Testing building plans for public safety: Usefulness of the delft checklist

Abstract

Public safety in research and policy Establishing connections between safety and urban planning goes far back in history. In his pronouncements on the ideal city Plato pointed to the need for wide streets easy to survey to protect the mobility (De Klerk, 1980). The safety of the 'lower orders' was rated rather less highly in those days. Their houses, which tended to be packed together along narrow, dark streets were considered good enough. Not much may be found of Plato's ideas in the early history of Dutch architecture and urban design. Here it was above all the town ramparts and the town gates that were designed to offer the burghers of the Middle Ages protection against thieves, highwaymen and attacks from outside. This is clear from surviving town plans. In many Dutch towns remains of these ramparts may still be found. At the individual level citizens relied on thick walls and small windows to offer a 'protective shell, standing between man and the dangerous world outside' (Prak, 1968). Later still the realization dawned that good public lighting could likewise have a positive effect on public safety. The more systematic study of the relation between the physical environment and public safety is of only relatively recent date. At the beginning of the development of criminology as a discipline emphasis was placed on perpetrator-oriented theories. For many Dutch criminologists around the turn of the century the book L'huomo delinquente by the Italian psychiatrist Lombroso (1876) was an important source of inspiration. It precipitated a number of studies in which the causes of crime were sought above all in the personality of the perpetrator, criminal behaviour being seen as innate and hereditary. In so far as a link had already been established in those days between crime and the environment, the emphasis fell above all on socioeconomic variables (Bonger, 1932). Not until the 1950s and 1960s was the importance of adequate housing and good socio-cultural facilities increasingly recognized, largely as a result of the ideas of the Chicago School (Park et al., 1925; Shaw and McKay, 1942). A well-known Dutch study in this connection is the investigation by Buikhuisen et al. (1969) into the effects of neighbourhood redevelopment on crime. The ideas developed in other countries on crime