The Quality of Life: Research of Urban Security Aspects

Abstract

The investigation is based on the basic theoretical principles and the existing practices of community involvement into urban spatial planning proses as a creator of urban public security conditions. The article explores ways of improving urban structures of residential territories especially in the aspect of the urban public security. In the 1990s, public organizations of European and other countries focused their attention on improving the quality of life in cities. Theories regarding citizens' rights to protection from aggression, environmental pollution as well as the right to shelter and safe living spaces, health care, cultural life, democratic control of authorities and participation in the development of democratic principles have been analyzed in a great number of documents from various perspectives. On the basis of Western countries experience, this article studies an impact of cities urban structure and physical environment on public safety as one of the most important quality of life indicators. Lithuanians are not the owners of their own territories (this is in the ownership of the State), i.e. private subjects like public, territorial communities and real estate developers become the initiators of urban architecture development. Therefore, the local communities themselves get strengthened by consolidating their interests towards achieving common goals in the territory of their interest. Therefore, the problem of the present investigation can be associated with the following issues: factors and circumstances that determine the transformation of urban structure include the availability of effective measures for safety living spaces, social control over developing urban architecture, increasing pollution of the environment, the ideological transformation of policies, the transformation of human attitudes and his place in the world. Safe living spaces are influenced by various factors such as IT development, globalization, increasing competition and the dynamics of activities aimed at developing urban architecture. Globalization created by the development of information technologies focuses on building a cosmopolitan global unsafely society, anonymous culture and architectural style in these areas the quality of life indicators are strongly impacting on identifying the size and the boundaries of the territory that community is interested in. In the context of such circumstances that the territorial communities' zones were formed, the author carried out a study, which made it possible to determine cohesion between urban indicators and safe living environment. The goal of this article is to analyse different urban structures as objects influencing the quality of life through safe living environment interfaces. Also, to introduce urban planning measures that would reduce amount of threats to public safety. The research and statistical analysis was carried out with the aid of GIS software. The results showed that urban planning as a measure of public space and architecture formation is an integral part of security control and prevention in the multifunctional urban environment. The article gives a set of recommendations on the ways of improving methods and practices of safety living environment.