Illustration by an example ("Safe City")
Architecting complex systems

We're going to illustrate the approach to architectural design proposed in this article, taking as our opportunity or starting point: "Making a city safer" (known in Anglo-Saxon literature as "Safe City").

We won't go into this example in detail or depth, but will simply point out some initial thoughts and ideas. We'll try to show how to orientate the work to be done, how to tackle the architecture of such an opportunity, and how this approach is singular and different from a "classic" engineering or problem-solving approach.

First, a few words about the very notion of a "safer city". Recently, numerous initiatives have flourished under names such as "Smart City", "Digital City", or "Intelligent City", aiming to insert and use recent technologies to tackle various urban issues in a different mode. These so-called smart city initiatives tend...