Safe Place by Design: Urban Crime in Relation to Spatiality and Sociality

Abstract

Different conceptions of crime in design practice, sociology, environmental psychology, and criminology indicate an extensive articulation of crime in relation to the built environment and urban form in the city. Five decades of different studies on urban crime, crime prevention through environmental design, and fear of crime indicate an implicit and gradual movement from deterministic to possibilistic propositions in exploring the relationships between urban crime and environmental design both in theory and practice. Hence, the study firstly conducts a critical review on the issue of urban crime in relation to urban design, planning, and architecture disciplines. Categorizing different researches of urban crime in terms of their propositions and various dimensions of crime prevention through environmental design, the study proceeds to discuss the issue of crime in relation to spatiality and sociality in the city. Moreover, grounding the issue of safety in the context of place theory and avoiding deterministic and free-will approaches to urban crime, the study advocates for the necessity of mapping urban morphology, functional attributes, and spatial patterns in relation to socio-economic condition and demographic profiling. Thus, giving primacy to spatiality in relation to sociality and criticizing the absence of morphological mapping of urban crime, the study denotes the multi-scalar and multi-dimensional attributes of urban crime in relation to morphological, functional, perceptual, and social dimensions of a safe place by design.

Urban Crime Occurrences in Association with Built Environment Characteristics: An African Case with Implications for Urban Design

“…(1) Theft on the public realm, (2) residential burglary, (3) theft in the public/private institution, (4) shoplifting, (5) theft on the agriculture property, (6) theft of vehicle. 7Mugging, (8) mugging using weapons, (9) mugging using white arm, (10) robbery on the public realm, (11) residential robbery, (12) robbery in the public/private institutions, (13) robbery in the shop, (14) robbery in the agriculture properties, (15) robbery of vehicle.…”

“…The relationship between the urban built environment and crime has been widely explored in many developed countries [1,2,5,[11][12][13] but with much less attention in developing countries [14,15]. In general, research has been conducted at three levels-micro (buildings), meso (neighborhoods), and macro (city/town)-with more attention given to the micro-level using sampled buildings.…”

KAJIAN IDENTIFIKASI KOTA AMAN (SAFECITY) di SEMARANG

“…Kedua faktor tersebut kemudian akan diketahui faktor mana yang perlu diprioritaskan dengan menghasilkan respon kota terhadap faktor. Respon ini dapat dituangkan dalam perencanaan dan perancangan kota atau kawasan dengan mempertimbangkan keamanan masyarakat sebagai elemen utama (Cozens, Saville, & Hillier, 2005;Kamalipour, Faizi, & Memarian, 2014).…”

Assemblage Thinking and the City: Implications for Urban Studies

“…Assemblage thinking is against essentialism and reductionism in different ways. While essentialist approaches in urban studies tend to reduce the concept of place to an essence with a stabilised identity (Kamalipour, Faizi, & Memarian, 2014;Kamalipour, Yeganeh, & Alalhesabi, 2012), assemblage theory reads place as a multiplicity that is in the process of "becoming" in relation to social-spatial and material-express alignments. Hence, methodological frameworks can also run the risk of reductionism.…”