Beyond the Basics: How SafeGrowth and Third-Gen CPTED Reimagine Community Safety

 

The 2025 CPTED conference and SafeGrowth Summit in 

Palm Springs, California

by Mateja Mihinjac

Last month we held our 2025 ICA International CPTED Conference in Palm Springs

alongside a SafeGrowth Summit with our global network.

Our conference theme — Community Building and Empowerment: A Holistic CPTED Approach — framed much of the discussion. As Greg Saville and I prepared our conference session months earlier, we identified three essential criteria for CPTED to be truly holistic:

• It must be proactive
• It must be integrative
• It must be grounded in community building.

Both SafeGrowth and Third Generation CPTED meet these benchmarks — and our session explored exactly how.

Expanding on the latest developments in Third-generation CPTED at the
2025 ICA CPTED Conference

PROACTIVE 

A proactive approach means tackling the root causes of crime before it happens. CPTED exemplifies this by using strategies that both reduce opportunities for offending and encourage local communities to take an active role in prevention — dissuading potential offenders while reinforcing pro-social behavior.

Thinking proactively about crime problems is powerful because it relies on anticipating the problem by taking proven measures to prevent it in the first place.

INTEGRATIVE

I’ve written about reductionist approaches to understanding and responding to crime in a blog a few years ago.

In that blog I claimed that crime prevention professionals and researchers need to approach the problem by working together in an integrated way to fit solutions to the context, economy and politics of each neighborhood. We can achieve this by thinking pragmatically about the problem(s) and integrate physical, social and psychological approaches to the extent each of them is required to respond not only to symptoms of the problem but to also address the underlying reasons that have culminated in the crime problem(s).

Trees, forests, hillsides, meadows, mountains - the bio-physical world integrates ecosystems naturally. The social world needs theories that do the same. 

This element is vital to holistic crime prevention because it brings together different perspectives to better understand the problem — and to craft the most effective, tailored solutions.

BASED ON COMMUNITY-BUILDING

People from communities that are cared for, care for each other. This is why investing in neighbourhood communities – both financially and through building social capital – pays major dividends in the long run. This is nicely demonstrated in Larry Leach’s blog in which he writes about the importance of strong bonds between the residents to help address addiction, a major issue that affects many neighbourhoods and may manifest in an overflow of drug-related crimes.

Community building that is both engaging and empowering is therefore a key element of holistic crime prevention because it ensures that those most affected by the problems in their neighbourhood get empowered to play an active partnership role in addressing those problems.

How well do CPTED and SafeGrowth satisfy these criteria? 

Conference participants worked on designing CPTED elements 
into a local park during site visits

CPTED

Greg and I conceptualised the theory of Third-Generation CPTED as a holistic and integrated approach. 

With this we intended to demonstrate CPTED can contribute powerfully to safer and more liveable neighbourhoods that move beyond merely satisfying basic biological and safety human needs, which First-Generation CPTED can be effective in securing through its proactive nature in addressing crime problems. 

We also argue that Second-Generation CPTED, has the power to address the social level needs and build neighbourhood capacity. This is done collaboratively with those within the neighbourhood and with other stakeholders to address local problems, but it still falls short at the “integrative criterium”. 

By adding a psychological dimension to CPTED’s established physical and social layers, we aimed to address the complexity of modern neighborhoods — places where safety and livability go hand-in-hand with deeper human needs like self-actualization and transcendence. We propose this can be achieved through four pillars of sustainability: health, social, environmental, and economic.

Lt William Hutchinson, Palm Springs Police is fully trained in the SafeGrowth/CPTED method.
He helped facilitate site visits for conference participants

SAFEGROWTH

As a neighbourhood safety planning method inclusive of CPTED, SafeGrowth has a strong foundation in all three elements.  

By planning safe neighbourhoods where local residents take an active and empowering role, proactivity and community building are the heart of SafeGrowth. Neighbourhood safety teams learn how to identify problems and develop solutions to existing problems. That is how they build a long-term plan of priorities to prevent problems occurring in the first place.

Integrative crime prevention planning must, by definition,
involve residents from the neighborhood

The integrative nature of SafeGrowth happens by embedding CPTED at all levels of safety planning and by using scientifically-proven crime prevention and social programs that align to each neighbourhood’s problems. There is no cookie-cutter approach in this method. Any program the neighbourhood adopts is directly tailored towards addressing that neighbourhood’s needs. 

The integrative power of SafeGrowth lies in its fusion of CPTED with science-backed prevention and social programs tailored to each neighborhood’s unique challenges. These aren’t one-size-fits-all solutions — they’re built from the inside out, by and for the community.

I can no longer imagine addressing complex crime issues through unilateral responses. My hope is that holistic thinking — about both problems and solutions — becomes the new normal, so we can create responses that last.