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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 11:37 am
Time: 11:37 am
Results for design against crime (arab countries)
1 results foundAuthor: Shehayeb, Dina Title: Planning and Designing Urban Space, Community and Crime Prevention: The Case of Arab Countries Summary: World statistics on safety and security show that the MENA region has one of the lowest crime rates in the World (UN-HABITAT, 2007). Homicide rates are associated with combinations of social, economic, cultural and political factors that are unique to localities. Even though underlying risk factors, such as poverty, unemployment, and political conflict prevail in several of the Arab Countries, homicide rates for selected global regions shows that the Arab Countries still have the lowest rates. At city level, large and rapidly growing cities in the Middle East report significantly lower crime rates than urban places elsewhere (UN-HABITAT, 2007). Based on Crime Trends Survey data, the Middle East is one of the regions with the lowest rates of robbery, with 3 and 2 incidents per 100,000 inhabitants, respectively (UNOCD, 2005). The relation of urban space, community and crime prevention has not been studied enough in the region. Place-based crime prevention and reduction theories of defensible space since Oscar Newman (1972) have originated in certain social and cultural contexts and have been often challenged (Kennedy & Silverman, 1985; Merry, 1981; Rohe & Burby, 1988). This earlier trend of physical determinism ignores the role of other variables such as socio-cultural homogeneity, income, teenager-to-adult ratio, places where crimes occurred, and type of crime; the impact of which on crime and fear of crime proved highly significant (Coleman, 1985; Coleman, 1988, pp. 161-170; Mawby, 1977; Van der Wurff, 1988; Schweiteer et al 1999). More recently crime prevention through environmental design – CPTED (Jeffrey, 1977) situational crime prevention (Clarke,1997) and environmental criminology have increasingly been supported by empirical research suggesting that interaction between the social and the built environment including the physical design and its management plays a role in facilitating or diminishing opportunities for crime and violence. While there is no way of establishing causality between physical design or management and crime, some research indicates that 10 - 15 % of crimes have environmental design and management components (Schneider and Kitchen, 2002, 2007). However, the relation between design, management and social aspects as factors affecting crime lacks clarification. Another problem is the limited scope of intervention that this literature has targeted. Empirical research has focused on certain planning and design elements and ignored others. For example, lighting, landscape, and activity scheduling in urban space (UN-HABITAT, 2007) have been focused upon, but not land use planning, street pattern and conditions of the edge of urban space, all of which have proved to play a major role in influencing use and perceptions within urban space (Shehayeb et al., 2003; Shehayeb, 1995). The lack of integration of crime prevention strategies within comprehensive city planning practices has been emphasized as a factor in facilitating opportunities for urban crime (UN-HABITAT, 2007). Recent directions in crime prevention have addressed physical planning from a rather limited perspective; with an emphasis on more effective policing and control strategies such as video surveillance (UN-HABITAT, 2009). For example, they focus on elements such as street widening that can open up previously impenetrable urban areas to police and emergency service vehicles, or the creation of new and ‘better’ housing which would improve manifest living conditions and public control of urban spaces. Such guidelines may lead to reverse outcomes; increased policing maybe at the cost of community building and territorial claim, both of which are factors that have shown effectiveness in promoting safety and security, in some contexts better than policing! Mediating factors such as perceptions of safety, sense of community, and appropriation of space, highly practiced in many cities of the Arab World, should be explained to reveal the nature of the relation between urban space and crime. The role of culture as a modifier of both behavior in, and meaning of, the built environment should be understood so as to avoid making the mistake of formulating prescriptive guidelines and design recipes suitable in some socio-cultural contexts but not in others. This paper aims at exposing some wide-spread misconceptions about the relation between physical space and crime, explaining the role of mediating factors so as to better generalize conclusions to different contexts, and finally, to show how these factors are at play in the context of Egypt as a case study representing the Arab Countries. Details: Santiago, Chile: Global Consortium on Security Transformation (GCST), 2010. 21p. Source: GCST Policy Brief Series No. 16: Internet Resource: Accessed October 8, 2012 at http://s3.amazonaws.com/zanran_storage/www.securitytransformation.org/ContentPages/2467318928.pdf Year: 2010 Country: International URL: http://s3.amazonaws.com/zanran_storage/www.securitytransformation.org/ContentPages/2467318928.pdf Shelf Number: 126643 Keywords: Crime PreventionCrime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTDesign Against Crime (Arab Countries)Public SpaceSituational Crime PreventionUrban Areas |