The Urban Fabric of Crime and Fear

Vania Ceccato Editor

The Urban Fabric of Crime and Fear

Editor Vania Ceccato School of Architecture and the Built Environment Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, Sweden

ISBN 978-94-007-4209-3 ISBN 978-94-007-4210-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4210-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London Library of Congress Control Number: 2012941401 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher’s location, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be obtained through RightsLink at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution under the respective Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)

For Luiza and Lidio Anders, Filip and Amanda

Preface

This book is written for all those interested in the city’s liveability, more specifically the city’s capacity to generate places fit for all to live in. Crime and fear of crime impose challenges to the liveability of cities. Whether the risk of being a victim of crime is real or not, contemporary security concerns hamper mobility and social interactions that are vital for urban quality of life. The risk of being a victim of crime is not equally or randomly distributed over space; some parts of the urban fabric are less safe than others. Fear of crime has been found to follow specific patterns in the city which are not always easy to predict. This book aims to show links between urban structure, crime and fear of crime, illustrating how different disciplines deal with urban vulnerability to (and fear of) crime. The challenge here is to place issues of risk and fear of crime on the urban scale, reminding the reader that both risk and fear are affected by multi-scale factors that go far beyond the materiality of the city. These articles are based on challenges found in European and North American cities and, without being too extensive, also in cities of the Global South. The book concludes by showing examples of planning practices and crime interventions that aim to promote safety at both national and local levels. Most of the content of this book derive from speeches given by speakers at Security matters! A seminar on urban crime, fear and contemporary social order in the context of urban sustainability that took place in Stockholm, Sweden, May 20–21, 2010. The objective of the seminar was to provide an interdisciplinary discussion of crime and fear in the urban context. Speakers focused on this single theme from different perspectives, which makes the book useful to a wide group of academic disciplines such as criminology, architecture, geography, planning, anthropology and psychology and for a general audience interested in fear and crime in cities. I am grateful to our contributors from Brazil, Denmark, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the USA for taking the time either to convert speeches into articles for the book or to write articles from scratch. Together, these contributions offer a diverse collection of issues, from different points of departure, driven by particular methodological trajectories but all based on a common ground of issues relevant to

vii

viii

Preface

those who deal with urban safety. The gender dimension of safety, although not the focus here, was approached by various contributors and has become an integral part of the book. Crucial in bringing this book to fruition were reviewers who kindly read the articles and made suggestions for improvements – a big thank you! The reviewers were of two types: the contributors themselves and the external reviewers, here presented in alphabetical order: Amy Rader Olsson, Ebba Ho¨gstro¨m and Roland Andersson, Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden); Gregory Saville, University of Calgary (Canada); Irene Molina, Uppsala University (Sweden); Jodi Lane, University of Florida (USA); Lars Dolmen, National Police Board (Sweden); Robert Svensson, Malmo¨ University (Sweden); Stephen Farrall, Sheffield University (UK); and Szymon Marcin´czak, University of Ło´dz´/Umea˚ University (Poland/Sweden). Special thanks to Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Robert Haining for reading and making comments on the introductory chapter of the book. I should also like to thank my colleagues and students at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE), Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), from whom I have drawn inspiration and gained insights when editing the book. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the support of Professor Folke Snickars and Professor Katja Grillner. On a fiscal note, I would like to thank the Swedish Research Council FORMAS which provided funding for the realisation of the seminar, together with the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at KTH, and the Swedish National Defence College (Crismart Group) for providing the seminar venue. The book came alive with the pictures kindly produced by architect Erick Tonin – pictures that now are at the beginning of each part – thanks. I am also grateful to Adriaan Uittenbogaard for helping me with some editorial details and to Catherine Byfield for her patience when proofreading the articles, not always an easy a task since many of us are not native English speakers. Finally, but not least, I must thank the publisher, Springer, for their support. I particularly wish to acknowledge Evelien Bakker and Bernadette Deelen-Mans for their stewardship of this project. Stockholm

