Rebuilding Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design

Strengthening the Links with Crime Science

Rachel Armitage, Paul Ekblom, Rachel Armitage, Paul Ekblom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317419143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a practice-oriented approach to reduce the risk of offences such as burglary and fear of crime by modifying the built environment. In recent years, this approach has been criticised for duplicating terminology and for failing to integrate successfully with other approaches.

Rebuilding Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design explores and extends the common ground between CPTED and situational crime prevention – another traditional approach in the field of crime prevention and security – via the latter's evolution into the field of crime science. Drawing on international research to develop new interdisciplinary perspectives, this volume explores how situational crime prevention and environmental criminological theories relate to those of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and considers how crime science can be reformulated to merge different approaches, or at least articulate them better.

Rebuilding Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design will appeal to students, applied academic researchers and practitioners who wish to deepen their understanding and contribute in turn to the ongoing revitalisation of the field.

1 Introduction

Paul Ekblom and Rachel Armitage

People have always protected themselves and their property by modifying their environment, even before the construction of permanent buildings began. Archaeology and history reveal a succession of architectural inventions, from thorn hedges, ditches and ramparts to palisades, doors, drawbridges and the like, accompanied by specialised security fittings such as locks and bolts. However, as an explicit movement and field of practice, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) emerged only some four decades ago. CPTED originated as a blend of several sources, mostly North American. These included the community-centric approaches of Jane Jacobs (1961), who had a background in urban studies, local activism and architecture, introducing the concept of ‘eyes on the street’ and also of social capital; Oscar Newman (1972), the architect and city planner who contributed Defensible Space; C. Ray Jeffery (Jeffery 1971; Jeffery and Zahm 1993), a psychologist with a theoretical bent who actually coined the phrase Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and subsequently attempted to broaden the approach in ways which were sadly neglected at the time; and Barry Poyner (Poyner 1983, 2006), a British architect who brought a strong commitment to research and evaluation. CPTED comprises several broad principles: Defensible Space (making places easier to keep people out of), Movement Control (including more traditionally Territoriality – motivating occupants to defend their places), Surveillance, Management, Maintenance and Image, Activity Support (encouraging legitimate activities which restrict the opportunity for crime) and Physical Security. Other variants can be found e.g. in Armitage (2013), Cozens (2014) and Gibson (2016).

Situational crime prevention (SCP) focuses, as its name implies, on changing people’s offending behaviour not by influencing the predispositions that they bring to crime situations but by changing those situations themselves. SCP arose somewhat later than CPTED. Its origins included wartime Operations Research (Wilkins 1997); Action Research (Lewin 1946); Problem-Oriented approaches (Goldstein 1990); sociology in understanding changing crime patterns via changes in Routine Activities bringing offenders and targets/victims together in the absence of capable guardians (Cohen and Felson 1979); generic cognitive/social psychology and economics, with an emphasis on Rational Choice and decision- making (Cornish and Clarke 1986; Clarke 2012); and micro-geographical approaches (Crime Pattern Theory – Brantingham et al. 2017). Together, these have become known as opportunity approaches, and thus the preventive strategy is mainly about opportunity reduction.

We do not offer an in-depth resume or review of CPTED or SCP here: that has been supplied elsewhere from the perspectives of research (e.g. Armitage 2013; Cozens and Love 2015) and practice (e.g. Cozens 2014). But we do have some pertinent observations about the evolution of these parallel tracks of environmental crime prevention, which have never quite converged – so far.

CPTED and SCP have both, in their different ways, remained outliers from mainstream approaches to crime and security. Apart from the original injection of ideas and the occasional significant review, evaluation or research study CPTED has kept somewhat distinct from academic input and discipline, resembling a ‘school’ of architecture pursuing a slowly evolving manifesto that accretes new ideas without fully assimilating them (Ekblom 2011a; Armitage and Monchuk 2017). Or, rather, several schools, since we now have Second-Generation CPTED with an emphasis on social cohesion, community connectivity, community culture and threshold capacity (Saville and Cleveland 2003a, 2003b), and even three candidates for Third-Generation: Thorpe and Gamman (2013) focus on multiple drivers of environmental design; Gibson (2016) on conceptual clarity and alignment with sustainability; and SafeGrowth on safe, sustainable urban space (www.safegrowth.org/blog/green-answers-for-crime-3rd-gen-cpted). And the term ‘CPTED’ in some regions, especially North America, has gained currency as a substitute word for any kind of territorially based civil-world crime prevention, which unfortunately dilutes the concept or muddies the water, whichever metaphor you prefer.

The originators of SCP chose deliberately to cut themselves free of conventional criminology and policymaking, with their emphasis on offender motivation and its societal causes and the functioning of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. These interventions addressed the ‘civil’ world of products such as cars; procedures such as cash transactions; surveillance; and, of course, the design, construction and management of places.

