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On CPTED - Crime Prevention through Urban Design

Content:

The concept of CPTED

The scientific problem

The political problem

The implementation problem

Final remarks

The concept of crime prevention through environmental planning and design

There is not in the Europe any single or common definition of crime preventive planning and design that is agreed upon, but crime prevention can generally be defined as both the purpose of reducing actual crime and the increase in the feeling of safety and security.

Crime prevention, as a whole, is a wide concept that covers law and order, social and educational policies, and intervention in the built urban environment. It includes e.g. the police, the justice system, surveillance systems and guards, local co-operation between schools, social authorities and the police, and technical crime prevention of different kind - everything from locks, bolts and alarms on doors and windows to careful urban planning.

The means of technical crime prevention concerns the spatial structuring, the visual impression, and the robustness of buildings, components and furniture.

The best effect is gained by combined efforts, which does not narrowly focus on technical security gadgets.

Crime preventive planning and design rises two major questions, on which there internationally not yet are any agreement.

1. The first major question concerns the 'open society'. This is a question of whether the main focus should be on gated and guarded communities and their equivalent in larger buildings - or whether the main focus should be on keeping the built environment as open and accessible as possible. In the last case the amount of physical barriers and formalised surveillance should be reduced to the necessary minimum. With an 'open society' approach crime prevention can never be seen as a something absolute, which aims to stop all and every crime. This will anyhow most often will be an unrealistic goal. Instead crime prevention in this perspective have the aim to reduce to some degree the level of crime, especially situationally conditioned crime.

2. The second major question concerns the prevention of actual crime as a starting point in crime prevention vs. a starting point aiming at increasing the feeling of safety. In other words: the focus on real, statistically measurable risks of crime on the one hand and the focus on perceptions of fear on the other.

Crime prevention must necessarily differentiate between these two aims. In real life there is often a large difference between experienced or imagined safety on the one hand and the actual, real safety on the other - even if uncomplete crime statistics are taken into account. The image of crime reported through the mass media often gives a very different impression of risk compared to real statistical crime rates - different risks for different groups of the population, in different places and at different times. The feeling of safety or unsafety is to some extent age and gender dependent - sometimes proportional in reverse to the real risks.

From the point of view of efficiency - the cost-benefit analyses of crime prevention, it is improvements in the real safety, that is in the immediate focus. Reality is more complex, though. The knowledge about the actual reduction of crime through different crime prevention measures and in different circumstances is still rather limited. This might make cost-benefit analyses dubious. The feeling of safety often can not be kept out of the analyses either, as the feeling of safety effects the use of public space and therefor also the natural surveillance that takes place. A city and a built environment that feels safe can also be considered a democratic right and a resource, which everyone ought to have.

A narrow focus on the cost-benefit of crime prevention is also difficult to handle in isolation. From a society point of view, safety and unsafety related to crime prevention would also have to be considered in a wider perspective on risks of different kinds: traffic safety, prevention of diseases, secure supplies, etc. The risk of bodily damage in traffic accidents is e.g. about 10 times higher than the risk of criminal bodily assaults in public space or in drinking places. Human beings have always lived in risk societies, but the specific focus on different risks seems to change quite much with time, place and/or the person.

In some of the European countries (especially in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Austria) the question of the feeling of safety is in focus as much as the actual safety, and in these countries it is considered possible to combine actual crime prevention with an increase in the feeling of safety.

This supposedly can be done from a point of departure related to the experience of well-being in the urban environment. A result will be more populated public spaces, which both can reduce crime and increase the feeling of safety. The focus on well-being also means, that the environment does not get a hard and repulsive expression, which by itself can increase the feeling of unsafety.

The question of the humane contemporary city is quite complicated and ought not to be discussed as either /or. Several approaches can be reasonable at once and the possibility of choice can be a quality in itself. This initially said, the question of CPTED today includes 3 major sets of problems: 1) the scientific problem; 2) the political problem; 3) the implementation problem.

