CPTED - The death and life of social

GUEST BLOG – Mateja Mihinjac is a criminologist at Griffith University, Australia completing her Ph.D. on the implementation of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). She is a certified SafeGrowth instructor and has taught SafeGrowth in Australia and New Zealand. This is her first SafeGrowth blog.

Diane Zahm, urban planning professor, and former ICA Chair, once wrote that without citizen involvement and practices relevant to the local neighborhood, implementation of CPTED strategies is “merely security and not really CPTED”.

I uncovered that quote recently while researching CPTED theory and history. I was amazed at how much information supported the social and motivational aspects of CPTED and yet, I discovered, it was largely ignored in contemporary CPTED literature. From my research, it was clear that CPTED, as originally intended by the pioneers, was more similar to SafeGrowth than to the CPTED practiced today, what we now call 1st Generation CPTED.


DEATH AND LIFE

In Death and Life of Great American Cities, journalist Jane Jacobs wrote of city life and “eyes on the street” as the best example of urban design that supports informal control and builds social capital. Similarly, public housing authority Elizabeth Wood emphasized that people’s needs and desires should be paramount in urban design but that “design cannot do everything for the population”.

Architect Oscar Newman’s 1972 concept of defensible space was based on the social connections between people to create the kind of informal territorial proprietorship that prevents crime. Obviously, from the perspective of all these original writers in the field that later became CPTED, the power of social cohesion to prevent crime is not a consequence of architectural design but rather its prerequisite.

LOST MOTIVE

Following Newman, in the 1970s the U.S. government funded extensive research into CPTED - the Westinghouse CPTED studies. They evaluated the most comprehensive demonstration of CPTED projects in four different cities. One factor arising in those studies was the importance of motivational reinforcement - getting residents to become informed on prevention methods, working together to prevent crime, and to building a sense of social cohesion in their neighborhood. Motivation reinforcement somehow got lost in the CPTED implementation process in later years. 

A 1993 evaluation of the Westinghouse studies concluded:

“The reason for inconsistent and temporary effects appears to be that crime and violence arise from interactions between the social environment and the physical environment, which cannot be controlled entirely through manipulations of the physical environment.”

Volunteer-run outdoor library. Social reinforcement activities in Ljubljana, Slovenia
Photo by Marusa Babnik

Given the power relegated to social reinforcement in the early CPTED project work, how did social characteristics get lost in modern CPTED theory?

Social motives for crime receive practically no attention in modern CPTED except in the 1997 invention of Second Generation CPTED in which social and community aspects are reintegrated back into CPTED practice and theory.

With the renaissance of community development in the new field called collective efficacy, the exciting social design concept called tactical urbanism, and the evolution of SafeGrowth as a new way to plan safer neighborhoods, I hope CPTED will join these new 21st-century movements and fully integrate the social and the physical. Because it is within the community where the power to drive social change emerges.