Summary
"Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) practitioners believe that the proper design and effective use of the built environment can reduce the fear and incidence of crime while improving the quality of life. While the application of CPTED principles will often yield a positive result, its overriding belief in the environment’s ability to influence crime and criminal behaviour is a limiting factor that “downplays the ability of individuals to select and to choose, to arrange and change the environment to fit one’s needs”. It’s this faith-like allegiance to environmental determinism that ultimately keeps them from seeing clearly and accurately. The same cannot be said of authors who base their conclusions about the effectiveness of environmental design factors on their observations of people’s behaviour. These authors routinely demonstrate their ability to “see clearly and accurately” by reporting significant behavioural deviations as they relate to CPTED expectations."--Includes text from page 1. .