Neither of the two approaches has paid much attention to consistency of terms and concepts or attempted to integrate their respective theoretical bases beyond a kind of ‘lumping-together’ (Ekblom 2011a, 2011b; Gibson 2016). In each case, this has been in the name of simplicity, but it is a false simplicity which ultimately serves to confuse and ultimately to deny practitioners tools for thinking, communication, knowledge management and collaboration that are subtle enough to handle the messy complexity of everyday crime prevention (Ekblom 2006). Nor have CPTED and SCP exchanged ideas and practices except sporadically and rather uneasily.

But things have started to move in the latter field, which has begun to emerge from its self-imposed isolation and transform into crime science (e.g. Wortley et al. 2019). This is an applied academic discipline which seeks to understand the immediate causes and contexts of criminal events in order to decrease their occurrence and harm. It emphasises the interaction between situational and offender-related factors and is not afraid of complex theorising where necessary to reflect and successfully influence for the better a complex world; it draws on the content and methods of a range of disciplines, from biology to physics and computer science.

A third comer on the scene is general field of design, with leading lights including the Design Against Crime Research Centre, University of the Arts London, and the Designing Out Crime Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney. The wider understanding of and practice on design that these institutions and others bring – with emphasis on ‘user-friendly/abuser-unfriendly’, user-centred and co-design approaches, social innovation and the concept of reframing problems rather than simply taking the brief as the client poses it – has begun to generate interesting and challenging new ways of looking at improving security without adverse side effects such as fortification, inconvenience or profligate use of energy e.g. to floodlight areas for surveillance purposes.

This collection arises from our several interests in all the above fields and joint work on a range of projects and consultancies. One of us (Armitage) has a two-decade involvement in empirical research and evaluation on CPTED practice and policy (e.g. Armitage 2006; Armitage and Monchuk 2011; Armitage 2013, 2017); the other (Ekblom) has a somewhat longer involvement in SCP and crime science with an emphasis on theory, conceptualisation and systematisation of scientific and practice knowledge in crime prevention in general and CPTED in particular (see respectively Ekblom 2011b and http://5isframework.wordpress.com; and Ekblom 2011a and http://reconstructcpted.wordpress.com), and a decade of consorting with designers of products, places and social innovation (e.g. Ekblom 2012). But in common is our commitment to being constructively critical friends of environmental crime prevention; and in particular to the ever-closer union of CPTED and SCP.

Although we welcome the fertile ferment of the Third-Generation contenders, we do not feel confident enough ourselves at this time to propose a Fourth- Generation label. Rather, we wish to add new thinking from a diversity of disciplines – both centre field and outliers. Then we hope to undertake, and promote, further collaborations that move CPTED towards a properly evidence-based, theory-informed, conceptually sound and practically feasible field of intervention that is fit to hold its own in close embrace with crime science and an approach to architecture and planning that addresses the multiple drivers of complex societies around the world.

In line with this aspiration, the chapters in this volume represent leading-edge thinking and research and straddle the divide between CPTED and SCP/crime science.

The rest of the book begins with two empirical chapters with both theoretical and practical implications. Michelle Rogerson and Ken Pease OBE use data from a large national area-based regeneration programme to explore the dynamics of people’s decisions to move home and how this relates to local crime patterns. On the one hand, crime could precipitate residential mobility; on the other, high residential turnover may place obstacles to the implementation of formal and informal crime prevention efforts. Rachel Armitage and Chris Joyce illustrate the benefits of collaboration between an academic and a serving police officer. They attempt, through interviews with prolific burglars focused on images of homes, to obtain their views on the risk and protective factors of housing design and occupancy. Some of the familiar CPTED principles are supported, but others are not, indicating the importance of taking the offender’s perspective. There follows a chapter by Danielle M. Reynald and Mateja Mihinjac which is empirical but with a strong theoretical theme centred on the concept of guardianship, a more sophisticated treatment of which promises to further integrate the currently loosely linked approaches of CPTED and situational crime prevention (SCP).

Moving further into the conceptual domain – yet ultimately with implications for how both research and practice are developed, conducted and communicated – Paul Ekblom’s ontological chapter builds on his previous work in documenting the limitations of CPTED and better connecting the fundamental ideas in its First- and Second-Generation variants to those of crime science, architecture and design. In this, he draws on the ideas of ecology.

One of the aims of Ekblom’s chapter is to develop sharper environmental concepts to support computational and mathematical approaches to CPTED and SCP. These approaches form the focus of the next two chapters. Daniel Birks and Joseph Clare review the field of ‘synthetic societies’ using agent-based modelling, where researchers create artificial environments in silico and populate them with simplified autonomous software agents which move about the environment following a particular agenda and interacting with one another. The patterns of actions and events that emerge enable exploration of causal interactions between individual behaviour and environmental context in complex systems; and predict and understand aggregate area outcomes such as crime rates and patterns. Agent-based modelling enables systematic manipulation of environmental properties and features in ways that would never be practically feasible or ethically allowable, but which informs CPTED theory, practice and policy choices. Hervé Borrion, Octavian Ciprian Bordeanu and Sonia Toubaline use mathematical simulation experiments to focus intensively on vehicle and knife attacks by terrorists, seeking to identify optimal configurations of armed response vehicles and CPTED measures in a range of operational contexts, including whether or not offenders conduct hostile reconnaissance. Displacement of offending emerges as a significant issue: while challenging to model, doing so potentially yields significant improvements in security strategies.

