Today, urban planning and safety work have become closely intertwined [13]. The concept of the safe city appears in the literature; however, this concept is not analyzed as often as the smart city concept. In some publications, the concept of the safe city is treated as one of the systems that make up the smart city [6,14]. However, some researchers have come to the conclusion that this narrows the issue and that it needs to be expanded. They argue that the safe city should be treated as equivalent to the smart city, with the two concepts being intertwined.

While the subjects of research interest on smart cities include using modern technologies to improve residents’ quality of life, increasing the efficiency of city management, improving the quality of provided urban services, and increasing the city’s competitiveness [1,15,16,17], the safe city concept covers issues related to the provision of civil protection, property, the environment, and infrastructure. It should be noted, however, that actions to create safe urban space not only use modern technologies but also older solutions that may prove useful [8].

Often, most works on safe cities only refers to crime reduction issues, e.g., reduction in murder or rape [18,19,20]. One of the most reliable indicator of a safe city is the number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants (for example lists drawn up by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). Meanwhile, today, urban safety is a result of many complex factors. These include a lack of opportunities, widening inequity, territorial segregation, economic polarization, poor urban planning, and social exclusion, as well as drugs, guns, organized crime, and poor crime prevention [21].

As Gaspar Viega points out, a senior director at Alcatel-Lucent specializing in public safety: “If you think about safety only in terms of reducing crime, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the city will be kept safe. For example, you can look at casualties from poor traffic management and auto accidents. It’s also about the level of pollution in a city. This is how a safe city should be analyzed” [22]. Concepts of the safe city include a wide range of aspects and activities linked to public spaces, from crime prevention to physical protection of the environment, to accessibility, and to institutional and organizational aspects [23]. Ristvej, Lacinák, and Ondrejka (2020) propose that the concept of the safe city should include the following components: intelligent safety technologies for surveillance, search, detection, and identification; healthcare; relevant data and centers for data processing to administer the city’s cloud; methodology of activities; informational and cybernetic safety; design; intelligent technologies of crisis management to support decision making, provide early warnings, and to monitor and forecast emergencies and environmental situations; security components of individual systems in the safe city; and centrally managed technologies for police and integrated rescue systems [8].

The complexity of urban safety issues can also be seen in the number of factors that are taken into account when creating an index of safe cities. The list is based on 57 indicators grouped into four blocks: digital security, infrastructure security, health security, and personal security. Tokyo, Singapore, Osaka, Amsterdam, and Sydney [24] were considered the safest cities in 2019. This situation changed in 2021 [25]. Table 2 presents a list of the safest cities by block.

Ensuring a safe urban space is a condition for the life and work of a city’s inhabitants, the protection of their rights and freedoms, and the effective functioning of the economy, urban space, transport, and communications. All the key stakeholders in cities (police, fire/medical emergency services, city government, homeland security, transit, and utilities) should provide an effective safety or security response to any situation affecting their citizens or organizations [26].

To sum up, in this article, the concept of a safe city should be understood as a city that is focused on increasing the level of security and improving the quality of life of its inhabitants, using both innovative and traditional tools and cooperation with stakeholders, especially in the areas of digital security, infrastructure security, health, security, and personal security. According to the authors safe city stakeholders are all entities (people, communities, institutions, organizations, offices) that can influence this city or a specific project implemented in it through their rights, obligations or interests.

The term stakeholder comes from the English word stake, which is often translated as input, participation in an interest, or involvement in an aspect of an activity. The term also refers to the risk incurred, but also to cooperation, need and claim, demand, requirement, knowledge, expectation, or the legitimacy of demanding a certain commitment [27,28].

One can find references from the 1950s in the literature on the subject. The concept of the stakeholder theory can be understood as the fact that companies are responsible not only for the interests of shareholders, but also for their employees, customers, and society [29]. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary presents a definition from the 19th century which defines a stakeholder as a person who holds the stakes in bets on various games, while the use of the word stakeholder in financial literature began in the middle of the 20th century [30,31].

However, it is accepted that the contemporary concept of stakeholders was first used in 1963 by the Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International), which defined stakeholders as “groups without whose support an organization could not exist”.

