Reducing crime and the opportunities for crime, is one of the challenges faced by urban designers and landscape architects when delivering new neighbourhoods and open spaces.

As design professionals we are seeking to develop new places which are distinctive and attractive to new and existing residents. Obviously such residents will be keen to live in places which are free of anti- social behaviour and crime.

However, safety is by no means the only issue that residents value in their developments. Good access to varied, challenging and well-maintained public space; high quality provision for children’s play; and opportunities for social interaction and community building are also judged by the public to be important.

Unfortunately, it is often the case that fear of crime and the security measures taken to allay these fears, militate against creating successful neighbourhoods and public spaces.

CABE believes that the design of public space and the renewal of existing places should follow a ‘place making’ agenda rather than an approach which focuses solely on crime reduction. Particularly in new growth areas we are keen that the provision of suffi cient good quality, varied and challenging open space is designed into projects from the start.

Approaches to public spaces which follow a ‘target hardening’ line explicitly prioritise crime reduction either through the reinforcement of existing facilities and often the removal of amenities and planting or, in the case of new public spaces, providing so few facilities or greenery that there is little opportunity for anything to be vandalised.

This approach produces an overly fortifi ed and denuded public realm with little colour or ambiance. Such an approach may appear to cause the perceived problems to go away but in itself may create new problems. While initially it may appear that there is less to damage, the blandness of the resulting place may actively discourage existing and future law abiding users. After all where is the pleasure in sitting in a park if there is nothing much to look at, few pleasant places to sit, or no useful facilities like toilets or a youth club?

This reduction in patronage creates a vicious circle with fewer and fewer people using or walking through the space. Once the level of natural surveillance drops, opportunities for criminal and anti-social activity increase. Parks and spaces can develop a reputation as places where such activity is rife even when there is precious little left in the space beyond tarmac and grass. This is primarily because the existing community have effectively deserted the park to such people and activities.

Negatives and positives

A target hardening approach used on its own does send out a very negative message to local residents (even if community representatives may have led the initial call for such a security-led approach). By focusing on hardening facilities for everyone, it assumes the worst might happen and that only the most basic facilities with heavy security can be sustained. Also a bland, hardened place is unlikely to create a positive and engaging space for community events and the fostering of good community relations.

That is not to say that security products do not have their uses when used appropriately and in response to the local context. Good examples of sensitively designed security measures tackling a specific problem (typically resulting from historically poor layout or design) include the gating off of poorly overlooked alleys. We would advocate that such work is done with the involvement of both the local community and design professionals to ensure it is in keeping with the neighbourhood, local movement patterns, and is of lasting benefit to local residents.

However if public safety is considered at the outset as a part of good urban design then there should be much less need for later security interventions and retrofi tting of security products.

Often there are opportunities for the community to gain much more value from an initial equivalent public space investment compared to a pure crime reduction measure. If the money is put towards better designed parks and spaces, the benefi ts can be varied and long-term rather than temporary and isolated. In the UK we spend around £140 million a year on CCTV. That’s a camera per every 14 people and even a small part of that huge sum would go a long way to providing better designed parks and streets. This is exactly what happened in Sunderland where an investment of £40,000 of core local authority funding in a warden scheme, which included the parks (including Mowbray Park – seen here) in its patrols saw the cost of cleaning up vandalism and graffi ti in the parks drop by 90 per cent and a signifi cant uplift to property values in surrounding neighbourhoods.

It is easy to be unduly influenced by newspaper headlines that tend to highlight incidents of crime. In fact overall crime fi gures in the UK are falling from a peak in the mid 1990s. However, those who advocate good design need better counter arguments to those who promote crime deterrents.

Compelling statistics reinforce sales pitches for products but have most likely not been compared to fi gures for improving the environment. Ensuring simple design measures in new developments such as overlooking and natural surveillance as well as providing onsite staff is critical. This is a signal to architects and landscape architects to market their design skills better to clients and to be comfortable in explaining the crime prevention attributes of their plans to local stakeholders. CABE is working with the Association of Chief Police Offi cers – Crime Prevention Initiatives Ltd (ACPO – CPI) to enhance the Secured by Design principles and improve their use, presentation and appreciation among design and crime prevention professionals.

Basic principles

Good urban design principles, as outlined within government guidance such as By Design (DETR/CABE 2000), will produce high quality public space that is inherently safe and pleasant to use and that also delivers a range of other positive outcomes such as encouraging social interactions in communities, sustainable travel and an inclusive public realm that meets the needs of all sections of the community.

The interlocking design principles listed in By Design are:

• Character – A place with its own identity
• Continuity and enclosure – A place where public and private spaces are clearly distinguished
• Quality of the public realm – A place with attractive and successful outdoor areas
• Ease of movement – A place that is easy to get to and move through
• Legibility – A place that has a clear image and is easy to understand
• Adaptability – A place that can change easily
• Diversity – A place with variety and choice

While the above criteria should produce attractive places that are intrinsically safe and where community life can fl ourish, we have evidence that many recently built developments are failing to develop a strong community spirit. CABE’s recent ‘A sense of place’ research into the attitude of residents living in new housing developments showed that over 45 percent of people thought that their new neighbourhood did not create a sense of community. This is a worrying fi nding as the Home Offi ce’s own research into the experiences of anti-social behaviour (Home Offi ce 2004) shows that a lack of neighbourliness was a strong determinant of high levels of anti-social behaviour. The task to ensure that new growth points do not suffer such social problems is a signifi cant one. Many of the places awarded new growth point status such as Thetford and Redhill have not traditionally been places where government regeneration money has been focused. These are arguably the places where good design advice has been in short supply and where there is evidence of poorly designed existing neighbourhoods alongside low-level anti-social behaviour in the public realm. CABE is helping to develop strategic direction for new growth points to ensure that, early on in the process, high quality masterplans and frameworks anticipate the need for networks of good quality public space in both existing and new neighbourhoods.

Critical to this is new government guidance, such as the Manual for Streets, which will serve to re-focus priority on the pedestrian, and it is in places like the new growth points, that getting people out of cars to use the public realm and to use town centres, is likely to prove a more effective deterrent to anti- social behaviour than heavy-handed measures.

To finish with a few positive examples. Gun Wharf Quay (pictured above) is an attractive and safe development in Plymouth that has eschewed gates, spikes, cameras and sleeping policemen in favour of a successful place-making design approach. The transformation of Sheffi eld’s Green Estate from a bleak place frequently targeted by vandals to one at the heart of the community, serves to illustrate how an integrated design approach combined with an awareness of crime prevention is the best way of delivering attractive and safe places.

Brian Quinn is a senior programme offi cer in CABE Space. He is helping to develop guidance and case studies that illustrate the value of well designed and maintained parks and streets in creating sustainable communities.

He has particular interests in the relationship between design and crime prevention. Prior to working for CABE Brian worked as an urban designer for Alan Baxter and Associates and the Richard Coleman Consultancy. He has an MA in Urban Design from the University of Westminster.

Further reading

Decent parks? Decent behaviour? at www.cabe.org.uk