Vania Ceccato

Chapter Outlines

The book is divided into five parts. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the issue of crime and fear in the urban context and explains why this is a relevant subject for those interested in the quality and liveability of urban environments. This chapter provides a theoretical framework to the book and helps introduce the issues discussed in Parts I–V. Part I places the issue of crime and fear of crime in cities against a general background of globalised fear, but from an urban perspective. Pain and Alexander seek to contribute to ground-up understandings of everyday security. They show a critical perspective on fear in the city by considering the issue through the eyes of those who occupy a contradictory position: sometimes viewed as feeling urban fear and sometimes as being its root cause. They focus on white working-class young people living in a marginalised urban area of the UK. The issue of differentiated levels of fear of crime at the intra-urban level is further discussed by Jackson and Brunton-Smith. They are interested in finding out how individuals evaluate their personal risk of crime, more specifically, how extensive is this perception of risk in space (does it go beyond their own neighbourhood’s boundaries?). The authors link individual survey data from a national probability sample of residents in urban areas of England and Wales to independent measures of neighbourhood demographic characteristics, visual signs of disorder and reported crime. Part II turns to the micro-urban environments and how they relate to crime vulnerability. Hillier and Sahbaz explore links between the micro-urban environment and crime in a London borough. Such vulnerability does depend not only on particular types of streets, buildings or facades but also on (or in combination with) individuals’ interactions and the contexts of their daily activities. Moving between places means being exposed to unfamiliar places. LoukaitouSideris deals with an important citizen right: the ability to walk from home or work to the transit stop or wait at the bus stop or station platform without the fear of being victimised. Increasing transit crime is a rather persistent but underreported trend that intimidates transit riders in many cities, particularly women. Her study draws

ix

x

Chapter Outlines

from the literature as well as empirical studies to explain the relationship between fear and crime and the spatial characteristics of places. Part III focuses on crime and fear analysed either through aggregated spatial units (output areas in the UK and basomra˚de in Sweden) or as a context to social life using individual data. Haining starts discussing how geographers have dealt with the ecology of crime using both offences and offender data; he also explains the role of ecological analysis when the target of inference is the individual rather than the area and how far one can go with aggregated data. Both articles by Ceccato and Wikstro¨m and Ceccato and Wilhelmsson are concerned with contextual effect of environment on individuals: first, the effect of the neighbourhood context on the decision to commit a crime, and second, the impact of crime and fear of crime on people’s behaviour when buying a property. In the first article, Haining focuses on the geography of crime using case studies in the UK. He begins by illustrating the extent to which familiar concepts in criminology such as social disorganisation theory and routine activities theory contribute to our understanding of geographical patterns of crime. He also illustrates the importance of constructing relevant spatial frameworks for ecological analyses using two examples. He first identifies high-intensity crime neighbourhoods in Sheffield, England. He describes the area-level attributes that explain the police’s own perception of where such neighbourhoods are located; he also describes the area-level attributes that explain where such neighbourhoods are located when identified from the police’s own recorded offence-offender database. Ceccato and Wikstro¨m’s article has a methodological character and derives from new ways of assessing the effect of environment on individuals’ behaviour, in this case, offending. The motivation is that most ecological theory and research into crime causation neglects the role of the individual and, crucially, the role of the interaction between the individual and his or her environment. The authors suggest the use of geographic information systems (GIS) combined with space-time budget techniques, to visualise and track individuals’ daily activity patterns in different city environments. They first test several GIS-based visualisation techniques for handling spatial and temporal dimensions of activity patterns using a dataset of adolescents in Peterborough, UK. Later, they show how these spatial methods can support the creation of measures of environment exposure that may help predict offending. Still adopting an ecological approach, Ceccato and Wilhemsson illustrate whether and how crime and fear of crime affect neighbourhoods, particularly the prices of housing in Stockholm, Sweden. They first assess separately whether acts of vandalism and fear of places in the neighbourhood affect apartment prices. Such effect is measured not only in neighbourhoods where people live but also in their surrounding areas. Later, they assess the combined effect of vandalism and fear on apartment prices. The study explores a set of land use attributes created by spatial techniques in geographic information systems (GIS), crime and fear of crime data in combination with detailed geographical data in hedonic pricing modelling. Part IV draws on two examples from cities of the Global South to provide a broader perspective on crime and fear. Landman focuses on built environment

