Anti-Broken Windows: Can Greening Increase Eyes On the Street? (original) (raw)
Chapter 4 Do green areas affect crime and safety
In: Crime and fear in public places, 2020
The aim of this chapter is to identify and assess the nature of published, peer-reviewed literature in English on the relationship between green areas (parks, forests, neighborhood parks, green vacant land, interstitial spaces) and crime and perceived safety. This goal is achieved by performing a systematic literature overview from 1968 to 2018 from the major databases and respond to the following questions: (1) Which are the most common types of the green areas associated with crime and/or poor perceived safety in the international literature? (2) Do green areas affect the occurrence of crime and disorder, and if so, how? (3) Do green areas impact on perceived safety and, if so, what are the mechanisms? The chapters concludes with a discussion of policy and research recommendations.
Do green areas affect crime and safety?
Crime and Fear in Public Places, 2020
This chapter is structured as follows. First, we discuss the basic definitions and theoretical necessary principles, then report the methods, followed by the results. In the final section we identify gaps in the literature and suggest a research agenda on green areas and safety as well as policy implications of the current knowledge. Note that in this study "green areas" and "green spaces" will be used interchangeably. 4.2 Theory and definitions of green areas and safety Types of green areas and crime Goode and Collins (2014) categorized green spaces in six groups according to their origin, development and walkability. Although the categories were created for green areas in the British context, they can be helpful to illustrate the spectrum of green areas found in other parts of the world. The first category is "tended" green spaces for pleasure and is composed of squares, parks and campuses, botanical gardens, gardens, tree-lined streets, flowerbeds, verges and pockets of space. The second category is called "tended" green spaces for use, and is composed of allotments, playing fields, greens and playgrounds, graveyards and cemeteries. Then, they suggest "un-tended" green spaces, such as disused railway lines and wasteland, and water features, such as those green areas close by rivers, streams, lakes and ponds, canals, conduits and millstreams, dockyards and waterfronts. In addition, there are "natural" green spaces, for example, meadows, heaths and woodland, and finally "controlled" green spaces, which include green belts and nature reserves. Green areas (or spaces) tend to be associated with amenities and safety but not everywhere (Ceccato & Hanson, 2013; Groff & McCord, 2011; Iqbal & Ceccato, 2015). Vacant lands and/or interstitial spaces with greenery may be considered an indication not of environmental quality but quite the opposite, as they may attract problems, such as littering, and more serious crimes, such as drugs, robbery and rape, that seriously affect urban quality (Iqbal & Ceccato, 2015; Troyer & Wright, 1985). Year Case study Methods Location and type Fear/perceived safety, related safety effects Expected results Green area 14. Maruthaveeran and Van den Bosh (2015) 2015 Urban parks.(Aims to determine the attributes that evoke fear of crime and to determine the defensive behavior among urban park users.) Interview-led.
Busy Streets Theory: The Effects of Community-engaged Greening on Violence
American journal of community psychology, 2018
Lack of maintenance on vacant neighborhood lots is associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress for nearby residents. Overgrown grasses and dense brush provide hiding spots for criminals and space to conduct illicit activities. This study builds upon previous research by investigating greening programs that engage community members to conduct routine maintenance on vacant lots within their neighborhoods. The Clean & Green program is a community-based solution that facilitates resident-driven routine maintenance of vacant lots in a midsized, Midwestern city. We use mixed effects regression to compare assault and violent crime counts on streets where vacant lot(s) are maintained by community members (N = 216) versus streets where vacant lots were left alone (N = 446) over a 5-year timeframe (2009-2013). Street segments with vacant lots maintained through the Clean & Green program had nearly 40% fewer assaults and violent crimes than street segments with vacant, aba...
Greening vacant lots to reduce violent crime: A randomised controlled trial
2013
Background Vacant lots are often overgrown with unwanted vegetation and filled with trash, making them attractive places to hide illegal guns, conduct illegal activities such as drug sales and prostitution, and engage in violent crime. There is some evidence that greening vacant lots is associated with reductions in violent crime. Methods We performed a randomised controlled trial of vacant lot greening to test the impact of this intervention on police reported crime and residents' perceptions of safety and disorder. Greening consisted of cleaning the lots, planting grass and trees, and building a wooden fence around the perimeter. We randomly allocated two vacant lot clusters to the greening intervention or to the control status (no intervention). Administrative data were used to determine crime rates, and local resident interviews at baseline (n¼29) and at follow-up (n¼21) were used to assess perceptions of safety and disorder. Results Unadjusted difference-in-differences estimates showed a non-significant decrease in the number of total crimes and gun assaults around greened vacant lots compared with control. People around the intervention vacant lots reported feeling significantly safer after greening compared with those living around control vacant lots (p<0.01). Conclusions In this study, greening was associated with reductions in certain gun crimes and improvements in residents' perceptions of safety. A larger randomised controlled trial is needed to further investigate the link between vacant lot greening and violence reduction.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
In high-density cities around the world, alleys are common but neglected spaces that are perceived as unsafe. While cities have invested resources in environmental interventions to improve safety in urban allies, it is not clear how these interventions impact perceived safety. We review two important criminology theories that discuss the environmental and social factors that lead to crime: the Broken Windows Theory and the Routine Activity Theory. We argue that these theories can also be used to explain safety perceptions of urban environments, and then develop urban alley interventions based on these theories. We test people's perceived safety of these interventions through a photograph survey. Results show that all interventions yielded higher perceived safety than existing alley scenes. Interventions based on the Broken Windows Theory (cleaning or vegetation interventions) yielded only modest improvements in perceived safety, while interventions based on the Routine Activity Theory (urban function interventions) yielded higher ratings. Our findings question the dominant use of the Broken Windows Theory in environmental interventions to promote perceived safety and argue for a more effective approach: urban function interventions inspired by the Routine Activity Theory.
