Brazil & the Next Gen R/Evolution

Venue for the 2023 ICA CPTED Conference is Sao Paulo, Brazil. The largest city in the Americas has a metro population over 20 million - photo Wiki Creative Commons

by Gregory Saville

It’s Halloween today and the goblins and ghosts are looking for treats. An interesting ghost from my past appeared today, triggered by an international conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil this week. It all started 28 years ago…

In 1995 I ran an urban planning/criminology consultancy with my former business partner, Paul Wong in Vancouver, Canada. Our work in Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) had expanded across Canada and we were becoming alarmed at what we saw. The first CPTED publications were holistic, neighborhood-oriented, and they combined social programs with physical designs to cut crime opportunities. 

However the CPTED that we saw in some places was not holistic. It had de-evolved into target hardening, locks, and lights. There were very few guidelines and no certification programs. To our dismay, we discovered that the public, and municipalities across the world, had no clue about the failing quality control problems in CPTED. 

SOMETHING NEEDED TO BE DONE  

Basically, we located a like-minded CPTED practitioner, Barry Davidson from Calgary, Alberta, and in 1996 we launched the first-ever practitioner/researcher CPTED conference in Calgary. Thus was born the ICA - International CPTED Association - the first-ever global, non-profit, CPTED professional association. I have written a prior blog on the history of the ICA. 

With chapters all over the world, the ICA is the premiere global organization for professional CPTED in research and practice. Most recently, members of the ICA collaborated with others in the International Standards Organization to design and implement the first-ever, global CPTED standard, ISO 22341:2021 - “Guidelines for crime prevention through environmental design”. 

CPTED USA is the latest ICA chapter

The ICA has a talented and diverse board of directors from around the world and most recently, the ICA approved two new affiliate chapters – the CPTED USA and CPTED/PCAM Canada

ICA IN BRAZIL

This week the latest ICA conference - Safe Cities by People - is underway in Sao Paulo. I was unable to attend this year, but my colleagues Gerard Cleveland and Mateja Mihinjac will present a special session on the R/Evolution in 2nd and 3rd Generation CPTED. They will describe the latest advances and research in CPTED. Second Generation was launched in 1997 at the second-ever ICA conference in Orlando, Florida. Third Generation was launched by Mateja and myself 5 years ago at the ICA Conference in Cancun, Mexico. 

Most exciting is the announcement by Mateja and Gerard of two new publications. 

• The first is a forthcoming book in 2024 by Mateja, Carl Bray, Jason Tudor, and myself, called Return to Walden.  That book presents the latest in the SafeGrowth method, to which this blog is dedicated. 
• The second is Gerard and Annie Morrison’s new book Tier Teaching about better methods of teaching, learning, and safety in our schools, where the seeds of delinquency and dysfunction are planted, or removed, through competent education and educators. 


I am disappointed to miss this conference but to help Mateja and Gerard, I prepared a short video intro for their presentation today. Best wishes to all at the Sao Paulo ICA conference.