Crime Prevention and the Built Environment

Ted Kitchen, Richard H. Schneider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415373241
• eBook ISBN: 9781134191130
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

With a comprehensive analysis, this book links theory, evidence and practical application to bridge gaps between planning, design and criminology. The authors investigate connections between crime prevention and development planning with an international approach, looking at initiatives in the field and incorporating an understanding of current responses to the growth of technology and terrorism.

Part One
The theory

2
Classical theories of place-based crime prevention

Introduction

Classical place-based crime prevention theory is derived from disciplines that span architecture, urban planning, criminology, geography, psychology and sociology (among others) and from on-the-ground experiences that involve juvenile offenders, public and council housing tenants, and the practical problems of police investigations. Working within these disciplines and informed by practice, the scholars and researchers referred to in this chapter developed the family of theories that together form the classical core of today’s place-based crime prevention. These theories include defensible space, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), situational crime prevention and environmental criminology. In this chapter we review the history and context of the theories’ development and consider their application today by law enforcement agencies, criminologists, planners, designers and academics in efforts to organise, understand and resolve criminal events in the built environment. In so doing we discuss problem- and community-oriented policing, law enforcement strategies that have evolved from these, and related theoretical backgrounds. Emerging conceptual frameworks such as space syntax and new urbanism are described in Chapter 3. These latter ideas raise many issues connected to the fundamental place-based crime prevention theories discussed here, and we shall refer back to them as necessary throughout the book.

Organising issues and questions

It is ironic that evidence-based crime prevention approaches developed in the mid- to late twentieth century owe a significant debt to the discredited work of Cesare Lombroso, a nineteenth-century prison physician who documented relationships between physical appearance, criminal disposition and behaviour. While Lombroso’s work (1876) was based on flawed assumptions and produced erroneous conclusions, his meticulous scientific methodology nevertheless paved the way for succeeding generations of crime prevention theorists who based their work on observation and data analysis as opposed to a priori approaches.

Although Lombroso’s studies influenced the process of the research, the fundamental substantive notion underpinning the field of place-based crime prevention comes from different sources and is rooted in the notion that the environment influences behaviour. A wealth of research generated by many disciplines supports this clearly observable concept. The great heterogeneity of studies in the field represented by the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA; http://www.edra.org), established in the United States in 1968, testifies to the resilience of this fundamental principle. Some of this work has focused specifically on understanding relationships between environmental influences and crime, with a concentration on places and settings, as distinct from scrutinising offenders, police, or the legal and correctional systems (Clarke, 1997). This place- and setting-based focus is the basis for the four major theories that we discuss below: defensible space, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), situational crime prevention and environmental criminology.

Strategies budding out of these theories have been adopted by government agencies across the developed world as part of the growing reliance on evidence-based policy making and practice. Some place-based crime prevention theories/strategies are proving to be credible based on scientific evaluations, while the jury is still out on others (Sherman et al., 1997). Many of the applications have come to inform and guide crime prevention and security policy and practice across a wide range of land use categories, infrastructure, and building and estate development practices. This is so even though some scholars argue convincingly that mechanisms for the translation of place-based crime prevention from theory into practice for planners and urban designers are neither standardised nor necessarily efficient (Zahm, 2005).

Nevertheless, there is evidence that place-based theory has influenced – albeit unevenly – day-to-day urban public policy and practice relating to design and building regulation (Schneider and Kitchen, 2002), large scale anti-terrorist design (National Capital Planning Commission, 2002b), protection of microbiological and biomedical facilities (Royse and Johnson, 2002), siting and design of industrial parks, industrial buildings and office facilities (Peiser and Chang, 1998; Nadel, 2004), school security practice (Florida Department of Education, 2003) and courthouse design (Jandura and Campbell, 2004). This is only a very short list of many public and private domains where these theories have been applied on the ground in one form or another.

Despite that, many would argue that these theories only provide us with generic advice relative to explaining and predicting specific criminal events (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the Home Office, 2004). Place-based crime prevention theory cannot account for the vast variability of the environment within which criminal events unfold. Every environment differs relative to users, to physical design, and to cultural and socio-economic elements such that a plausible argument is that each is unique (Taylor, 2002). How, then, can one formulate general principles that apply across a wide range of places? Moreover, we often find ostensibly conflicting advice about places and phenomena relative to crime prevention. For instance, all the theories noted above suggest that surveillance is a good thing, but there is evidence that all surveillance is not equal in reducing crime (Mayhew et al., 1979). Moreover, how much surveillance is enough or too little? Is surveillance as straightforward as Jane Jacobs’s prescription of ‘eyes on the street’ would have us believe (Jacobs, 1961)?

