The impacts of environmental factors in crime occurrence and safety of Tehran’s citizens

Abstract

With the spread of urbanization and increase in abnormal urban behaviors, especially crimes, the issue of citizens’ feeling of safety and environmental prevention via environmental planning and design has gained a high significance today. Environmental sciences (e.g., environmental psychology) and urbanism can prevent abnormal behaviors, such as felony crime in urban places by identifying effective local features and environmental conditions, along with other actions, so that the felon would have much less opportunity for committing criminal and unlawful acts in urban areas. This article describes the outcomes of a study project called “formulation of environmental criteria for preventing transgression in urban areas”. Aimed at identifying the role of environmental factors and formulating the criteria for reducing susceptibility to crime in urban areas, and carried out by the instructions of the Undersecretary of urbanism at the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism, it was completed in 2006 at the Study and Research Center of Architecture and Urbanism. Its suggested criteria and regulations have also been presented for obtaining the approval of the High Council of Architecture and Urbanism (which is the highest authority for approving urbanism regulations in Iran). In this article, field findings are analyzed using the scientific method of research and the descriptive method in comparison to the environmental theory of crime prevention and environmental features of safe urban areas. Hence the results of case studies and field surveys in the most crime-prone urban areas of Tehran (as a case study) were scrutinized from the city dwellers’ point of view, and finally the type of this relationship was determined considering the knowledge acquired about the relationship between environmental features and crime occurrence (feeling of safety), and considering the status of research in cities.