Crime in the snow - CPTED & winter cities

Snow and CPTED. Examining LED streetlights and staying warm (photo by Jason Tudor)

CPTED pioneers never imagined how crime works in a winter city. Local practitioners figure that out themselves. Case in point: Our SafeGrowth training last week in Saskatoon, Canada, about 250 miles north of the US border.

Saskatoon now leads the municipal pack for CPTED implementation. I've blogged before about Saskatoon, especially regarding bus terminals. Like many forward thinking communities it has online design guidelines and CPTED policy. Like other places Saskatoon reviews new developments for CPTED.

Unlike other places Saskatoon is the first-ever city to incorporate 1st Generation CPTED, 2nd Generation CPTED, and SafeGrowth into their design guidelines. Many CPTED practitioners still don't know the difference between the concepts (explained in the guidelines). Saskatoon does this by embedding SafeGrowth into Local Area Plans in dozens of neighborhoods across the city, each with their own plans and steps for moving forward.

Saskatoon students audit underground parking lots 

We've now trained over a hundred city staff, police and community members. Last week city planner Elisabeth Miller and myself continued the training with outdoor safety audits and CPTED reviews of parking lots. Newman, Jacobs, Jeffery, Angel, and Gardiner wrote nothing about CPTED and streetlights in snowbanks at -20 Celsius. We'll see how the project teams from class figure it out.