Massoomeh Hedayati Marzbali, Aldrin Abdullah and Mohammad Javad Maghsoodi Tilaki continue the theme of mathematical modelling with structural equations based on empirical data in the service of conceptual clarification and practical application, e.g. in predicting crime risk on the basis of (clarified) CPTED principles. But they also lead the book in several other directions of interest. First, they present CPTED research in a rarely encountered Asian context; second, they develop and test a systematic CPTED measurement scale; and third, they assess national Malaysian CPTED guidelines against their own empirical findings.

We then move onto an implementation theme with study in failures of CPTED by Ward Adams, Eric S. McCord and Marcus Felson. In a chapter with the provocative title of ‘How to ruin CPTED’, they argue that good design of environments cannot be counted on as a permanent solution because a newly built or refurbished place can after commissioning be mismanaged, undergo changes in use which invalidate the current CPTED arrangements, outgrow them through expansion or are allowed to deteriorate. (All these processes are best explained by concepts from environmental criminology; empirical examples illustrate the last two.) Consequently, CPTED must be purposively combined with CPTEM – Crime Prevention through Environmental Management.

Leanne Monchuk next presents findings from her long-term familiarity with the pioneering efforts of the UK’s Greater Manchester Police to develop and operate a framework of CPTED service delivery that is of high professional quality yet practically and financially sustainable. This is an issue of great importance given the austerity budgeting that the police and other services have had to endure over the last decade and, it would unfortunately seem, will have to endure in years to come. On a broader issue, the contrast between the delivery arrangements in Greater Manchester and those elsewhere in the UK – including civilian architects versus trained police officers; service-funded by developer-paid fees versus free, publicly funded input; and requirement for formal crime impact statements by developers – mean that making general conclusions about the effectiveness and implementation of CPTED is challenging.

The chapter by Marcus Willcocks, Paul Ekblom and Adam Thorpe – all connected with the Design Against Crime Research Centre, University of the Arts London – unsurprisingly takes a more radical designer’s view on the proper scope and approach to CPTED. Based around a practical project which sought to improve the security and wider appeal of a district in Oslo, Norway, this describes the evolution of an attempt to blend Ekblom’s crime-focused Security Function Framework with designers’ wider interest in ‘what we want more of alongside what we want less of’ – hence the emergence of the ‘Vibrant Secure Function Framework’. The chapter considers whether this approach helps to stimulate design rather than merely document done designs, as has been contended; which of the conventional CPTED principles are supported or challenged in this extended framework; and how far Second- or Third-Generation progressive takes on CPTED can be incorporated.

In their concluding chapter, Rachel Armitage and Paul Ekblom summarise the messages from the aforementioned; look to the changing environment within which CPTED must operate and to which it must adapt; and propose a future programme of development.

References

Websites accessed 9 July 2018.

Armitage, R. (2006). Predicting and Preventing: Developing a Risk Assessment Mechanism for Residential Housing. Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal, 8(3), pp. 137–149.

Armitage, R. (2013). Crime Prevention Through Housing Design: Policy and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Armitage, R. (2017). Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. In R. Wortley and M. Townsley (Eds.), Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis. London: Routledge.

Armitage, R. and Monchuk, L. (2011). Sustaining the Crime Reduction Impact of Secured by Design: 1999 to 2009. Security Journal, 24(4), pp. 320–343.

Armitage, R. and Monchuk, L. (2017). What Is CPTED? Reconnecting Theory with Application in the Words of Users and Abusers. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice. DOI:https://Weblink:https://academic.oup.com/policing/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/police/pax004/3067250?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Brantingham, P.J., Brantingham, P.L. and Andresen, M. (2017). The Geometry of Crime and Crime Pattern Theory. In R. Wortley and M. Townsley (Eds.), Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis (2nd ed., p. 115). New York: Routledge.

Clarke, R. (2012). Opportunity Makes the Thief Really? And So What? CrimeScience, 1, p. 3.

Cohen, L. and Felson, M. (1979). Social Change and Crime Rate Changes: A Routine Activities Approach. American Sociological Review, 44, pp. 588–608.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Moving home as a flight from crime: residential mobility as a cause and consequence of crime and a challenge to Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design
• 3 “Why my house?” – exploring the influence of residential housing design on burglar decision making
• 4 Using guardianship and situational crime prevention (SCP) to strengthen Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)
• 5 Sharpening up CPTED – towards an ontology based on crime science and ecology
• 6 Simulating CPTED: computational agent-based models of crime and environmental design
• 7 Simulation of dependencies between armed response vehicles and CPTED measures in counter-terrorism resource allocation
• 8 Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) in Malaysia: development of a tool to measure CPTED implementation in residential settings
• 9 How to ruin CPTED
• 10 A decade developing the delivery of CPTED across Greater Manchester
• 11 Less crime, more vibrancy, by design
• 12 Conclusion
• Index