Trees and crime in urban areas: recommendations
Forestry Research and Engineering: International Journal, 2018
The benefits of trees, especially in urban settings, are often limited to discussions centered on energy savings, the removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide, muting noise pollution, and storm water control. However, several studies have examined the relationship between violence and vegetation in urban areas. In fact, the relationship between trees and crime was considered as early as 1285 by King Edward when he ordered property owners to clear highway edges of trees in an attempt to reduce robberies.1 In this paper, I will review studies on the relationship neighborhood trees have to crime and provide recommendations regarding how urban trees can assist to deter criminal activity. Recommendations resulting from reviewing these studies are: 1. Enhancing the presence of current trees and green spaces in those areas, 2. Educating citizens on the need for trees and green spaces, 3. Creating incentives for homeowners and tenants to support efforts that increase the number of and condition trees and green spaces, 4. Finding partnerships with local businesses and industry to aid in tree plantings and greening efforts.
Building community: an environmental approach to crime prevention
Crime cannot be understood as a single-solution problem. Participation of the community is important to complement and make more efficient any program of crime control by police authorities or any other law enforcement agency. This thesis is intended to create consciousness among designers of the urban environment of their social role. Cities must include places to promote community interaction and formation of social bonds. As social bonds among residents increase, and bonds with the place begin building a sense of territoriality in the community, the residents become active defenders of the place against crime. A theory summary presents different and complementary points of view, some focused directly to urban and landscape design such as those stated by Jane Jacobs, Clare Cooper Marcus, Donald Appleyard, and Oscar Newman. Others focused to social and psychological aspects of the relation between humans and environment, for example those presented by Erving Goffman, Edward Hall, Amos Rapaport, Irwin Altman, and Setha Low. A field study is presented to complement the theory review. It was based on two inner city neighborhoods in Orlando, Florida. The data used came from Orlando Police Department, FBI, and U.S. Department of Justice crime and victimization reports. The population characteristics were analyzed based on the 2000 U.S. Census. From the study, a general conclusion is that social characteristics of the population in any given neighborhood such as poverty, high percentage of broken families, unemployment, social heterogeneity, large numbers of young population, and large proportion of rented homes create environments highly susceptible of crime. But social characteristics are not the only aspects determining crime. Physical layout of the neighborhood plays also an important role in preventing or promoting crime. In spite of the fact that both neighborhoods had similar social characteristics, crime was considerably higher in the neighborhood where the physical structure neglected possibilities for neighbors to interact and use public areas. Theories and other information presented is finally synthesized into design guidelines, which are related specifically to the function of landscape architects and other designers as shapers of cities and societies.
Outdoor Lighting and Crime, Part 1: Little or No Benefit
2002
Scientific studies support common experience that light tends to allay the fear of crime at night. It is widely believed that outdoor lighting also helps prevent actual crime at night, but experiments have given equivocal results. Thorough scientific reviews published in 1977 and 1997 concluded that the effects were unknown. Recent work in the UK suggests that lighting does have a crime reducing effect by day as well as at night. This work appears to be flawed in ways that favour a crime-reducing result. While it seems reasonable to expect that social effects of outdoor lighting at night might have some influence on daytime crime, so far there appears to be no reliable evidence for any net crime-preventing effect, day or night. It even appears possible that lighting might increase crime, a topic investigated in Part 2 of this work. CCTV competes with outdoor lighting for crime-prevention funding. The available evidence indicates that CCTV is not an effective alternative. Until the lighting and crime issue is better understood, no more security lighting or other lighting for crime-prevention should be installed and the funding should be redirected to rectification of existing overbright and glary outdoor lighting.
Pushing the boundaries of (a) green criminology: environmental harm as a cause of crime
Greencriminology.org, 2012
Elsewhere on this site I have addressed the question ‘What is Green Criminology?’, but here I want to suggest that my previous definition, whilst reflecting much (probably most, but by no means all) of the work of green criminologists to date, perhaps sells the idea of a green criminology short. Rather than seeing green criminology as “the analysis of environmental harms from a criminological perspective, or the application of criminological thought to environmental issues” perhaps a better definition – or conceptual framework – would be the application of an ecological perspective to the problem of ‘crime’ in general. This can encompass everything within the earlier definition, but can also include a whole lot more. To put it another way, I would like to suggest that there is more to a green criminology than just the focus on green crime.