What works and what is right

 

Street views from New York's Highline Park
"Eyes on the Street", literally

by Mateja Mihinjac

In crime prevention, we often categorise strategies as working or not working simply based on measured changes in crime rates. If crime goes down, the intervention is labelled “evidence-based,” and the conversation moves on.

SafeGrowth, as with all evidence-based methods, measures crime rates. However, SafeGrowth also asks a more difficult and penetrating question: Is it the right thing to do? 

It may sound odd to state that crime prevention should not be judged only by what works. Yet, our experience with decades of crime prevention show that it must also consider who it works for and who it works against.

 

WHEN “WHAT WORKS” COMES AT A COST

Many traditional crime prevention strategies rely on target hardening and security measures: locks, gates, fences, barriers, and surveillance systems. These approaches, now subsumed under First-Generation CPTED, can be effective. They reduce opportunities for crime and are relatively easy to measure. From a narrow perspective, they can work. 

They can also fail due to an unintended consequence. 

For example, they reshape the places where they are applied and trigger the application of “hostile or defensive architecture”, now associated with First-Generation CPTED by some anti-CPTED critics. Says one from the University of Toronto: “Defensive architecture is an outgrowth of a set of design principles known as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.” 

Public walkway single seats and preventing homeless sleeping. No one sits. 

High fences and controlled access points can create environments that feel closed, sterile, and exclusionary. 

Subtle deterrents, such as hostile architecture mentioned earlier,
to devices designed to discourage loitering (mosquito devices),
send clear signals about who belongs and who does not. In these cases, safety may be achieved, but often at the expense of equity, inclusion, and social life. 

Public spaces begin to look and function more like private territory and arguments are emerging to halt the process.

Fencing to control access -  keeping the Geese outside the gates

WHERE THINGS GO WRONG 

First-Generation CPTED traditionally focuses on four core principles: territorial reinforcement, natural surveillance, access control, and maintenance. These are powerful tools and, when applied thoughtfully, can improve safety and reduce opportunities for crime.

But that is problematic when CPTED is reduced to these elements alone and applied as a checklist of physical interventions without considering broader social impacts. I’ve written about the problem of such reductionism in one of my previous blogs.


In practice, this can produce environments that are technically safer but socially problematic. 

Measures based on increased control, exclusion, or surveillance can disproportionately affect already marginalised communities. Critics have shown how such approaches can reinforce spatial inequality and exclusion, including forms of racialised access to public space characterised as anti-blackness.


 

Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village where Jane Jacobs and community activists prevented destruction from highway expansion in the 1960s. Eyes on the street that care.

Thus, focusing only on measurable outcomes risks overlooking a key question: who bears the burden of those outcomes?

FIXING THE PROBLEM 

The Second- and Third-Generation CPTED are the building blocks of SafeGrowth and they offer a different path. 

Second-Generation CPTED moves beyond physical design to include the social, cultural and ecological dimensions to stabilise neighbourhood conditions. It employs strategies such as social cohesion, community culture, neighbourhood capacity, and connectivity


Third-Generation CPTED expands further, emphasising safety as a result of thriving, healthy and sustainable neighbourhoods. It employs four strategies, including environmental sustainability, social sustainability, public health sustainability, and  economic sustainability


The regular weekend chess tournament in the park.
An age-old activation and cultural strategy

These approaches recognise that safety is not just about reducing crime opportunities. It is about building places where people feel they belong, participate, and take ownership. Instead of asking how do we keep people out, they ask how do we create places where people want to be and where communities themselves contribute to safety?

 

RETHINKING “EVIDENCE”

Part of the challenge in identifying what works lies in how we define evidence.

Target hardening is often favoured because its impacts are immediate and measurable. We may install a fence or reduce access, and crime may drop. The result is clear and quantifiable. 

Yet broader impacts, such as reduced accessibility, loss of public space, increased exclusion, and hostile architecture, are harder to measure. They unfold over time, often after post-intervention evaluation has been completed, and are frequently overlooked.

 

Modern 'homeless encampment' behind fences and locked gates in Denver, Colorado.
Exclusion, hostile architecture, reduced access. This is not the answer.

Some more comprehensive evaluation frameworks, such as those developed by the European Crime Prevention Network, have begun to move beyond simple crime reduction by examining context, process, and broader outcomes like fear of crime.


However, they still tend to prioritise what is measurable over what is equitable. The question of who benefits and who is excluded remains insufficiently addressed in such evaluations. 

In SafeGrowth, we are encouraging expansion in what counts as evidence. This means moving beyond crime reduction and considering inclusivity of space and strength of community ties. It also includes the overall quality of life in the neighbourhood.

 

LOOKING AHEAD

There are many strategies that have been shown to both reduce crime and support equity and community wellbeing. Some are well established. Others are still emerging.

We all want safer places, and we also want better places for everyone. The real task is to reconcile what works with what is right and to recognise that lasting safety depends on both.

Two Kansas Citys - Design, community, and crime

 

Downtown skyline of Kansas City, Missouri - day and night. Two different cities.
How you look determines what you see.

 

 by Greg Saville

This week we spent time in Kansas City. I watched this city not as a tourist, but as a field observer. One afternoon I photographed the downtown under a calm blue sky. It was interesting, not remarkable. That evening it stood silhouetted by a burning orange sunset. The sky had changed. The city had not. Depending on how you look, you see two different cities. 

