Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

98
Urban crime and violence
Available evidence
shows that crime
prevention through
environmental
design-based
approaches to the
processes of shaping
new development
have an important
contribution to
make to crime
prevention
Community-based
approaches clearly
have an important
role to play in the
litany of responses
to crime and
violence
have an important contribution to make to crime prevention.
52 This approach, which focuses on the setting of crime,
links crime prevention and reduction to changes in physical
design. To date, most of the experience of applying this
approach has been in the developed world. But subject to
two important conditions, there is no reason why
approaches of this nature cannot be successful in developing
countries. The first of these conditions is the need for
support for these approaches to be generated among the
development communities of such localities so that attempts
to apply them do not become a running battle between
developers, planners and the police. The second condition is
that appropriately trained staff must be available in order to
put these approaches into practice. These issues are further
taken up in Chapter 10.
A final example of a type of initiative that is common
in many parts of the world is the use of closed circuit television
cameras (CCTVs). The UK is an example of a country
which has deployed CCTV cameras widely during recent
years, not just in public places such as shopping centres and
car parks, but also in some residential areas. 53 This latter
element has been very controversial in the US because of
the implications for civil liberties of installing cameras in
residential areas. There are other areas of controversy, such
as who owns and operates CCTV cameras and what uses
those responsible are allowed to make of the pictures taken.
But the biggest controversy probably centres on the question
of whether or not they work as crime prevention tools. Do
they actually deter people from committing crimes, or do
they just make the subsequent process of tracking down
perpetrators easier? Do they ease people’s fears of crime in
public places, or after a while do people get used to the
presence of cameras and take little or no account of them?
Do they encourage adaptive behaviour by criminals, which
might include the displacement of crime into other areas
where cameras are not ubiquitous? These are questions that
are still hotly debated; but what is clear is that CCTV
cameras have now become a commonplace part of initiatives
against crime and violence in many parts of the world. 54
Planning and design interventions are generally
geared towards reducing vulnerability of targets (people and
property) by increasing protection and discouraging delinquents.
They also reduce general risk factors by reducing
opportunities for violence. Finally, they favour the development
of other resilience factors, linked to socialization,
community involvement and policing. They are therefore
largely overlapping and contributing to other types of interventions.
Community-based approaches to urban
safety and security
Community-based approaches clearly have an important role
to play in the litany of responses to crime and violence. It is,
however, important to understand that this can mean a wide
range of possible ways in different local circumstances. At
one end of the spectrum, some approaches are about helping
the development and implementation of initiatives where
the main impetus is from the community itself, and where
community members will have an ongoing responsibility for
the initiative. In such instances, the role of the public sector
is likely to be primarily an enabling one. At the other end of
the spectrum, community involvement in place-based initiatives
mounted by the local authority seems to be essential if
they are to have the maximum chance of success: such initiatives
should be ‘done with’ communities rather than ‘done
to’ them. Communities may not be the initiators; but they
still have a central role to play in shaping initiatives based
both upon their local knowledge and upon the fact that, in
their daily lives as residents, what they do or do not do can
make a difference to what happens on the ground. It is also
possible that the role of communities and their representatives
may grow throughout the life of a project, so that they
may take over as local wardens or stewards once community
acceptance has been secured. So a wide range of project
types might fit under this heading; but central to all of them
is the concept of community engagement as being vital to
the success of such projects.
It is also important to understand that community
responses to crime and violence are not just about communities
banding together to tackle problems, whether or not this
involves working in partnership with the state. People,
where they have or can put together the financial resources,
also respond to problems of crime and violence through
increasing urban segregation, with the affluent often choosing
to live in gated communities or closed condominiums
which they regard safer than the rest of the city. This has
been extensively studied in Latin American cities, where the
leading work has traced how rising crime and insecurity in
São Paulo transformed it from a city characterized by open
circulation to one with a large number of ‘fortified
enclaves’. 55 This came about not so much through any act of
deliberate public policy, but rather through the exercise of
individual and community choices on a considerable scale by
those who were rich enough to make such choices. While
this is wholly understandable from the point of view of such
individuals, the effect on both the physical and the social
functioning of the city can be very negative.
The above discussion is largely about how relatively
wealthy elites in São Paulo have chosen to segregate
themselves physically from the problems being experienced
in the rest of the city. The conclusion should not be drawn
that processes of this nature inevitably leave the urban poor
in such cities helpless and unable to do anything about their
circumstances. For example, the story of how crime and
violence have been addressed in Diadema is about taking
positive action to tackle crime and violence in part of the
same São Paulo conurbation of ‘fortified enclaves’. It is
mainly about the importance of political leadership, about
the process of partnership between key agencies, and about
determined action to tackle deep-seated problems. 56
But one element of the Diadema story is also about
the community itself, and about the desire of that community
to see the extreme problems being tackled and to take
advantage of the new opportunities being provided in order
to build better ways of life. What is illustrated here are two
sets of phenomena that appear to exist side by side: private
action by elites to insulate themselves from what they see as