With apologies for multiple postings....
Call for Papers on a session entitled: The Urban Built Environment: Secured by Design?
Sponsored by the RGS-IBG Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG)
Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers
Annual Conference, July 3-5th 2012, Edinburgh
Session Conveners:
Loretta Lees, Cities Group, King’s College London, UK
Elanor Warwick, Cities Group, King’s College London, UK
(ex-Director of Research, CABE)
The Urban Built Environment: Secured by Design?
This session focuses on a somewhat slippery and often emotionally charged subject: the link between crime and the urban built environment. As understanding of the causes of crime improve, built environment professionals (particularly planners, architects and urban designers) are still left with a series of questions. Are society’s expectations for crime reduction realistic? Are cities becoming safer? How much might design contribute to this? These are also serious and difficult questions that geographers seek to address. In this session we focus on the contradictions between different interpretations of the contribution of design to urban safety (classical and more recent) and in so doing we question the policy evidence base that has emerged. We investigate the borrowings and cross-fertilizations between theories, the presence and problematic of strong disciplinary silos and professional elitism. We seek to critique the simplistic reliance on the design of desirable objects, target hardening, or the fortification of buildings because this reduces collective responsibility to formulate a more ‘social’ construction of safety through natural surveillance or inhabiting public spaces. This session will be of interest to those working on/in defensible space, crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), situational crime prevention, environmental psychology, the social use of public spaces, and also urban design responses– for example, New Urbanism, Space Syntax, and gated communities.
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