When you look at Kansas City and crime research, what do you see? A decades-old program for neighborhood diagnosis called CityScope, a city-wide project on gun violence, a study on alcohol outlets, and another on property values. But overall, Kansas City is most notable for a famous 1974 study on police patrol and more recent crime and mapping research on “Risk Terrain Modelling” (a tool for police crime analysts). 

Apparently, at least since the 1970s, Kansas City is a police research laboratory, not a neighborhood research laboratory. When it comes to social ecology and neighborhood crime prevention, the pickings are slim.

I was interested in the people living in neighborhoods. That too is where crime can be addressed, perhaps not with formal police methods. Social ecology studies show how crime prevention can happen in more informal, and powerful, ways. A walk in two Kansas City neighborhoods was revealing. 

South of Midtown is the Country Club Plaza and Brookside neighborhoods. These are analytical approximations of the three neighborhoods. There are numerous ways to classify neighborhoods, in this case established urban indicators of land use, movement patterns, and activity. 

 

A LOOK AT BROOKSIDE

Brookside is a 1900-1930 streetcar community where clusters of shops and stores lined the sides of the streetcar routes. Brookside has a mixture of architectural styles, with front porches, short setbacks, and a continuous tree canopy overhead (a Third Generation CPTED concept called biophillia).

Brookside neighborhood. A commercial main drag surrounded by residential
 - the streetcar city 

Residences and apartments radiated in grid streets perpendicular to the main street. It is an comfortable neighborhood to stroll with shopping, coffee shops and parks nearby. History describes how design features here evolved organically, with different builders over decades and families rehabbing to their own style. 

The short front yards and gardens not only brought people outside to interact; they helped people get to know familiar faces. 

Straight and angled parking, seating on the sidewalk, planters, different architecture

The eyes here did not simply see the street. They loved their neighborhood (said locals). That did not just ensure eyes on those streets, it ensured eyes that cared about their neighbors. As a result life here unfolds in predictable ways, a slow rhythm that enhances both the sense of community, and the historical memories of community from one generation to the next. 

A LOOK AT COUNTRY CLUB PLAZA

Just north of Brookside was Country Club Plaza (The Plaza). Here, activity and design are deliberate. It was built in 1922 using Spanish Revival architectural styles including apartments, retail, entertainment, eateries, and offices. 

Country Club Plaza neighborhood, built in 1922, has Baroque and Moorish
Revial Architecture, fountains, murals, and Spanish style art

The Plaza is privately-governed, and though it has residential and apartment living, it is often termed the first outdoor shopping plaza in the country. 

It was a beautiful neighborhood with fountains and murals. This managed economic ecosystem was an architectural showpiece and a place where security is controlled. 

I wondered: these are two different kinds of neighborhoods so how did The Plaza and Brookside look from the perspective of our Third Generation CPTED Neighborhood Livability Heirarchy? 

Country Club Plaza, a 15-block area, has a long, and complex, story in urban planning history

Both places work, yet for different reasons. Brookside might be slightly closer to the advanced level on the Livability Hierarchy. Interestingly, there was one category where they differed most: Crime! 

 

CRIME IN EACH NEIGHBORHOOD 

Crime is not simply a function of environmental opportunity. It is a function of how places regulate that opportunity over time. That becomes clear when comparing Brookside and the Country Club Plaza using available crime data. Any clean comparison requires assembling patterns from multiple sources, an imperfect solution but good enough for a quick look. 

Country Club Plaza crime reports, Jan-April 2026.

Brookside crime reports, Jan-Apri 2026

Even with data limitations, the pattern is clear. Brookside’s residential fabric shows lower and more stable incident levels, while The Plaza carries greater and more visible crime pressure. That difference is reinforced by a spike in crime incidents since last year at The Plaza. Management brought in increased private security measures such as lighting, CCTV, and armed security. 

In practical terms, Brookside operates as a self-regulating neighborhood system with continuity of residents and routine use. The Plaza, by contrast, is a high-activity destination that depends on formal control to manage the risks it attracts. Looking at it this way, strong social continuity regulates opportunity more effectively than design and management alone.

 

FLAWS IN CPTED TRADITIONALISM 

None of this suggests either neighborhood is unpleasant. Likely, both sit in the moderate range of the Livability Hierarchy, though Brookside appears stronger.

None of this suggests crime prevention absent. In Kansas City, police and security agencies conduct CPTED surveys, and violence prevention groups promote CPTED toolkits. Unfortunately, these approaches remain rooted in traditional 1st Generation CPTED and offer little more than surface attention to social activity and connection. The kind of social ecology seen in places like Brookside demands far more. It emerges through daily life and the conditions that reinforce it over time.

As Oscar Newman and Jane Jacobs both argued, safety does not arise simply from physical features like walkability or shared amenities. Those matter, however without understanding how community life forms and sustains itself, they are not enough. Adding design features without that understanding does little to create lasting safety.

HOW YOU LOOK AT SAFETY MATTERS

That is why 2nd Generation CPTED and SafeGrowth focus on community development. It is not enough to only rely on checklists of surveillance, access control, maintenance, and territorial reinforcement. This is the flaw of CPTED traditionalism. Real safety requires building the social conditions that sustain it.

Brookside did not become safe by defining property boundaries, installing lights, or eliminating blind corners. It evolved into a safe place through the visibility of vibrant daily life and the development of pro-social activity built into the work and play of residents. Kansas City shows this gap plainly: between the appearance of safety, and the lived reality that sustains it.