Crime and Fear in Public Places

Towards Safe, Inclusive and Sustainable Cities

Vania Ceccato, Mahesh K. Nalla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000098006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429352775 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

No city environment reflects the meaning of urban life better than a public place. A public place, whatever its nature—a park, a mall, a train platform or a street corner—is where people pass by, meet each other and at times become a victim of crime. With this book, we submit that crime and safety in public places are not issues that can be easily dealt with within the boundaries of a single discipline. The book aims to illustrate the complexity of patterns of crime and fear in public places with examples of studies on these topics contextualized in different cities and countries around the world. This is achieved by tackling five cross-cutting themes: the nature of the city's environment as a backdrop for crime and fear; the dynamics of individuals' daily routines and their transit safety; the safety perceptions experienced by those who are most in fear in public places; the metrics of crime and fear; and, finally, examples of current practices in promoting safety. All these original chapters contribute to our quest for safer, more inclusive, resilient, equitable and sustainable cities and human settlements aligned to the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Part I

Crime and fear in public places

An introduction

1 Crime and fear in public places

Aim, scope and context

Vania Ceccato, Juma Assiago and Mahesh K. Nalla

1.1 Introduction

Safety is an essential dimension of urban sustainability. In a sustainable city, safety ensures each person a place to live free from danger but also has the possibility of movement that is essential to place attachment and one’s quality of life (UN-Habitat, 2013, 2017, 2019). The adoption by member states of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2019) and the New Urban Agenda have provided a global blueprint towards better connected, mixed use and compact cities and human settlements. Additionally, the adoption of UN system-wide Guidelines on Safer Cities and Human Settlements provides further guidance to national and local governments to plan and make cities and human settlements safer. The UN-Habitat’s approach is premised on ‘prevention’ rather than reaction, to effectively address the complex challenges of urban insecurity, crime and violence. Placing public places and public transit availability, use and access at the center of the urban safety debate is a new way of understanding the role of cities and local governments in the prevention of crime and violence. Challenging traditional assumptions about urban crime and violence to make cities places of hope should influence global understanding of how individuals use and access the city in differentiated experiences.

No city environment reflects the meaning of urban life better than a public place. A public place, whatever its nature—a park, a mall, a train platform or a street corner—is where people pass by, meet each other, socialize and occasionally (only occasionally) become a victim of crime (Ceccato, 2016). The international research on environmental criminology and place-based crime prevention has long demonstrated how important the particular situational conditions of public places are to crime and citizens’ perceived safety. Yet, what makes a public place safe remains open to debate.

With this book, we engage in this debate by submitting that crime and safety in public places are not issues that can be easily dealt with within the boundaries of a single discipline, such as criminology or urban planning. Rather, they require knowledge and practical examples from other disciplines. This edited volume also assembles a unique set of original research as chapters that deal with public place and the situational conditions of crime (Clarke, 1997) and fear, from the perspective of sociology, criminology, geography, architecture, urban planning, engineering, computer science, gender studies, transportation, and law enforcement. These studies cross traditional boundaries between disciplines yet share a number of important commonalities.

Overall, this discussion about safety in public places is not only an important issue for research but also for the vision and practices of long-term sustainability of cities (UN-Habitat, 2019). Promoting accessibility for all social groups in the city regardless of people’s background is a key factor towards the realization of safe and sustainable cities and human settlements, using holistic, evidence-based and multidisciplinary approaches to urban safety and security.

This chapter provides an introduction to the theme of crime and fear in public places, the book’s scope, steps taken in the making of the book, key definitions, and the synopsis of the chapters.

1.2 Aim, scope and context

The aim of the book is to illustrate the complexity of patterns of crime and fear in public places by providing examples of studies on these topics contextualized in different cities and countries around the world. All contributions add to our quest for safer, inclusive, resilient, equitable and sustainable cities and human settlements aligned to the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2019).

This is achieved by tackling five themes (Figure 1.1):

1 the nature of the city’s structure as a backdrop for crime and fear (The environment),

2 the dynamics of people’s daily routines and their transit safety (The movement),

3 the safety experienced by those who are most targeted by these offences in public places (The users’ perspective),

4 the methodological challenges and advancements in the analysis of crime and fear (The Metrics), and,

5 the examples of current practices in promoting safety for different groups of society, both by academics and practitioners (The intervention).

Safety is one of the main concerns regarding public spaces. In fact, safety highly affects the use of a public place and its accessibility. Several environmental characteristics affect the safety of public places, yet it is safety perception that plays a significant role in making places appear safe or unsafe to people (Costamagna, Lind, & Stjernström, 2019). Therefore, how cities are planned and designed has a major impact on an individual’s safety (Ceccato, 2016). In this book, we provide examples, on the one hand, of public places that concentrate people and therefore offer crime opportunities. This is discussed in the cross-cutting theme The environment, which is focused on the city environment as the backdrop of crime and fear. Transportation nodes, parks, sports arenas, and university campuses illustrate the types of criminogenic conditions that might be at play in these environments. The environments where crime concentrates are different from other places in the city (Sherman, Gartin, & Buerger, 1989), because they are crime hot spots, that is, they have the capacity to attract and/or generate crime (Brantingham & Brantingham, 1995). Crime generators pull “masses of people who without any predetermined criminal motivation stumble upon an opportunity too good to pass up”. Motivated offenders are drawn to crime by known criminal opportunities in particular places—these places are crime attractors (Franka et al., 2011, p. 1). We also provide examples of public places that are criminogenic because they offer the right conditions for anonymity, which is essential for certain types of crime. Robbery, rape, and even violations such as the dumping of garbage and chemicals, for instance, only happen in places with poor surveillance and reduced opportunities for intervention (Ceccato & Uittenbogaard, 2014; Pettiway, 1982). These are characteristics of forests, desolated places, and roadsides that can make certain types of targets more vulnerable to victimization than others can (see the chapter about the role of public places in Disability Hate Crimes, for example). Desolate places in a park can also be pointed out as places that trigger fear and anxiety among park users.

