SafeGrowth and 안심 - A shared vision with Korean CPTED researchers

Skyline of Seoul, South Korea, by night. Over 25 million in the metro area, one of the most advanced cities in the world. Leaping ahead with the latest CPTED - photo CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

by Gregory Saville

When the Korean CPTED delegation departed Seoul last Sunday to meet us in Denver, they traveled 16 hours and crossed 16 time zones. Twenty-four years earlier, two South Korean scholars published a study applying space syntax theory to evaluate CPTED in the International CPTED Association’s official journal, Volume 1, Issue 1.

Across that distance and span of time, South Korea has quietly become one of the world's most innovative laboratories for CPTED research and practice.

Last week we hosted visitors from the Architecture and Urban Research Institute (AURI), a government research institute in the Republic of Korea, led by Dr Eunhee Kim. The members of the group included: 

• Dr. Eunhee Kim, Director, CPTED Research Center, AURI; 
• Dr. Youngweoo Kim, Associate Research Fellow, CPTED Research Center, AURI; 
• Jaeseok Her, Assistant Research Fellow (Spatial AI and Big Data Division), AURI; 
• Hongseok Choi, doctoral candidate, City & Metropolitan Planning, University of Utah (former AURI). 

 EARLY CONNECTIONS 

Late last year, AURI reached out to us for some background on SafeGrowth, the International CPTED Association, and our generational approach to CPTED. In May, we collaborated with them in an online webinar with some of their talented researchers. That is when I learned about the astounding progress of Korean CPTED over the past 20 years, especially in a few areas where they have leapfrogged past many other places with CPTED (how many CPTED instructors teach space syntax, or even know what it means?).

Beginning a three-day tour of Denver metro at the Arvada City Hall, Colorado

Before they arrived, we read AURI's recent work using virtual reality to evaluate neighborhood design and a study on using machine learning to explore relationships between urban environments and emergency calls for service. That research reported, “green areas have been mixed in the literature, [but] this study newly demonstrates that green spaces in urban Seoul are associated with reduced 112 [911] call occurrence”. It was a finding that seems to reinforce the Third-generation CPTED environmental principle of biophilia and how green land use can reduce fears and crime rates.

This was an exciting moment! 

Eight members of the SafeGrowth Network appearing virtually from across North America, including some also from the International CPTED Association, joined Mateja and I at the introductory workshop in Arvada in welcoming our Korean guests. Their visit was a professional exchange for research and education, but I suspected they would show us more than vice versa.

 

THE SITE VISITS

Obviously, the Koreans did not need more evidence on crime hotspots, lighting, target hardening, or access control. They have decades of experience with those concepts. Instead, we toured sites showing a more complex, urban planning side of SafeGrowth and CPTED, especially Smart Growth planning of which SafeGrowth is based and in which metro Denver excels. Smart Growth integrates compact development, walkability, mixed land uses, and transportation into complete neighborhoods.

One of our sites included the successful Transit Oriented Development (TOD) in Arvada’s Old Towne centered on the RTD commuter train station. 

Arvada City Hall meeting with Mayor Lauren Simpson, City Manager Don Wick, and their respective staff members

We met our gracious hosts, Arvada City Mayor Lauren Simpson and City Manager Don Wick, and their staffs to learn about TOD governance and development issues. 

Although the modern term Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) was popularized by planner Peter Calthorpe, transit-centered neighborhoods have existed for many years in cities like Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Vancouver, Minneapolis, Stockholm, and London. 

Yet despite their importance, TODs remain one of the least-developed areas of CPTED practice. We spent considerable time discussing how walkability, connectivity, mixed land uses, and human-scale design influence neighborhood safety and crime.

We then traveled to Lakewood’s new downtown, mixed-use development also based on Smart Growth, one of the first in the country, constructed from the ground-up twenty years ago. 

We spent time with artists at the Denver Art Society to learn about the social impact of Third Places on neighborhoods like the Arts District of Santa Fe and then followed with another Third Place, this one an adaptive reuse mall, the Edgewater Public Market. 

 

Dr. Eunhee Kim and Jaeseok Her speaking to Denver Art Society
artist Dana Mooney

Hongseok Choi speaking with Denver Art Society artist Allard Broderick

We have posted prior blogs on the Third Places crime immunity effects and the Denver Art Society. Third Places have a growing role in SafeGrowth to stabilize troubled areas in a way that no policing or target hardening ever could. 

We spent one morning at the Denver Police Academy with academy Director, Lt. Jessie Campion and Commander Jacob Herrera, from the Operational Innovation Bureau. They kindly permitted us a visit to examine police crime prevention strategies and training, including a CPTED report on the historic Denver Union Station following a crime spike in 2021. 

Police Lt. Jesse Campion toured the delegation through the academy and described tools of the trade in the Denver training programs

We ended our third day with a visit to Harmony Village, a cohousing development in Golden, Colorado. The Denver metropolitan region is home to about a dozen cohousing communities, among the largest concentrations of cohousing developments in North America.

The community gardens at the Harmony Village Cohousing in Golden, CO.

At first glance, the neighborhood looks much like any well-designed residential development, with plenty of natural surveillance and territorial controls, attractive homes, pedestrian pathways, gardens, and shared recreation areas. But the difference lies beneath the physical design. 

Residents own their homes but also intentionally share responsibility for governing the community, organizing activities, maintaining common spaces, and building relationships with one another. They learn conflict resolution techniques and organizing skills. In many respects, the neighborhood functions as a small, self-governing community. This illustrates why second-generation CPTED extends far beyond physical design.

The cohousing visit sparked considerable discussion since cohousing combines private home ownership with intentional community building and resident self-governance. For SafeGrowth, that distinction is important. 

Lorraine Neimela touring the delegates through Harmony Village Cohousing

Strong neighborhoods emerge not only from good design, but also from the capacity of residents to organize, collaborate, and collectively solve local problems. This is what too many Condo Associations and Homeowner Associations lack and what digital platforms like Nextdoor do not always achieve. In fact, studies now suggest they often do the opposite by encouraging fear of strangers, amplifying rumors, and replacing face-to-face interaction. 

Our thanks go to Lorraine Niemela from Harmony Village for touring us and the Koreans to view how cohousing, as with SafeGrowth, strengthens relationships first, so residents develop the capacity to solve problems together rather than simply report them.

 

안심

Korea has mastered many of the physical and technological dimensions of CPTED. This site visit was a great opportunity to show how SafeGrowth begins where those strengths leave off. It retains traditional CPTED, but it also asks how neighborhoods continue learning, adapting, and governing themselves long after the design work is finished. 

During the visit I learned that the Korean word 안심 best captures the SafeGrowth philosophy. It loosely translates to peace of mind and feelings of safety. That was the SafeGrowth concept we wanted to convey during the three days of their visit.

We were delighted to welcome our new Korean CPTED colleagues and impressed with their intuitive grasp of crime and safety problems in complex neighborhood systems where everything is interconnected to everything else. We barely had time to introduce the latest possible evolution of CPTED theory into complex adaptive systems. Next time, perhaps!  

As we said our goodbyes, I couldn't help but think of the final scene in the classic 1943 film Casablanca: "…I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." 

I am convinced that is so