Designing in crime prevention, designing out ambiguity: Practice issues with the CPTED knowledge framework available to professionals in the field and its potentially ambiguous nature.

Abstract

Crime prevention in the design of an urban setting displays unambiguous links with behavioural geography, the urban setting and development of sustainable communities, being a strategy that has been extant for over 40 years. This article examines how such strategies have been able to develop (or not) within the design of our environments and undertakes ground breaking analysis of academic input jointly with the response of professional practice. Systematic literature analysis and questionnaire responses from professionals in the field extracted a sizeable and diverse number of conflicting terms used to label Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) concepts in both academia and professional practice policies. Realising damaging transferability issues and extreme diversity in the understanding and use of CPTED frameworks between research and practice, this research exposes the risk to the sustainability and integrity of the crime prevention response by design to the human use of space. Frameworks from academic literature and professional policies were analysed evidencing the lack of a universally accepted framework and terminology set throughout.