Anti-Broken Windows: Can Greening Increase Eyes On the Street? (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
This paper offers experimental evidence that crime can be successfully reduced by changing the situational environment that potential victims and offenders face. We focus on a ubiquitous but surprisingly understudied feature of the urban landscapestreet lighting-and report the first experimental evidence on the effect of street lighting on crime. Through a unique public partnership in New York City, temporary street lights were randomly allocated to public housing developments from March through August 2016. We find evidence that communities that were assigned more lighting experienced sizable reductions in crime. After accounting for potential spatial spillovers, we find that the provision of street lights led, at a minimum, to a 36 percent reduction in nighttime outdoor index crimes.
Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 2016
Objectives: There is a growing interest in the relationship between greenspace and crime, yet how particular greenspace types encourage or inhibit the timing and types of greenspace crime remains largely unexplored. Drawing upon recent advances in environmental criminology, we introduce an integrated suite of methods to examine the spatial, temporal, and neighborhood dynamics of greenspace crime. Methods: We collate administrative, census, and crime incident data and employ cluster analysis, circular statistics, and negative binomial regression to examine violent, public nuisance, property, and drug crimes within 4,265 greenspaces across Brisbane, Australia. Results: We find that greenspace amenities, neighborhood social composition, and the presence of proximate crime generators influence the frequency and timing of greenspace crime. Conclusions: Our analyses reveal that particular types of greenspaces are more crime prone than others. We argue that this is largely due to the prese...
Did community greening reduce crime? Evidence from New Haven, CT, 1996–2007
Landscape and Urban Planning, 2017
For some volunteers, neighborhood safety is one of the reasons for becoming involved in community greening. For example, many volunteers of the Community Greenspace program at the Urban Resources Initiative in New Haven, Connecticut believe that there is a potential reduction in crime from community greening activities, even though it is not an explicit goal of the program. These types of community-led interventions are distinct from both existing tree canopy and large-scale municipally led initiatives. These types of interventions remain understudied with respect to the potential for reducing crime. We therefore used a quasiexperimental difference-indifferences (DID) approach to test whether more than a decade of street tree planting (1996-2007) in New Haven had an effect on crime levels at planting sites (n=300) compared to control sites that received no Community Greenspace-planted trees (n= 893). We examined violent, property, and misdemeanor crimes (comprised of vandalism, prostitution, and narcotics crimes) individually and jointly to test for crime-type specific effects, while controlling for sociodemographic factors and spatio-temporal trends. In general, we found a null relationship between trees planted and crime on block faces per year at the p < 0.05 level. Increases in crime were not observed on treatment sites. We discuss implications for tree inventories and monitoring, study design, and techniques to assess impacts of tree planting efforts.
Transforming vacant lots: Investigating an alternative approach to reducing fear of crime
Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2017
Vacant lots deserve criminological attention insofar as their disorderly conditions create opportunities for a host of negative outcomes including "fear of crime." The present study considers whether incorporating fundamental standards of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) into traditional urban greening practices of vacant lots provides added value with regard to fear of crime above and beyond the traditional endeavor. This study conducted an experiment (N=523) from a sample of undergraduate students. Research participants were asked to report their level of fear of crime in regards to one of three randomly assigned computer-adjusted images: 1) A disorderly lot; 2) A traditional greened lot; and 3) A CPTED lot. This study found that on average participants who viewed a CPTED lot had lower levels of fear of crime than all other participants. This study discusses the implications of this finding for future research.
Neighborhood street activity and greenspace usage uniquely contribute to predicting crime
Crime is costly economically, socially, and psychologically for all societies, especially in urban areas. While there are many well-studied environmental and social influences on crime such as poverty and marginalization, one less studied, but important factor is the effect of neighborhood greenspace. Prior research has shown that greenspace is negatively associated with crime, but the mechanism of this effect is debated. One suggested mechanism is that greenspaces increase local street activity, which in turn reduces crime, but past work has failed to examine effects of greenspace and street activity together, making it difficult to decouple these factors. Additionally, past research has typically used the static physical presence of greenspace as opposed to determining residents’ engagement with and use of greenspace, which may be critical to understanding the potential causal role of greenspace on crime. Here, we examine the association of crime with street activity, physical gre...
Crime prevention in urban spaces through environmental design: A critical UK perspective
Cities, 2019
Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) and the Defensible Space Theory have been adopted to enable the effective use of the built environment to reduce crime. The occurrence of crime is widely accepted to be context-specific. Some explanatory theories have focused on social disorder, alluding to the notion that if such disorders are eliminated from society then serious crime would be eradicated. Numerous approaches have considered the use of environmental design and spatial configuration as a possible solution to reduce crime. The main aim of this study is to gain further understanding of stakeholders' perceptions of Brixton Town Centre (BTC) in London and thus advance the discourse of CPTED. Using a mixed methodology approach, a visual audit of CPTED, a critical analysis of police crime data, questionnaire surveys and semi-structured interviews were carried out to gauge the effectiveness of key CPTED intervention principles identified in BTC. It was revealed that since the interventionary measures began in BTC in 2011, there has been an increase in the crime rates for other parts of England and Wales whilst BTC in particular has experienced a decline. A positive correlation was found between length of residency in the area and fear of crime. Lighting was critical to people's perception of feeling secure. Finally, the research findings revealed that although crime rates had fallen in BTC, stakeholders agree that further improvement was required. This research concludes with a proposal of further study that will theorize the phenomenon occurring at BTC.