SAFEGROWTH® BLOG
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GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC · LARRY LEACH
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC · LARRY LEACH
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by Gregory Saville A few weeks ago we ran our SafeGrowth Summit just before the annual International CPTED Association conference. Both events were held at a sunny beach resort in beautiful Cancun, Mexico, and they were a study in contrasts. The SafeGrowth Summit included an intimate group of a dozen SafeGrowth Advocates who ran informal workshops in person (and online) while the ICA conference featured over 500 delegates in formal presentations. Yet both events brought people from around the world and both were smashing successes. SAFEGROWTH SUMMIT This was the 6th SafeGrowth Summit comprising small, brainstorming sessions where those of us in the SafeGrowth network share successes and failures and also develop new strategies to move the concept forward. We reflected on project work this past year and examined the politics of change. We saw architectural renderings of neighborhood hubs designed by one of our Latin American members and we learned the results of a recent beta-test of our new GPS digitized field observation software. There were inspiring accounts of the Philadelphia Livability Academies now underway and we discussed a new methodology to track our success after neighborhood projects. We talked, discussed, ate, swam, planned and, best of all, laughed.  The 2019 venue offered sunsets and great facilities CPTED CONFERENCE The ICA conference followed immediately after at the same venue and produced the largest audience in ICA history. Over 500 delegates came to share successes and failures, but they focused their work on different versions of crime prevention through environmental design. While SafeGrowth uses both 1st and 2nd Generation CPTED, it does this through the lens of planning safer neighborhoods, community development, and social capacity-building. The ICA conference featured the first-ever, commercial Expo, as well as case studies from cities around the world. Many of our SafeGrowth Advocates delivered presentations at the ICA conference. Best of all, two of our SafeGrowth Advocates, Mateja Mihinjac and Carlos Gutiérrez, won international achievement awards from the ICA. Congratulations to all for great work to make neighborhood lives safer and more vibrant.
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 Saskatoon river trail at night by Mateja Mihinjac This summer, I led a team of eight city planners and set out to explore how the physical and social environment in downtown Saskatoon, Canada influences perceptions of personal safety. This was the first-ever micro-level, fear and safety project to use a specially tailored, digitized software app to map and analyse downtown safety in Canada. This is something geographers of crime and environmental psychologists have been studying for decades, but often without the precise measurements that we were about to uncover. MEASURING PERCEPTIONS OF SAFETY Perceptions of safety have been understudied in the field of criminology despite knowing that they may affect people’s use of the public realm more than actual crime. Moreover, from Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design - CPTED - we know that features on the streets, parks, and neighborhoods where we live may promote or reduce fear in that environment. Yet, we rarely measure this association.  Downtown Saskatoon street research locations As a criminologist specializing in SafeGrowth and CPTED, the City of Saskatoon planning department hired me for the summer of 2019 to develop and pilot this downtown project. The first step included the development of the field data collection survey, a modified version of the Neighbourhood Safety Audit that incorporates the principles of CPTED. The survey was then digitized in a GPS location-based data collection app called Fulcrum, that allowed us to capture and record data with our mobile devices for use in subsequent analysis. DATA COLLECTION We formed two research teams of four participants from the Saskatoon Planning & Development Division. Each participant had undergone CPTED/SafeGrowth training and was knowledgeable about urban design and safety. Teams collected night and daytime data within the downtown area over 13 days.  Daytime audits were combined with evening audits of the same locations Because we were interested in perceptions and fear at a very micro-level, the study area was confined to the blocks and laneways within a four block area. We used our new app to collect information from 108 micro-spatial locations within a radius of 30 meters (100 feet) of each location, and then we also collected 596 additional intercept surveys with members of the public on the street at the time. Detailed fieldwork like this is laborious and time consuming, but teams were diligent and we were able to gain invaluable insights, in some cases uncovering findings about fear that were previously unknown.  Fear and safety perception maps can be correlated with actual crime maps PRELIMINARY FINDINGS What did we learn?
 One of the city planner audit teams during night field work FINAL THOUGHTS In our SafeGrowth training we often say: Once you learn CPTED you’ll never again look at the environment the same way. However, CPTED novices often forget that the environment encompasses both physical and social. This research provides evidence about the interplay between the physical and social environments on public perceptions. Clearly, physical and social CPTED strategies are equally important and must be part of all planning and prevention. |
