FreiburgRESIST

Freiburg RESIST – “Safely living“ in Freiburg

FreiburgRESIST is a transdisciplinary project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF). The project is improving existing security measures by developing a resilience management system for preparing and conducting large-scale events. The synergy of the local perspectives of involved authorities and citizens, and insights from security and resilience research aim at ensuring efficient communication during the event, and in potentially dangerous situations. RESIST is coordinated by the city of Freiburg, Germany and has been granted with € 9.9 Mio of funding after a successful application within the SifoLIFE competition on civil security measures. The Centre for Security and Society contributes to the project with research at the cross points of ethical-legal evaluations, sociological research, and the development of quantitative methods to measure the system’s effect on local resilience. The resilience management system is envisioned to be used flexibly across all temporal dimensions: In anticipatory planning of major events, during potential evacuations in direct response to risk and danger, and in the follow-up evaluation of crisis situations. In these functions, the resilience management system seeks to be attentive to the needs of all involved parties like police authorities, fire brigades, but also people involved on-site. Although spatially tailored to the specific situation of Freiburg old town’s narrow alleys and crowded life, the partners of FreiburgRESIST envision to create a prototype for municipal security management adaptable to various organizational and geographic contexts.

Responsibilities of the Centre for Security and Society (CSS)

The Centre for Security and Society will contribute to the project with its expertise in the fields of applied ethics, sociology and the research on resilience. Ethics and data protection will be anchored in the functioning of the system through privacy-by-design and ethics-by-design. The RESIST’s ethical impact will be monitored and assessed reiteratively throughout the project’s development phase. By co-designing live trials and pilots, The CSS team will evaluate RESIST's security concepts in terms of their plausibility, feasibility for those involved and, finally, their potential for social acceptance. For quality assurance, the CSS research team analyses the resilience cycles of RESIST and will formulate suggestions for further optimization of the security management system.