Sustainable Urban Development and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design for the British City. Towards an Effective Urban Environmentalism for the 21st Century

Abstract

This paper discusses the inter-related concepts of sustainable urban development and CPTED (crime prevention through environmental design). It argues that a ‘safer’ and ‘sustainable’ community must be characterised by the image of regulation, or at least some control of real and imagined threats to personal or community health and the threat of crime and personal attack. Planners and urban designers have a growing awareness and experience of ‘sustainable development’ and are beginning to consider the capacity of the built environment to reduce both the fear of crime and the potential for offending. This paper concludes that a synthesis of the two concepts can represent a meaningful contribution towards crafting an effective strand of ‘urban environmentalism’ that can be utilised to facilitate the design of safer, more liveable and sustainable urban communities.