Community safety approach
The community safety approach[1] builds upon the approach of cultural criminology to combine material or artifactual aspects with social aspects of culture. It sees a general shift in political and public conceptions of security, from situational prevention to whole of community safety. It rests on the idea of making risks and threats visible and encouraging citizens to get involved in structural prevention, based on strengthened neighborhoods and informal, social control. Urban planning and architecture naturally would have an important role to play in realizing such an approach.
The switch from prevention to safety is explained by a failure of the prevention approach to provide sufficient response to and public as well as political awareness of certain types of risks. The emerging paradigm of community safety was thus founded on the idea of making risks and threats visible, encouraging citizens to become involved in structural prevention, based on strengthened neighborhoods and informal, social controls. Urban planning and architecture naturally would have an important role to play in realizing such an approach.
Basically this approach rests on a concept of risk reduction[2], but by the mid-1990s it was found not to meet public safety needs in risk-prone areas. The solution was sought in a comprehensive approach that at the same time would retain the local focus of the original community safety approach. As a result, crime control was connected to the general idea of maintaining a normatively good order in a society, reaching from criminal up to environmental issues, and at the same time the concept of devolution of responsibility for enacting such a “comprehensive community safety strategy”.[3]