And how do we weigh crime prevention against other desirable aims? For example, when does access control – another crime opportunity strategy advanced by the core theories above – become access prohibition, so lacerating the fabric of democratic societies that the underlying values of open and free connection are irreparably damaged? As we shall discuss in Chapter 3, new urbanist theory suggests that the pendulum should be weighted towards open access, as distinct from access control. While this may be relatively easy to accomplish in new and healthy (greenfield) communities, how is this done in distressed (brownfield) communities which are struggling with access-related crime issues?

The responses to these fundamental questions and conflicts lie in context and balance. Each of the interrelated place-based crime prevention theories has local context-sensitive applications, and each application must be balanced against local physical (and often regional and national), socio-economic, legal, political and cultural concerns. As Colquhoun (2004) points out, understanding the role of context is crucial to urban planners and designers as well as to ordinary citizens, inasmuch as crime is as important in fundamental life choices such as decisions where to buy a home as it is in broad-scale public policy choices. The theories we discuss are thus constrained in terms of their power to generalise. On-the-ground strategies must therefore be tailored to local needs, although some similar principles can be seen at work across many contexts. Despite these limitations, without these place-based crime prevention theories we might still be focused solely on the psychological dispositions of offenders and on their socio-economic settings instead of considering what we now know to be important predictors and modifiers of criminal events that relate to the use, management, design and opportunity structure of the built environment.

Defensible space

We begin with defensible space, since it has defined place-based crime prevention practice in many ways. Defensible space is an evocative term used to identify an array of related ideas involving the extension of territorial control and influence, boundary marking with real and symbolic barriers, and the facilitation of surveillance that connect building and site design to crime opportunity reduction. Together these ideas – with multiple subcomponents – comprise the theory of defensible space. It was the first construct of its type to make popular headlines in the United States, has profoundly influenced a generation of public housing designers and policy makers (in particular) in the United States and the United Kingdom, and has served as the lightning rod for critics disturbed by its ostensibly deterministic (and some argue simplistic) design–behaviour prescriptions. Defensible space is one of the place-based theories at the heart of the British Secured by Design (SBD) scheme (Town et al., 2003), which has significant practical implications for community design and planning in the United Kingdom. We shall discuss this in more detail below and in Chapter 3, especially in relation to the debate between SBD and new urbanist advocates (Town and O’Toole, 2005; Kitchen, 2005).

Defensible space was credited with establishing crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED),¹ but in reality CPTED evolved independently at about the same time as defensible space, although the two have grown together over the years like intertwined vines. This mélange has prompted CPTED’s originator, C. Ray Jeffrey (1971, 1977, 1990), to disavow the modern CPTED as quite different from his original concept. However, police rarely distinguish defensible space from CPTED, although in the United States most would more likely recognise CPTED, whereas in the United Kingdom defensible space seems to be more recognised by local authorities, including constables, since it is closely identified with Secured by Design, as noted above. Whatever its pedigree, defensible space evolved out of Oscar Newman’s 1960s comparison of two side-by-side public housing projects in St Louis, Missouri, from observations of older St Louis neighbourhoods containing privatised streets, and from research in New York public housing projects (Newman, 1973, 1981). It was augmented by controlled applications in Dayton, Ohio, and Yonkers and the South Bronx, New York (Newman, 1996), and critically assessed in federally supported research conducted at sites across the United States in the 1970s (Rubenstein et al., 1980). Despite its largely residential origin, its applications have been extended across many types of land uses, although there is evidence that it is less effective outside of that realm (Murray, 1994).

The perception and power of ownership: Pruitt-Igoe and Carr Square Village

An architect, planner and critical observer of human behaviour, Newman was fascinated by the power and energy inherent in the command of places by users, even when they were not owners. His fundamental concept is intuitively appealing: places and spaces can be designed and built so as to increase residents’ feelings of ownership and control. Since people tend to protect better those areas and things they believe that they own – even if this may be a fiction when it comes to property renters – then places can be fashioned to increase the sense of ownership and induce these territorial feelings. To be sure, this was not a new notion. In the 1930s and 1940s, public housing agencies in the United States speculated that design could play a role in evoking protective and ‘social’ responses among residents, and they toyed with a number of site design approaches intended to maximise these feelings and behaviours (Vale, 2005; Franck and Mostollar, 1995). Indeed, the concept that the physical residential setting is somehow related to attitudes, beliefs and behaviours, and especially tendencies towards criminality, has a considerable lineage in US and British urban history and policy development (Hall, 1990).

Newman focused the concept squarely and forcefully on crime and design. In his view, places could be designed to be...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Boxes
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part One The theory
• Part Two The practice
• Part Three Conclusions
• Index