Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

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Towards safer and more secure cities
Design should not
just be about the
aesthetics and the
functionality of what
is being created, but
…about how
criminals might
abuse it for their
own ends
correct mistakes is not only expensive and disruptive, it is
also unlikely to be as successful as getting it right in the first
place.
This makes a powerful case for enhancing urban
safety through effective urban planning, design and governance.
But making the case and successfully constructing
systems and procedures that can enable this opportunity to
be taken are two different things. It should also be recognized
that this is merely one part of the struggle against
crime and violence, which needs to be seen alongside other
approaches and not as a universal panacea. But on the face of
it, trying to make sure that the process of development does
not offer opportunities to commit crimes in future and tie up
police resources on an ongoing basis 2 seems to be an
approach with much potential. It is therefore not surprising
that interest in this, worldwide, seems to have been
growing.
■ Designing with crime prevention in mind
Box 10.1 Design strategies to tackle residential burglary
and related crimes
Barry Poyner argues that the record in the UK shows that there are four main types of crime
that affect housing developments, and that designers should develop strategies to address these
matters:
Burglary – a strategy to discourage people from trying to break into the house. The
key design challenges here are to inhibit the selection of a house as a target for burglary, and to
protect, in particular, the rear of the house since a great deal of burglary takes place via access
from the back of a house.
Car crime – a strategy for providing a safe place to park cars. The key design challenge
here is to create parking within protected boundaries, where possible, or if not, to find safe
alternatives. The available evidence suggests that separate parking areas accessible from offstreet
footpath networks are likely to be the least safe locations in terms both of theft of cars
themselves and of theft from cars.
Theft around the home – a strategy for protecting the front of the house and items
in gardens, sheds and garages. The key design challenge here is to think about each of these
elements as its own location carrying its own particular problems, rather than to see all of
these elements simply as parts of one single problem. A particularly important issue in this case
will often be the approach that is adopted for the security of the boundaries of the plot on
which the property sits.
Criminal damage – a strategy to minimize malicious damage to property. The available
evidence about appropriate strategies in this case is not well developed; but a key issue is
clearly the relationship between open spaces likely to be used by children or youths and the
frontages of houses. In these instances, some thought needs to be given to separating the two
uses, perhaps by landscaping or through a residential street or pedestrian route.
Source: Poyner, 2006, pp99–103
Perhaps the most basic requirement of an approach of this
nature is that the design process needs to think from the
outset about the possible criminal use of the buildings and
spaces being created. In other words, design should not just
be about the aesthetics and the functionality of what is being
created, but should also be about how people can occupy
and use it safely and about how criminals might abuse it for
their own ends. This is probably the right place to start,
rather than with planning processes, because planning
processes essentially get to deal with designs for development
that are often not only already well formed, but also
have substantial levels of commitment attached to them.
Thus, planning systems would be faced with a difficult
challenge if their role was essentially to try to add further
design considerations at a relatively late stage into a process
that has already in the minds of its promoters reached a satisfactory
conclusion. So the starting point must be that it
would be highly desirable if design processes took account of
safety considerations and of the possibility of criminal
misuse from first principles. As illustrated below, this is also
one of the reasons why effective planning policies not only
indicate what they will do when faced with an unsatisfactory
design from a crime prevention perspective, but also seek to
put in place basic principles of crime prevention that they
want developers and their designers to consider in order to
reduce the likelihood of an unsatisfactory submission.
It should not be assumed that an approach of this
nature would necessarily be welcomed unreservedly by all
designers, especially if they see it as constraining their
design freedom and creativity or as challenging particular
views about urban design to which they hold strong
allegiance. Some of this is undoubtedly controversial, 3 and
there is still much work to be done to resolve much of this
controversy on the basis of evidence. But one helpful
approach to this issue, which does not necessarily require a
designer to adopt a particular design perspective, but asks
individuals to think strategically about what are key
problems in terms of residential burglary as part of their
design approach, has been developed (see Box 10.1). 4 This
approach appears to be more acceptable to many designers
than regulatory standards or guidelines, which they see as
being inflexible and constraining, as it puts the onus on
them to come up with appropriate solutions to these
problems as part of their design processes.
Persuading designers and developers to think about
crime prevention as an integral part of the design process
would be a huge step forward since there is clear evidence
that, in the past, crime can be seen as having been unintentionally
designed within some developments 5 –
‘unintentionally’ because the problem was that designers
simply did not think about crime prevention in relation to
their designs; rather, they actively ‘designed crime in’. There
is an argument today, of course, now that much is known
about the relationship between design and crime, to the
effect that this kind of ignorance is no longer acceptable. 6
The safe use of buildings and spaces, and the reduction of
opportunities for crime, now need to be part of basic design
thinking.
■ Planning with crime prevention in mind
Planning systems can also play an important role in this
process through policies and practices that promote thinking
about crime prevention and through their role in controlling
development. Chapter 4 has demonstrated that the process
of getting planning systems to think in this way is relatively
recent and far from being straightforward. For example, Box
4.3 shows how the English planning system developed thinking
about this in several steps over a period of 11 years. Even
then, there were both controversies around the guidance