt everyday life and certainly pose key security challenges ranging from standard crowd-management, traffic flow, accidents, terrorist attacks or other crises such as health risks (covid-19 pandemic) and environmental hazards.

Events are related to city branding and tourist attraction and as such a smooth event management can be a key factor for the image and the development of a city.

Events can often be a central proposition for economic development. Event organisation is linked to a number of professions and economic and social activities and are thus an accelerator of urban economy.

The project advances the goals of the European Urban Agenda for improved public space safety and digitisation. In the context of the handling of the COVID-19, public space and livability became a critical necessity whereas public space has been re-discovered as a valued commodity for free and safe dwelling.

The project at a glance:

Aiming at improving the security and accessibility of events from the point of view of visitors and organisers, a completely new AI system is developed in order to facilitate information sharing, mobility during large events, risk management and risk minimisation. In addition to the new AI system, a blueprint for improved coordination between relevant stakeholders is serving as a change management manual for improved events delivery and risk management.

Project Partners:

The project has three dimensions to directly address the above crosscutting challenges:

• A governance and change management dimension that aims to further the digitisation and coordination of stakeholders from the public, private and social spheres who are involved in events’ management.
• A technological dimension that aims to create a new AI-based solution for risk mitigation, crisis-management and event management. The SURE product will be directed to visitors, event organisers and crisis management stakeholders alike.
• A social dimension. The key challenge of SURE is how to efficiently manage large crowd-concentration and event-related urban security in a complex and evolving urban environment without over-securing sensitive urban areas which may cause the undermining of the citizens’ sense of security. In parallel SURE is touching upon the question of event-policy development and social spatial justice including the free use of public space and accessibility.

For its delivery the project aims

• to improve the security and risk planning coordination systems between the key stakeholders typically involved in event management,
• to develop a new artificial intelligence (AI) product for surveillance and risk management adapted to the European market
• and to match it to a geolocation tool or application for the general public to be used for optimal experiences and safety in the course of an event.