Referring to an internal SRI memo, Ansoff (1965) [32] highlighted the issue of corporate responsibility towards stakeholders, defining the concept of stakeholder management as a method of balancing claims by different stakeholder groups. Moreover, Ansoff recognized Abrams’ (1954) [29], as well as Cyert and March’s (1963) [33], views on stakeholders and their goals, but rejected the theory in favor of a view that divided goals into the “economic” and “social”. A “stakeholder” refers to one who has an interest and, according to Freeman and Reed (1983) [34] and Argandoña (1998) [35], the term refers to “all those who have an interest in the organization (so that the company, in turn, can have an interest in satisfying their satisfaction and requirements)”. However, it also includes those who have an interest, according to Rhenman (1968) and Frederick (1998) [36,37]: “all those who belong to an environment that is interested in what the organization does”.

In the literature, other researchers indicate additional characteristics of stakeholders; e.g., they should be treated as strictly external groups to the organization, which is part of an environment to which specific risk weights are assigned [28,38,39,40]. Moreover, Slatter underlines in his research that all stakeholder groups generate both risks and benefits, so it is important to identify risks [38,40]. Table 3 presents a chronological list of stakeholder definitions presented in the literature. The table catalogues the best-known stakeholder terms, including the 1984 Freeman [41] definition, which has been adopted by many other scientists. Different authors adopt different definitions to create an interdisciplinary debate and encourage others to perform their own research.

It should be noted that there is a consensus in the literature on the definition of the concept of stakeholders [48], but there is still an ongoing discussion among management theorists and practitioners about who is and who is not a stakeholder, about their actual or potential impact on the organization, and their devision [64]. Traditionally, internal stakeholders (e.g., staff, management) are most often differentiated from external stakeholders (e.g., customers, suppliers), thereby representing conflicting objectives [65]. Different studies and interpretations have evidenced the many divisions and categories of stakeholders.

Various approaches are used in the process of developing the division and description of stakeholders:

• Classification of stakeholders based on the strength of influence, legitimacy, and legitimacy of the relationship with the organization and urgency of the request [49,62];
• Systematization of stakeholders’ expectations based on the hierarchy of values and Key Performance Areas (KPA) [66];
• Distribution of stakeholders according to potential threat or willingness to cooperate [67];
• Assessment of the awareness, support, and influence of leading stakeholders on communication strategy and evaluation of stakeholder satisfaction [68];
• Stakeholder analysis as an assessment of the actual rather than the formal power arrangement, related to the management of the company or to the management of the project and its environment [69,70];
• Determining stakeholder identification, evaluation, and engagement [28,71];
• Stakeholder Circle method, which is a multi-dimensional map showing stakeholder proximity to the project, degree of impact strength, scale and scope of impact, or a three-dimensional stakeholder cube defining the profile of involvement of all groups in the project [27,72];
• A method of stakeholder classification due to the complexity of several factors, such as the probability of response, the strength of the impact, the strength of the interest, the risks incurred, or the position of commitment taken [27,62].

Analyzing all the divisions of stakeholders present in the literature, it can be observed that the process of adaptation of organizations, such as cities, to changes in the market is one of the most important aspects of activity. Under the conditions of a crisis, it is essential to take into account the involvement and benefits of stakeholders and build loyalty relationships with them in the local environment, which can be helpful in creating security in the city. To sum up, without this cooperation, long-term development and cooperation based on safety is not possible; therefore, very often, the value of the city is determined by the proper choice of sources creating value and influence, the involvement of stakeholders, and the proper management of relations with them.

A distribution of stakeholders by their level of influence and level of involvement in the organization is presented in Table 4. It is worth noting that the level of engagement and the level of impact on security, and thus the resulting results, are different for each interest group [73].

With reference to the key stakeholders in creating a safe city, it should be noted that several types of security for its residents should be secured—primarily digital security, infrastructure security, health security, and personal security. Therefore, it is important to know which leaders have been chosen by the citizens, whether these leaders are supported by specific political parties and city councils, whether the law is enforced by bodies that do not abuse their power, whether people working in offices are competent, whether the information technology used is safe for everyone, and what actions are taken by managers in cooperation with stakeholders in the policies for creating a safe city.