Algiers Video Surveillance and Traffic Command Centre
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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The room that watches Algiers also times its traffic lights. Both sit inside the national police command centre at Sidi M'Hamed — 1,837 cameras running, 5,592 more planned, and no published audit of what any of it achieves.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is press reporting; no primary evaluation was located. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 5 more in Algiers · 🛡️ Safety & security guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects
Algiers is covered by a camera network operated by the Direction générale de la Sûreté nationale from a command-and-control centre in the Sidi M'Hamed administrative district. In April 2024 the interior ministry put 1,837 cameras in service and a further 5,592 planned for full coverage of the capital. The same centre also hosts the capital's traffic-decongestion plan and the intelligent traffic-light management system, so surveillance and signal timing are supervised from one room — one run by the national police, not by the city.
🎓 Lesson
Putting the camera grid and the traffic lights in the same command centre is efficient and makes the police the de facto traffic authority. It is also why the earlier city-led signal project stalled: the wilaya could install the hardware, but authorising the cameras was never its call. Every figure published about this network describes effort — cameras installed, cameras planned — and none describes result.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Algiers Video Surveillance and Traffic Command Centre” — Algiers, Algeria. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/algiers-dgsn-video-surveillance/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.