4 urban planning tactics to reduce crime

To reduce crime, build streets that invite people to walk on them at all hours of the day and night

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Mike Barnard, urban development expert, posted on Quora a few strategies common sense urban planners can use when looking to reduce criminality in a community.

Jane Jacobs nailed most of it decades ago: Build streets that invite people to walk on them at all hours of the day and night.

  1. Short blocks
  2. Mix of old and new buildings to invite multiple types of uses
  3. Lots of entrances to retail and the like at street level
  4. Neighborhoods that don’t dead end, allowing lots of through traffic

Criminals don’t like witnesses. They don’t like people who potentially might intervene. So in streets with more rather than fewer people on them for more of the day have less crime.

Of course, ensuring that there are multiple generations and socioeconomic classes mixed in areas is key as well. As soon as the poor are ghettoed, they get terrible policing more designed to keep them out of rich neighbourhoods than to protect them, and crime in the ghetto typically soars. That becomes a multigenerational source of crime. But having older people who like keeping an eye on the street, well off people who insist on clean streets and appropriate policing and poorer people means everyone wins from a reduced criminality perspective.

Helping get harm reduction and housing programs in place in the city for addicts is very useful as well. Desperate addicts commit more crimes. Addicts who have needle-exchanges, funded methadone and attentive social and health care commit fewer crimes. Homeless people commit more crimes out of desperation. House them in permanent housing and they have the opportunity to rebuild their lives productively and cost the various branches of government less as well.

Then there is direct criminality as well. Urban planners run across situations where developers have lots of money and want approvals for projects that contravene urban planning rules and guidelines. Keeping approval processes transparent, enforced and clean raises the tone of a city and reduces direct criminality in urban development.

So, that’s four ways that urban planning departments and urban planners engage in or at least can engage in reducing criminality in urban areas. I’m sure that there are more.

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