About the report

The Safe Cities Index 2019 is a report from The Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by NEC Corporation. The report is based on the third iteration of the index, which ranks 60 cities across 57 indicators covering digital security, health security, infrastructure security and personal security. The index was devised and constructed by Vaibhav Sahgal and Divya Sharma Nag. The report was written by Paul Kiestra and edited by Naka Kondo and Chris Clague.

Key findings

Tokyo again comes first overall, and Asia-Pacific cities make up six of the top ten

Key findings

The results in individual index pillars show the importance of getting the basics right.

Key findings

Despite having many elements, city safety is indivisible.

Key findings

Higher income sets apart those with better results, but in ways that are less than obvious.

Key findings

Transparency matters as much as wealth to urban security.

Key findings

Transparency and a new understanding of the elements of urban safety are essential to resilience.

Findings from the index were supplemented with wide-ranging research and in-depth interviews with experts in the field. Our thanks are due to the following people (listed alphabetically by surname) for their time and insights:

Siddharth Agarwal, director, Urban Health Resource Centre
Alioune Badiane, president, The Urban Think Tank Africa (TUTTA), Senegal
Thomas Bollyky, senior fellow, Global Health, US Council on Foreign Relations
Gregory Falco, cyber research fellow, Stanford University
Emmanuel Grégoire, deputy mayor, City of Paris
Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe, former commissioner, London Metropolitan Police
Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez, senior director, Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice, World Bank
Elizabeth Johnston, executive director, European and French Forums for Urban Security
Yuriko Koike, governor, Tokyo
Victor Lam, chief information officer, Government of Hong Kong
Esteban Leon, chief of risk reduction unit and head of the city resilience profiling programme, UN-Habitat
Fumihiko Nakamura, vice-president, Yokohama National University
Adie Tomer, leader, Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative, Brookings Institution
Gino Van Begin, secretary-general, ICLEI

Executive summary

Humanity is a predominantly urban species, with over 56% of us living in cities. By 2050 68% will do so, reflecting a speed of urbanisation even faster than previously predicted. This process is occurring most visibly in developing countries, some of which struggle to deal with the extent of change. Indeed, the challenges of urbanisation, if unmet, can entail substantial human and economic risks. On the other hand, if they are effectively addressed, the growth of cities may become an essential part of how emerging economies find a way to catch up to those in more developed countries and how humanity as a whole creates more sustainable ways to live.

Thus, urban management will play a fundamental role in defining the quality of life of most human beings in the coming years. A key element of this will be the ability of cities to provide security for their residents, businesses and visitors. Accordingly, The Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by NEC Corporation, maintains the Safe Cites Index (SCI)—a detailed benchmarking tool that measures a wide range of security inputs and results.

The SCI has always reflected the multifaceted nature of urban safety, with indicators divided into four distinct pillars: digital, infrastructure, health and personal security. The 2019 version (SCI2019)—which this report accompanies the release of—benefits from a major revision designed to better measure “urban resilience”. This concept—the ability of cities to absorb and bounce back from shocks—has had an increasing influence on thinking in urban safety over the last decade, especially as policymakers worry about the implications of climate change. Rather than trying to create a fifth distinct pillar of security, the index now measures new areas within the other four of particular relevance to resilience such as disaster-risk informed development policies.

The key findings from the expanded and updated SCI this year include:

Tokyo again comes first overall, and Asia-Pacific cities make up six of the top ten, but geographic region does not have a statistical link with results. As it did in the previous SCI, Tokyo has the highest overall score in our index. Other cities in the top ten are Singapore (2nd), Osaka (3rd), Sydney (5th), Seoul (tied 8th) and Melbourne (10th). Two European cities are in this group, Amsterdam (4th) and Copenhagen (tied 8th), while two from America complete it, Toronto (6th) and Washington, DC (7th). However, a closer look at the important correlates of security, discussed below, found city safety is not related to global region: Tokyo, Singapore and Osaka lead because of their specific strengths, not because they happen to be in Asia.

