Securing Urban Space

In the last decades of the 20th century, architects and urban planners were given an increasingly important role in making urban space more secure.
The idea that cities or specific areas might be designed to be made more secure more easily is not new. One can think back to the walls built around cities that existed for most of the history of human settlement. However, these were meant to protect against danger from the outside.

What has changed over the past decades is that the cause of insecurity is no longer perceived as coming from outside but from within the urban space.

As we have seen in the previous pages of this lesson, one of the main concerns in terms of security is the growth of urban violence, generally associated with poorer social groups living in the city.
Several new concepts in planning and architecture have been put forward during the last decades on how to secure urban space from these groups. These concepts all have their roots in the general belief that there are certain spaces that foster crime (Garnier 2003). While it was initially considered that the dehumanising aspect of some spaces – such as big housing projects – were a cause of crime, the more recent way of thinking is that everyone (above all if the person is poor or young) is a potential criminal and that some spaces allow crimes to be committed more easily (Garnier 2003).
This "securitarian" mode of thought, which originated in the USA in the 1990s, is increasingly being imported into Europe and also to other continents.

Since this trend began, architects and planners have been increasingly asked to integrate crime prevention measures into their projects, just as, say, they have to respect fire protection standards. For instance, in the early 1990s, architects and police in the city of Manchester in the United Kingdom developed a label called "Secured by Design" that is given to projects that integrate crime prevention measures. The content of this label went on to be endorsed at national level in 1994 with the "Planning Out Crime" policy, which sought greater involvement from the police force in urban planning (Garnier 2003).
This integration of security within project design engenders new forms of urban space.