Methods and Tools for a Strategic Approach to Urban Security
lysing the security situation of a given community. Other apps go further and directly address issues of insecurity and delinquency. The SafetiPin app (presented in chapter 4) allows users, mainly women, to share their perception of neighbourhoods and even to provide a smallscale safety audit by mapping the territory and its unsafe and safe areas, as seen by users. In cities such as Riga (Latvia), apps actually allow to directly report incidents.
2. The perspective of citizens Looking at how insecurity affects citizens is another, complementary way to understand the local security situation. By including the perspective of those affected, victimisation can be analysed, as well as the subjective dimensions of insecurity, such as the feeling of insecurity and fear of crime. The previous paragraph already explained how actual victimisation does not necessarily match the information authorities have about crime, and we showed how victimisation surveys can be a tool of choice in order to learn about actual victimisation in a given territory over a certain period of time. Now we want to focus particularly on the subjective dimension of insecurity and on how to measure it. Taking as a starting point the situation in which citizens find themselves, we will now discuss other target variables and policy goals apart from the absence of crime and feeling of insecurity. And in particular the more holistic idea of feeling secure or safe, the freedom of movement/being able to move about or stay undisturbed and safely in public spaces, and the opportunities for individual development, well-being or happiness. This section will examine which methods and tools would be necessary to operationalise and measure these concepts.
Getting knowledge on the feeling of insecurity The feeling of insecurity is of importance for its impact on the individual and collective well-being as well as for its economic and political consequences. While of course influenced by actual victimisation, the
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