Chapter Outlines

xi

responses to crime and the fear of crime in South African cities since the coming of democracy in 1994. Many of these interventions include an overemphasis on target hardening through hard boundaries such as fences and walls, burglar bars on windows and barricades in the form of street closures through booms and gates. Landman explores the implications of crime and urban fortification for socio-spatial order and integration. The article makes use of the Drivers-Pressures-State-ImpactResponses (DPSIR) model to illustrate how urban fortification influences the socio-spatial landscape in South African cities. From the other side of the Atlantic, Zaluar presents the dynamics of social life in the poorest areas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where youth violence, guns and drug trafficking are part of everyday life. The article begins by examining how patterns of socio-economic inequality relate to youth deaths, but goes beyond the common assumed link between homicide and poverty. However, as argued in the article, such development cannot fully account for the increase in homicides in Rio. More likely to contribute to this outcome has been the development of new forms of criminal business that affect informal markets, transforming them into gateways for criminal set-ups. As a result, young males have been the most common victims of homicides under these warlike conditions. Even when the sound of gunfire is more heard than seen, the noise (and the fear it produces) is unevenly distributed between neighbourhoods. Finally, Part V provides three examples of safety interventions. The first case is presented by Tilley, who considers how local and national crime prevention policies and practices may operate in ways that unintentionally heighten relative inequalities in community levels of crime whilst at the same time producing overall reductions in the volume of crime. He examines crime prevention as a distributive good and crime as a distributive bad. Drawing on British Crime Survey data, Tilley considers whether the crime drop in high-volume crimes experienced in the last two decades has been associated with an improvement or deterioration in distributive justice in England and Wales. The analysis focuses on domestic burglary since this has been the target of substantial preventive attention. Most of the examples discussed in the paper are drawn from the British experience of crime and crime prevention, although the significance of this experience for other countries is considered. The second article in this section turns to crime prevention at the level of neighbourhoods. Gro¨nlund discusses the challenges of putting in practice the guidelines of Crime Prevention Through Urban Planning and Building Design using as a case study Hammarby Sjo¨stad, a newly built residential area in Stockholm, Sweden. This area is particularly interesting since it has recently been singled out by a UN HABITAT report (2009:121) as ‘a powerful example of how eco-efficiency is able to shape urban design and building. . . a new and valuable way of seeing cities, (which) requires a degree of interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral collaboration in planning systems that is unusual in most cities’. The article indicates features of the built environment that, when isolated or combined with other criminogenic elements of the area, act in favour of its safety. In an attempt to show evidence of Hammarby Sjo¨stad’s sustainability, Gro¨nlund compares indicators of its safety,

xii

Chapter Outlines

such as crime statistics and perceived safety, with other residential areas in Stockholm. Safety, gender and urban planning are central issues in the final article of the book by Dyme´n and Ceccato. Avoiding country comparisons, they present the history of cases in four different countries: Austria, Finland, Sweden and the UK. They assess how gender is incorporated into urban planning projects and practices when urban safety is the main goal. At the end of the article, the authors suggest an agenda of important issues related to gender and safety which might be of relevance to municipal planners and practitioners.

Contents

Introduction 1

The Urban Fabric of Crime and Fear . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Vania Ceccato

Part I 2

3

Placing Fear on the Urban Scale

Urban Security: Whose Security? Everyday Responses to Urban Fears. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Catherine Alexander and Rachel Pain Urban Fear and Its Roots in Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ian Brunton-Smith and Jonathan Jackson

Part II

55

Micro-Urban Environments of Crime and Fear

4

Safe on the Move: The Importance of the Built Environment. . . . . . . . Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

5

Safety in Numbers: High-Resolution Analysis of Crime in Street Networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bill Hillier and Ozlem Sahbaz

Part III

37

85

111

Crime, Fear of Crime in Neighbourhoods and Their Effects

6

Ecological Analysis of Urban Offence and Offender Data . . . . . . . . . . . Robert Haining

141

7

Tracking Social Life and Crime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vania Ceccato and Per Olof H. Wikstro¨m

165

xiii

xiv

8

Contents

Acts of Vandalism and Fear in Neighbourhoods: Do They Affect Housing Prices? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vania Ceccato and Mats Wilhelmsson

Part IV 9

10

The Context of Crime and Fear in Cities of Global South

Turf War in Rio de Janeiro: Youth, Drug Traffic, Guns and Hyper-masculinity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alba Zaluar Reconsidering Crime and Urban Fortification in South Africa . . . . . Karina Landman

Part V

191

217 239

Actions for Safe Urban Environments

11

Community, Security and Distributive Justice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nick Tilley

12

Is Hammarby Sjo¨stad a Model Case? Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in Stockholm, Sweden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bo Gro¨nlund

283

An International Perspective of the Gender Dimension in Planning for Urban Safety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christian Dyme´n and Vania Ceccato

311

Notes on Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

341

Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

347

13

267