Social aspects
Contents
Social aspects
Design features of urban infrastructure influence citizens’ perception of the risk that infrastructure is at, or that it is assumed to mitigate or prevent. Design features also influence the general perception of criticality of that infrastructure. These two are important aspects of security culture. While urban sociology and socially concerned urban planning have gained much insight on environments such as "pleasant", "calming" or "exciting"[1], "secure environments" have been addressed to a far lesser extent.
Secure environments facilitate the meeting of social needs by help of bulit infrastructure. Commonly, societal needs are addressed in is goal for::urban planning (such as need for recreation area, need for public transport improvement, need for bike routes, need for social gathering places and culture resources, special needs of vulnerable groups (such as children, disabled, elderly etc.). Many of them have security/safety relevance. Examples are:
- Lighting of or video installation at urban spaces, bus stops, etc., which helps reducing crime rates, robberies, sexual harassment etc.
- According standardized constructions to avoid chemical leaching from/around industrial sites and to avoid substance harassment and environmental pollution;
- According physical protection of urban rivers and channels (also sewage) to avoid flooding /overflowing;
- Child friendly construction norms and standards for schools and preschools to avoid injuries (e.g. safety areas near streets);
- Additional parking houses/garages to provide for increased drivers’ needs – improvement of ventilation systems to control exhaust fumes and avoid health problems;
- Counter-terrorism design measures to avoid terrorist attempts;
- etc.
The "ecological perspective"
The "ecological" perspective [2] in urban sociology explores what happens in social terms as a consequence of the exposure of people to built environment. Possible consequences include social exclusion of specific parts of the public, as reprimanded by cultural criminology [3].
On the bottom line, urban structure has an impact on social processes, and this needs to be addressed in strategic urban planning (cf. Hannigan 1998). The school of "new urbanism" has referred to this as the "sociospatial perspective". This means that urban space and society interact, and that "social space operates as both a product and a producer of changes in the metropolitan environment" [4].
Social aspects are citizen-related aspects, and security in urban space is societal security. That given, citizens should always be part of security and related considerations in urban planning since citizens are its ultimate end-users. However, it is not easy to address citizens by built infrastructure in order – for example – to influence their behaviour using that infrastructure. The reason for this is that – among other things due to culture aspects – citizens ‘read’ built urban environment in different ways: One central tenet in environmental psychology is that meaning intentionally embodied in built environment is not always decoded by citizens according to that intention.[5] Therefore, it is important that urban designs “incorporate public meanings” and citizens’ images of places, [6], including – one can add – those of secure places.
The "sociospatial perspective"
How built social infrastructure and society interact is for example addressed by the sociospatial perspective in urbanism research.
Practical addressing of social aspects and aspects of security culture in security-related urban planning can best be accomplished by appropriately involving citizens, based on a set of intruduced methods of citizen participation.
Footnotes and references
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