DESURBS · Designing Safer Urban Spaces

The DESURBS project makes significant and novel advances with the following developments: 1) An urban space security event database that includes incidents or ‘near misses’ that have (or might have) resulted in injury or loss of life, damage to urban spaces, the auxiliary infrastructures supporting those spaces, or the surrounding natural environment 2) An integrated security and resilience (ISR) design framework that engages local stakeholders for identifying vulnerabilities and improving urban spaces with respect to security threats. 3) Comprehensive and generic supporting tools and methodologies including urban resilient design guidelines and quantitative risk and vulnerability assessment models, tools and technologies to facilitate the qualitative ISR assessment process. 4) A web-based Decision Support System Portal integrating the project’s outputs and including tailored visualization and mapping tools to help end users better understand the vulnerabilities and design possibilities. An objective rating scale for quantifying safety of different urban space designs is developed and used to show that DESURBS solutions result in urban spaces less prone for and less affected by security threats. Primary case studies with end users in Jerusalem in Israel, Nottingham in the UK and Barcelona in Spain inform the development process. The consortium consists of eight partners from five countries, and includes academic and research institutions as well as an SME for exploiting the project’s outputs among end-users and stakeholders. The SME partner is committed to maintaining, updating and hosting the DESURBS Decision Support System Portal and associated databases and tools after the lifetime of the project. An Advisory Board with members from governmental and municipal urban planning and preparedness organizations ensures that the DESURBS advances are relevant, exploitable and will have the desired impact for end users.