Can streets be made safe?

Abstract

This paper addresses the controversy about the relationship between crime and spatial design. There are tow divergent views: the one which advocates open and permeable environments in which strangers as well as inhabitants pans through spaces and the second based on the model of defensible space in single mix which advocates closed and impermeable environments.

The paper identifies the hidden dangers of research into crime and its spatial distribution and warns against over-simplistic assumptions, particularly at the larger scale of analysis. Research by Simon Shu and other crime–space studies carried out by the Space Syntax Laboratory have some striking results – they found no correlation between crime and density, only a poor correlation between affluence and crime, but a very strong correlation between layout type and all kinds of crime, with traditional street patterns the best and the most ‘modern’ hierarchical layouts the worst. The results linking socio-economic as well as spatial data are preliminary but strongly indicate that rich and poor alike benefit from living in traditional streets. The paper offers some simple design guidance: join buildings together, avoid any kind of secondary access, make sure that all public spaces are continuously ‘constituted’ by dwelling entrances and maximise the intervisibility of these entrances by a linear rather than a broken up layout. The research draws out a critical lesson in space syntax crime analysis that spatial factors do not operate one at a time to increase or reduce security, they interact and both global and local factors must be right if security is to be enhanced.