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240Towards safer and more secure citiesDesign should notjust be about theaesthetics and thefunctionality of whatis being created, but…about howcriminals mightabuse it for theirown endscorrect mistakes is not only expensive and disruptive, it isalso unlikely to be as successful as getting it right in the firstplace.This makes a powerful case for enhancing urbansafety through effective urban planning, design and governance.But making the case and successfully constructingsystems and procedures that can enable this opportunity tobe taken are two different things. It should also be recognizedthat this is merely one part of the struggle againstcrime and violence, which needs to be seen alongside otherapproaches and not as a universal panacea. But on the face ofit, trying to make sure that the process of development doesnot offer opportunities to commit crimes in future and tie uppolice resources on an ongoing basis 2 seems to be anapproach with much potential. It is therefore not surprisingthat interest in this, worldwide, seems to have beengrowing.Box 10.1 Design strategies to tackle residential burglaryand related crimesBarry Poyner argues that the record in the UK shows that there are four main types of crimethat affect housing developments, and that designers should develop strategies to address thesematters:Burglary – a strategy to discourage people from trying to break into the house. Thekey design challenges here are to inhibit the selection of a house as a target for burglary, and toprotect, in particular, the rear of the house since a great deal of burglary takes place via accessfrom the back of a house.Car crime – a strategy for providing a safe place to park cars. The key design challengehere is to create parking within protected boundaries, where possible, or if not, to find safealternatives. The available evidence suggests that separate parking areas accessible from offstreetfootpath networks are likely to be the least safe locations in terms both of theft of carsthemselves and of theft from cars.Theft around the home – a strategy for protecting the front of the house and itemsin gardens, sheds and garages. The key design challenge here is to think about each of theseelements as its own location carrying its own particular problems, rather than to see all ofthese elements simply as parts of one single problem. A particularly important issue in this casewill often be the approach that is adopted for the security of the boundaries of the plot onwhich the property sits.Criminal damage – a strategy to minimize malicious damage to property. The availableevidence about appropriate strategies in this case is not well developed; but a key issue isclearly the relationship between open spaces likely to be used by children or youths and thefrontages of houses. In these instances, some thought needs to be given to separating the twouses, perhaps by landscaping or through a residential street or pedestrian route.Source: Poyner, 2006, pp99–103■ Designing with crime prevention in mindPerhaps the most basic requirement of an approach of thisnature is that the design process needs to think from theoutset about the possible criminal use of the buildings andspaces being created. In other words, design should not justbe about the aesthetics and the functionality of what is beingcreated, but should also be about how people can occupyand use it safely and about how criminals might abuse it fortheir own ends. This is probably the right place to start,rather than with planning processes, because planningprocesses essentially get to deal with designs for developmentthat are often not only already well formed, but alsohave substantial levels of commitment attached to them.Thus, planning systems would be faced with a difficultchallenge if their role was essentially to try to add furtherdesign considerations at a relatively late stage into a processthat has already in the minds of its promoters reached a satisfactoryconclusion. So the starting point must be that itwould be highly desirable if design processes took account ofsafety considerations and of the possibility of criminalmisuse from first principles. As illustrated below, this is alsoone of the reasons why effective planning policies not onlyindicate what they will do when faced with an unsatisfactorydesign from a crime prevention perspective, but also seek toput in place basic principles of crime prevention that theywant developers and their designers to consider in order toreduce the likelihood of an unsatisfactory submission.It should not be assumed that an approach of thisnature would necessarily be welcomed unreservedly by alldesigners, especially if they see it as constraining theirdesign freedom and creativity or as challenging particularviews about urban design to which they hold strongallegiance. Some of this is undoubtedly controversial, 3 andthere is still much work to be done to resolve much of thiscontroversy on the basis of evidence. But one helpfulapproach to this issue, which does not necessarily require adesigner to adopt a particular design perspective, but asksindividuals to think strategically about what are keyproblems in terms of residential burglary as part of theirdesign approach, has been developed (see Box 10.1). 4 Thisapproach appears to be more acceptable to many designersthan regulatory standards or guidelines, which they see asbeing inflexible and constraining, as it puts the onus onthem to come up with appropriate solutions to theseproblems as part of their design processes.Persuading designers and developers to think aboutcrime prevention as an integral part of the design processwould be a huge step forward since there is clear evidencethat, in the past, crime can be seen as having been unintentionallydesigned within some developments 5 –‘unintentionally’ because the problem was that designerssimply did not think about crime prevention in relation totheir designs; rather, they actively ‘designed crime in’. Thereis an argument today, of course, now that much is knownabout the relationship between design and crime, to theeffect that this kind of ignorance is no longer acceptable. 6The safe use of buildings and spaces, and the reduction ofopportunities for crime, now need to be part of basic designthinking.■ Planning with crime prevention in mindPlanning systems can also play an important role in thisprocess through policies and practices that promote thinkingabout crime prevention and through their role in controllingdevelopment. Chapter 4 has demonstrated that the processof getting planning systems to think in this way is relativelyrecent and far from being straightforward. For example, Box4.3 shows how the English planning system developed thinkingabout this in several steps over a period of 11 years. Eventhen, there were both controversies around the guidance