One of the first things that I noticed when I visited Rio de Janeiro a few years ago was the clear fixation on safety and security. There are gates and cameras everywhere. And the guidance you tend to receive from the locals usually resolves around how to stay safe. Don't wander around at night. Be careful when you take out your phone. Be mindful of certain areas. You know, those sorts of things.

Of course, you never really know how dangerous a city is because it's one of those things that's impractical to test. You're not going to wander around dark places just to see what the probability of being robbed is. The more sensible thing to do is simply believe what people are telling you and you observe the cues scattered around the built environment.

The result is a general sense of anxiety. You're not quite sure if all the gates and cameras are truly necessary, but their mere presence makes you believe that they might be. I mean, why else would they be so pervasive? Or, could it be that people are overshooting with their investments in safety and security because, well, fear and paranoia are strong motivators?

I was reminded of all of this as I read through Ed Chartlon's recent book review of, Panic City: Crime and Fear Industries in Johannesburg. The title of his review is Anxious Urbanisms, and I think that's a good way of describing some of these phenomenons. It's an urbanism of uncertainty. I haven't read the book (yet), but it's an interesting topic.

So I will leave you all with this excerpt from the review:

Ultimately, what we might take from Panic City, then, is less a comprehensive sociology of crime in the city and more a method of affective analysis. What the book provides is a sense of the ways in which the emotional sphere organises space, how feelings like anxiety or fear or panic, currently widely distributed across the world, materialise themselves, architecturally and politically. If immunity is anything like security, Murray offers us a cautionary tale. For wherever uncertainty thrives, so does the tendency towards paranoid thinking—which is to say, a contagion of a different sort, one that licences regimes of suspicion, self-protection and individual security, and all at the eventual cost of collective wellbeing and interdependence. 

This is a city metric I haven't seen before. City Observatory recently looked at the number of police officers (public) and security guards (private) per capita across American cities. They also ask a bunch of interesting questions. Why do some cities have far fewer police officers? Is high security an indicator for "anti-social capital?" (Social norms aren't encouraging people to behave.) And do some cities simply have more cops because it is perceived to be necessary?

Here is what they found:

The average is about 3.3 police officers per 1,000. And in each case, city is defined as the metro area. The study relies on census data and, if we're being precise, the data represents where people live as opposed to where they work. So some cities could be reporting a lower number simply because police officers tend to live outside of the metro area -- perhaps because of housing costs. Either way, it's interesting to consider why some cities spend a lot more on security than others and why Miami has so many security guards.

Chart: City Observatory

I learned today that the hard hat will celebrate its 100th anniversary this year.

Patented in 1919, the hard hat was invented by a man named Edward W. Bullard (though his father had already been making protective leather caps for the mining industry). Edward had just returned to the United States after World War I and he began to wonder why construction workers weren't wearing helmets like the one he had been wearing overseas. So he decided to make one.

Edward's first product was called the Hard Boiled Hat, and it was made out of steamed canvas and leather. Similar to today, an early version of the hat featured a "suspension system," which created an air cavity between head and helmet and cushioned any blows to the head. This overarching design approach hasn't really changed all that much over the years, but Bullard's hats did go from canvas to aluminum (1938) and then to plastic (1950). Plastic is, of course, cheaper to produce.

Supposedly, the first designated "Hard Hat Area" in the US was the Golden Gate Bridge site, which started construction in 1933. This should give you a sense of the hard hat's adoption curve. It seemingly took well over a decade for construction sites to start mandating their usage, and even then it doesn't appear to have been ubiquitous.

The company -- which was founded in 1898 in San Francisco -- is now in its fifth generation of family ownership, according to the New York Times.

Photo by Guilherme Cunha on Unsplash