This is a quite surprising fact that the global urban population has taken over the rural population. According to the records of the year 2007, the two groups were split nearly 50/50, with around 3.3 billion people apiece. In today’s date, the percentage of people who live in the urban areas has grown to be over 55% and is expected to reach 68% by the year 2050. It is because of this trend that many of the world’s largest cities have become home to millions of people.
Due to this increasing density in the urban areas, different
businesses, households and also governments have installed numerous security
cameras which could serve many purposes but the mainly being crime protection.
To get a hold of the scale of this surveillance, data from a recent report by
Comparitech is taken which helps to visualize the most surveilled cities in the
world.
The List of most surveilled cities
|
Rank |
City |
Population |
Number of Cameras |
Cameras per 1,000 people |
|
1 |
Indore, India |
3.2M |
200,600 |
63 |
|
2 |
Hyderabad, India |
10.5M |
440,299 |
42 |
|
3 |
Delhi, India |
16.3M |
436,600 |
27 |
|
4 |
Chennai, India |
11.5M |
282,126 |
25 |
|
5 |
Singapore |
6.0M |
108,981 |
18 |
|
6 |
Moscow, Russia |
12.6M |
213,000 |
17 |
|
7 |
Baghdad, Iraq |
7.5M |
120,000 |
16 |
|
8 |
London, UK |
9.5M |
127,373 |
13 |
|
9 |
St. Petersburg, Russia |
5.5M |
70,000 |
13 |
|
10 |
Los Angeles, U.S. |
3.9M |
34,959 |
9 |
Figures rounded
The top four cities on this list belong to India, the
world’s second largest country by population. The more the population, the
higher is the ratio of crime so the surveillance cameras play their role in the
country’s efforts to reduce crimes especially against women.
Further down the list are cities from a variety of
countries. One of these cities is Moscow, the capital of Russia, which has
expanded its use of surveillance cameras in recent years. Given the country’s
track record of human rights violations, activists are worried that facial
recognition technology could become a tool of spreading malice.
The only American city on the list is Los Angeles, which
contains some of the country’s wealthiest neighborhoods and municipalities.
That includes Beverly Hills, which according to the Los Angeles Times, has over
2,000 cameras for its population of 32,500. That means there are about 62 cameras
per 1,000 people, denoting that Beverly Hills would rank at #2 in the global
ranking if it were listed as a separate entity.
Surveillance in China
According to the estimates of the year 2021 by IHS Markit,
there are over 1 billion surveillance cameras installed worldwide. The firm
believes that 54% of the cameras are located in different cities of China.
Let’s make an assumption that China has 540 million cameras installed and
divide this number amongst the population that is of 1.46 billion, we can say
that there are 373 cameras per 1,000 people (figures have been rounded). This
approach has a limitation that it assumes that all communities in China are
urban. Well, which is not true.
China’s extensive use of cameras and facial recognition
technology has been broadly acknowledged by the media. These networks support China’s
social credit program, which gives local governments an extraordinary amount of
supervision over its citizens. For example, China’s camera networks can be used
to verify ATM withdrawals, and are so strong that they permit access into
homes, and can be used to even openly humiliate people for petty offences like
jaywalking.
Infographic by: visualcapitalist