Figure 1.1 Crime and fear in public places: the five themes of the book.

Even when crime does not happen in a particular public place, if an individual feels unsafe in that place, that person may avoid it at particular times of the day or altogether (Ceccato, 2012, 2013). We show in this book that this is problematic because, in some cities, especially those in the Global South, a large percentage of the population, often women, spend much of their time in public places. They are “transit captives”: they have relatively less access to non-public forms of transportation and are, therefore, overly reliant on public transport and spend much of their time in public places. The cross-cutting theme The movement will focus on “the dynamics of crime and fear in the transit city” and it constitutes a fundamental part of the book. A particular concern of women is the fear of sexual harassment while travelling, a concern that seems universal, as incidents of sexual harassment are reported on buses and trains in cities around the world (Ceccato & Loukaitou-Sideris, 2020). If public transportation is not reliable or safe, women’s mobility is impaired. Although women are most often the target of these types of behavior, they are not the only victims. There is evidence that gay men and transgendered persons are often victims of sexual harassment and violence in the São Paulo metro (Ceccato & Paz, 2017) and other cities in the world (Gekoski et al., 2015).

An individual’s right to safe public places is also highly dependent on society’s norms and structures, whether they promote or limit one’s freedom to move around without hindrance or fear. The risk of being a victim of crime and individual perceptions of personal safety are not only issues related to one’s age or gender but result from the intersection of a set of individual characteristics. In this book, we examine victimization and fear through an intersectional lens, considering issues of gender and age in particular in the cross-cutting theme The users’ perspective. Being an older and poor person creates “synergic layers of disadvantage” that affect whether one is at risk of being a victim of crime and how one experiences the world and expresses fear. This part also includes the perspective of victims of crimes as well as the offenders.

The book’s contributions illustrate new ways of measuring crime and/or perceived safety in public places. In Part V, The metrics, data about public places have been an important element in the discovery of patterns of regularities of both crime and fear in city environments. Equally important has been the use of spatial analysis for planning purposes, particularly when the goal has been to focus resources—more precisely, to tackle unsafe places and formulate preventive actions. The potential of these analyses is directly linked to the technological development of place-based techniques as well as use of “big data” both in academia and among planners and other professionals.

In particular, this book examines the evidence of victimization of crime in public places, feelings of perceived safety or lack thereof, and the necessary improvements that can make these places safer. The cross-cutting theme The intervention provides concrete examples of practices to guide public policy and local practices. Examples of collaborative safety planning strategies that aim at improvements of safety through local governance around the world make up this part. These chapters provide better grounds to assess the risk of crime and perceived fear that can help urban planners to better plan public places.

1.3 Steps taken in the making of the book

In order to create a cohesive edited volume, the authors met in Stockholm, Sweden, on 19 October 2018, to discuss the scope and structure of the book, as well as the particularities of the cities and countries. This meeting followed the conference “Crime and Fear in Public Places: Patterns, Challenges and Actions” that took place in Stockholm, Sweden, 17–18 October 2018, where researchers presented their results in seven parallel sessions.

All chapters went through a blind peer review process with, on average, two reviewers per chapter (see the Acknowledgements for a list of reviewers) and were guided by a template of evaluation criteria from editors. With the sets of suggestions in hand, the authors had a chance to incorporate suggestions to the chapters and re-submit to editors—a process that took about six months to complete. From the original submissions, four contributions were eliminated during this process. This evaluation process ensured that book followed a basic structure in terms of size, geographical coverage and degree of multidisciplinarity. The book is perhaps the first publication devoted entirely to crime and fear of crime in public places from a truly international perspective. Since the majority of the current literature to date is dominated by North American and Western European study cases, this book opens up this field of research to other contexts and includes countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America, drawing from the experiences of cities in the Global North and the Global South. Specifically, the book contains contributions from Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Mexico, India, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Australia, Italy, Brazil and the United States.

1.4 Definitions and terms

In this section, we define the most common terms used in this edited volume. This set of definitions and terms is expected to support the reading of the chapters that follow. What we mean by a particular term is not absolute and may slightly change from chapter to chapter. What we need to be aware of is that a definition bears a morality, which we argue, should better be spelled out, because whatever definition we assume has implications for how we, as researchers, approach a particular issue.

Let’s take the case of public places. Why is it so important to think about the concept of public places? First, because our focus in this special book is on the circumstances of crimes in these public arenas, namely, common, shared environments (often non-virtual) that can be accessed by individuals often at all times, such as parks, pedestrian paths, tunnels, streets, interstitial spaces between buildings, transport nodes such as bus stops, su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of appendices
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: Crime and fear in public places: an introduction
• PART II: The environment
• PART III: The movement
• PART IV: The users’ perspective
• PART V: The metrics
• PART VI: The intervention
• PART VII: Crime and fear in public places: conclusions and recommendations
• Index