1) The scientific problem:

- the spatial and environmental mapping and analyses techniques of the manmade world have been too primitive until recently

- the cleaning of the spatial- and environmental analyses of social differences is often difficult and the availability of social data in small units are also often restricted for reasons of integrity of people

- the lack of crime data - or more often - the imprecise character of much crime data especially concerning the exact location of the crime, the low frequency of some important kinds of crime (which makes valid statistical analyses of the precise relations to environmental factors difficult), and the non-digital form of crime and location data until recently that have demanded a lot of manual research work, when studies have been carried through

- the question of displacement of crime in space and to other kinds of crime (some - but not 100 percent - of the crimes in an area will 'move' or 'change' if crime prevention efforts in the area are strengthened)

- the difficulty of comparative studies because of the large number of factors involved ( e. g. is the number of crimes related to the design of locking systems, the spatial arrangements of other kind or a special set of combination of different factors)

- a simplified scientific rejection of CPTED as too closely linked to behaviourist determinism - while the scientific relation between mans environment and behaviour in reality is more related to probabilistic choice of conduct in different cultures, different kinds of spatial settings, etc.

2) The political problem:

- the question whether prevention efforts shall be related to the real risk of incidents or to the perceived fear of crime, which may be quite different from statistical risks

- the question of which prevention efforts to focus on - the police, social efforts, physical built efforts, etc. and different more detailed aspects hereof (efforts towards children in schools, etc.)

- the question of private property and rights/freedom of use - this question is related to the question of division of land (in Sweden also to 'allemansrätt)

- the question whether or to what degree CPTED shall be enforced by law or be voluntary

3) The implementation problem:

- resistance from architects (ideological, economical)

- resistance from builders (economical and/or lack of knowledge and experience)

- resistance from social workers and sociologists or lack of interest (ideological, partly economical, lack of spatial interest and lack of spatial analytical tools)

- lack of interest from local government (lack of guidelines e.g. in Sweden, lack of skilled people, lack of appropriate organisational framework related to the issue e.g. in Denmark)

- resistance from some criminologists because of the scientific difficulties and the scientific complexity

- week interest in crime prevention from insurance companies, as they, although indirectly, profits from crime (insurance companies are mostly interested in technical matters in relation the the choice of insurance rates, not in the reduction of crime basically)

- there is a lot of money to be made on technical security gadgets and on guard services, but so far not much money to be made for other parties involved in the built environment, although e.g. lower maintenance costs might be quite important (concerning new development, the special 'gated communities' in the US is another matter, as they are more profitable for developers than other kinds of development - the possibility of U.K. and Dutch CPTED certification for new housing are European steps in the direction of marketing crime prevention in a profitable way)

- the state / national governments still often have a week interest in CPTED - it is an area of quite low priority at least in the Nordic Countries (almost no money allocated the issue) and the availability of EU founds for the topic is also very close to absolute zero

Besides these implementation problems related to some of the possible 'stakeholders' in CPTED, there are also other kinds of implementation problems, related to the 'content' of CPTED:

- poor marketing of and education in CPTED in Europe

- goal conflicts and lack of proper ways or experience to handle of goal conflicts (crime prevention vs. traffic safety vs. aesthetics vs. agenda 21 ecology issues, etc.)

- the question of CPTED as seen from a process perspective of reaching specific objectives in concrete situations involving all the stages of the development of an area and all the stakeholders vs. a more fixed guideline perspective of functional demands to be implemented as general principles

- CPTED - the Danish way - have, in my view, turned out to be an 'anti-modernist' approach, when compared to the great manifestos of modern architecture and planning (e.g. when compared to CIAM's charter of Athens of 1933). This is not intended as such, but a result of detailed considerations of safety issues in the city - one by one. The combined effects of the Danish CPTED guidelines points - as a general perspective - towards an advantage of more traditional city development forms. This makes the implementation of CPTED require a paradigm shift in the minds of some people, and this does not happen over night.

Final remarks:

The Danish interpretation of CPTED is consciously worked out in such a way that the liveable humane city is not in conflict with the advice on how to achieve a more safe city. As the Danish approach try to integrate these two goals, and as the Danish CPTED design guide lines normally is not much more expensive than the non-use of the guidelines, I think it is reasonable to use them, even if the scientific evidence is not as good as it ought to be in an ideal world. The question of gated communities and the like in the US is quite another matter.

The difficulty today, as I see it, is the inherent conflict between 'the safe city' and 'the experientially exciting city' of difference, surprise and adventure. It should be remembered though, that a cosy, culturally homogeneous and liveable city is also to some extent in conflict with 'the experientially exciting city'.

The question of the safe vs. the exciting city is recently explored in the Swedish landscape architecture magazine 'area' in the theme issue 3, 2000 on 'the safe city' (säker stad). More of my views are at http://bo.gronlund.homepage.dk

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