The results in individual index pillars show the importance of getting the basics right. Leo Tolstoy famously wrote, “All happy families are alike: each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” A look at the top five cities in each pillar—digital, health, infrastructure and personal security—yields a similar message. In each area, leading cities got the basics right, be it easy access to high-quality healthcare, dedicated cyber-security teams, community-based police patrolling or disaster continuity planning. Even among the leaders, the weaknesses of those not in first place tended to vary from city to city. Those who want to improve need to get the basics in place and then consider their own specific situations.

Digital security
Leading in digital security are: Tokyo, Singapore, Chicago, Washington DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco
Health security
Leading in health security are: Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam and Stockholm
Infrastructure security
Leading in infrastructure security are: Singapore, Osaka, Barcelona, Tokyo, Madrid
Personal security
Leading in personal security are: Singapore, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Wellington

Looking at the index results as a whole provides a number a key insights into urban security:

- Despite having many elements, city safety is indivisible. The different kinds of security covered by the index require distinct interventions, often by different agencies or actors, such as health systems for medical care and police for public order. Amid this diversity, though, statistical analysis of the SCI2019 results shows that performance in each of the pillars correlates very closely with that in every other. In short, cities tend to do well, middling or poorly across every security pillar rather than having good results in one and lagging in others. This is consistent with expert commentary that, rather than representing clearly distinct fields, different kinds of safety are thoroughly intertwined and mutually supportive. Service planning and provision must take this into account. Technological investments for infrastructure, for example, can bring health benefits, while enhanced cyber-security will protect the ability of the city to provide every kind of security, not just protection of digital systems.

- The SCI2019 results are not evenly spread but have a large number of cities clustered at the top, with the rest showing much more variation in scores. Just 10 points separate the overall scores of the top 24 cities, while the following 36 are over 40 points apart. This does not mean that the differences in the leaders’ group are unimportant. Instead, on a scale that can measure every index city, the large group of top cities are much more similar to each other than to those lagging behind.

- Higher income sets apart those with better results, but in ways that are less than obvious. The index scores correlate strongly with average income in the cities. In part this reflects the need to invest sometimes substantial amounts in certain areas essential to security, such as high-quality infrastructure or advanced healthcare systems. The more surprising contribution to this correlation is that, across our index, those cities with less wealth also tend to lack policy ambition. As one interviewee told us, the biggest challenges facing Sub-Saharan African cities reflect a lack of effective planning and management. Low-hanging (or at least relatively low-cost) fruit exist, which all cities that have not already done so should attempt to harvest. Doing so requires focus and perseverance.

- Transparency matters as much as wealth to urban security. Levels of transparency in cities, as measured by the World Bank’s Control of Corruption metric, correlated as closely as income with index scores. Correlation does not guarantee causation, but interviewed experts stressed the many ways that transparency and accountability are essential in every pillar of urban security, from building safer bridges to developing the trust needed for relevant stakeholders to share information on cyber-attacks. Well-governed, accountable cities are safer cities.
- Transparency and a new understanding of the elements of urban safety are essential to resilience. Those parts of our index most directly related to resilience indicate that, as with safety more generally, higher incomes are associated with better preparedness. This is unsurprising: technologically advanced infrastructure, for example, if appropriately deployed, can be an important contributor to resilience. In this case, though, transparency and accountability seem to be of even greater importance: a poorly governed city will almost never be resilient. Although not able to offer a general prescription for resilience, our research points to a number of key elements, including joint planning by all relevant stakeholders, both governmental and non-governmental, to prepare for shocks; a new understanding of infrastructure that uses a city’s natural assets as tools to enhance its ability to absorb shocks; and the importance of promoting social connectedness among citizens in creating communities that will work together in a crisis.

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Safe Cities

Index 2019

Safe Cities Index 2019

Urban security and resilience in an interconnected world

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