Safety of large city is a complex concept. It is determined the whole spectrum of factors in the broad sense, and its level can be right appraised only on the basis of multidimensional analysis of the social, economic and ecological state of city, technical state of objects and systems of municipal economy.
The problems of construction the effective system of providing large city's safety are varied, and the levels of their worked out are very different. One of the key tasks in this area is creation of the monitoring system which would provide a permanent checking feature after level of city's safety. Complication of its decision is determined complex character of problem, that requires collection and integration various, department disjoined information. To our opinion, determination of structure and maintenance of the data system, which are necessary for the estimation of city's safety, providing of their comparableness, organization of collection and regular actualization are the most weak spot in all informative providing system of the of decision for examined problem. As a rule, separate city services possess enough rich information of their departmental state of economy, however their informative systems usually are incompatible. The decision of integration problem of this information within the framewrk of the united monitoring system would allow doing an important step in the direction of increase of city's safety.
One of features of large cities consists in that they possess a difficult territorial structure, the separate elements of which can considerably differ in levels of production concentration, or in terms of life etc. Account of territorial aspect is sure needed in the estimation of large city's safety.
There are a lot of topical problems such as the task of measuring and estimation of terms and factors to determine levels of separate city's subsystems. At the same time there is a very actual problem of complex, integral estimation of city's safety as an integral socio-economic object. The process of its decision can be broken on the row of the stages.
1. An exposure of potential “areas of tension” and main destabilizing factors in different spheres of socio-economic development of city.
2. Forming of the system of indexes, which values are the indicators of socio-economic tension in the research areas of city's development.
3. Organization of the monitoring system, providing track after the dynamics of the chosen indexes' values and informative providing of the proper analytical and managing structures of city.
4. Development of the construction method of hierarchical structure for integral estimations of city's safety.
5. Creation of tools, providing possibility in the efficient mode to conduct the calculations of necessary estimations, carry out the analysis of the got results, forecast accordion tendencies, determine composition of elements of the socio-economic system cities the normal functioning of which is broken or the development's dynamics presents a most danger from point of origin possibilities of crisis situations, and to give out to city's authorities recommendation on prevention or softening of crisis situations.
Safety can be defined as a degree of accordance of the state of one or another system’s elements to the general system requirements, as ability of one element to provide and support optimum terms for the normal functioning and development other and whole systems.
In accordance with offered approach a city is examined as a regional socio-economic object, being unity of three subsystems: social, economic and ecological. Analysis of basic co-operations between these subsystems and between basic elements inside them allows exposing the potential symptoms of internal “unbalanced” of the city system, and to describe the construction of the proper hierarchical system of estimations and compare the normative (optimum) and actual states of separate subsystems and whole city, to estimate its security level in different aspects.
Each of estimations of lower level is built in starting statistical indexes, which, as a rule, are directly incommensurable between itself that requires the use of the special methods for their comparing. The developed tools allow using for this purpose the wide-spread methods of factor analysis and multidimensional metrical modeling of real situations, and also there is specially created method for the decision of estimation tasks of the socio-economic state of regional objects which is based on the using of rationings functions in combination with expert procedures.
The resulted estimations are dimensionless and assume subsequent integration. The procedures used in the process of construction of integral estimations expert are related to determination of relative importance of one or another parameters of the city's state for the estimation of his safety and task of possible scopes of their change. They are enough simple and clear that allows bringing over not only skilled specialists of city administrative structures to examination, but in a number of cases using for this purpose the results of public city opinion polls.
Most complication is appeared in the receipting of estimations, reflecting influence on city's safety of social factors. It is often very hard to do synonymous conclusions in relation to their influence on security level, even knowing one or another parameters of the state of social subsystem of city (for example, level of financial welfare of population). However necessity to have such information as “information to the reflection” and tools, allowing experts and analysts to take into account them at forming of general picture of the city's state, appears.
Application of the considered method allows building the system of integral estimations which open possibilities for the analysis of levels of different components of the city system securities, and also comparative estimation of influence of the real or hypothetically possible changes of separate directly incommensurable parameters, which characterize the different aspects of the city's state, on whole security level, but they carry conditional character up to a point. Such information can serve as reference-point for forming of priorities of realization the proper measures and programs and ground of variants of resources allocation between them.