by Mateja Mihinjac

Winter influences how we use our neighbourhood. Because of short daylight hours and cold weather, walking the neighbourhood is often an isolating experience. Current COVID lockdowns all across the world make these changes even more pronounced. All this affects the perception of safety of local residents, especially regarding residential laneways that may become risky movement predictors.

RESIDENTIAL LANEWAYS

Residential laneways, also called alleys, back lanes or catwalks, are a welcome addition to the neighbourhood when they provide accessibility, shorten travel paths, and enhance walkability. They can serve as positive places for interaction.
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Some blame these micro-places for increasing opportunities for crime. Research suggests that laneways can facilitate crime opportunities by contributing to increased levels of noise, property crime, antisocial behaviour and fear.

Yet others argue that laneway research shows improvements in social and environmental sustainability, which lead to better safety and perception of safety outcomes. Positive laneway design has a buffering effect on crime and vulnerable targets due to increased informal social controls stemming from higher levels of social cohesion.

Therefore, the question is not whether laneways have a place in the neighbourhood because they might trigger crime opportunities – laneways have many positive attributes that contribute to walkability and neighbourhood liveability. Rather the question should be how do we better design laneways and make them safe.

POOR DESIGN

Many laneways are separated from neighbouring courtyards with high non-permeable fences that offer few opportunities for natural surveillance and interaction. Such laneways create tunnel-like gauntlets that are unattractive, especially at night. 

In addition to this, many laneways, especially in North America, are positioned along backyard residential garage areas intended predominantly for vehicles and rubbish removal. No wonder these laneways become a “no man’s land” and thus lead to safety concerns described earlier.

One of our project teams from a recent Calgary SafeGrowth training identified that residents were concerned with hiding spots, poor visibility in the dark, graffiti on tall fencing, and similar. Clearly, laneway designers must create open and attractive areas that pay attention to pedestrian use.
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IT’S MORE THAN CRIME 

The second issue is that the laneway debate centres exclusively around crime prevention. Little attention is given to larger issues such as the type of the laneway and neighbourhood structure. Conversely, much of urban design literature speaks to the importance of integrating multiple liveability indicators and considering safety as an integral rather than isolated indicator of laneway suitability. As architecture professor Kim Dovey says, “I begin from the view that the urban public realm needs to be at once safe, accessible, vital, creative and democratic.”

Criminologist Paul Cozens believes that when the discussion centres around crime prevention alone, we make laneways hostile to human-scale design. In fact, he claims we can inadvertently “design in crime” while the residents become isolated from one another and from the outside neighbourhood.

When our Calgary team spoke to residents they found that the residents often referred to other quality of life concerns that affected their use of the laneways rather than safety concerns alone. Some of these included poor maintenance, tripping hazards, poor wayfinding, and integration of laneways with the street.

Again, this suggests we must consider laneways more holistically, not strictly with a crime prevention eye, and we must reconcile safety with other liveability indicators.
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WHAT CAN BE DONE? 

Despite the potential safety risks, there are many benefits of well-designed and well-functioning residential laneways. If designed well, they can further enhance community capacity-building and create a sense of neighbourhood.

There are some excellent toolkits describing how to accomplish these goals. They include a Turning Laneways into Public Places document and a Reimagine Catwalks Playbook. 
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As we say repeatedly in SafeGrowth, what matters most is collaborative design with residents – not designing to or for them. This is how we use laneways, not as dreadful shortcuts and fear-inducing places, but as shortcuts for building the neighbourhood. ​

​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.

​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.

​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.

​PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

What did we learn?

1. The social environment influenced perceptions much more than the physical environment. Respondents often couldn’t point to particular land use or design features impacting their perception of safety, but they were able to note people who increased their comfort levels, such as local employees, shoppers, and people running errands. Erratic and unpredictable behaviour on the street increased their anxieties. 
2. Lack of activity in particular blocks due to underactive land uses impacted perceptions of safety, such as the 29 vacant storefronts in our study area. These vacant properties both lessened street activity and reduced “eyes on the street”.
3. Interestingly, the respondents’ night-time perceptions did not appear as negative as we expected. Some parts were so inactive at night that we obtained very few interview responses. While CPTED surveys conducted by one team concluded these underactive areas were anxiety-provoking, when late-night social events and festivals activated the area, it positively influenced the perceptions in our surveys with the public. 
4. Both the public participants and the CPTED team appeared reassured by the uniformed presence of community patrol officers in the Community Support Program. They particularly praised the Program for contributing to increased feelings of downtown safety. Many asked for expanding the program. 

​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.

I live in one of the most livable towns in the country. It has a variety of bookstores, an active and safe teen skate park, accommodation for the elderly, alternative housing options like cohousing, and two local industries.

There are over 40 restaurants for just 8,000 people (obviously a tourist town) and a festival every weekend from spring till winter. It has one of the most successful farmers markets and a vibrant and architecturally interesting downtown.

There hasn't been a murder in the city for decades and last year there were 52 violent crimes (mostly minor assaults) in the county with about 29,000 residents producing a county violence rate of 17 violent incidents per 100,000 residents.

In short, it is safe and vibrant.


Gotham City crime

New York City is also one of the most vibrant cities in the country and by every meaningful measure, it dwarfs my town. It has thousands of restaurants, bookstores, festivals, and every other amenity imaginable serving a city of over 8 million. It has a lower crime rate than most large cities. Yet, in comparison to my town the violent crime rate last year in NYC was 55 violent crimes per 100,000 residents.

In other words, the violent crime rate there was three times higher than here.

Yet a former neighbor, a young woman who lived in New York until recently, describes feeling much safer on New York streets than here. She is more concerned about walking home in the dark here than walking there even though her actual risk is 3 times higher (To be fair I doubt she knew the different rates, only how she felt).

Why?


The Truth about Risk

Perception and risk are two entirely different animals. I have spent many years working in high crime places. I learn about the cues of environment, attitude of the locals, and actual crime risks. My first lesson - we may feel safe but not be so.

This week I read a great blog about crime risk by Sam Harris titled The Truth about Violence. He cites four basic safety principles including how to avoid dangerous places and people.

Harris also describes a truism about us: It is unpleasant to study the details of crime and violence—and for this reason many of us never do. I am convinced, however, that some planning and preparation can greatly reduce a person’s risk.

I agree.

Read Harris's blog. It's worthwhile.

No doubt considerable fear exists on the streets of London after this week's riots. Whole books are written on urban crime and fear. What about rural places far from urban mayhem? The Gabriola Island murders from last blog suggest rural crimes too ferment fears of public places like nature trails.

This is ironic. Parks and trails are statistically far safer than bars at closing time or inside homes when domestic strife turns violent. Study after study tell us public trails are safe, such as Tod Schneider's article on bike trails back in 2000.

Yet those are urban studies. Research has yet to examine rural nature trails and crime. CPTED was born, after all, in the city.

I was recently interviewed by a horticulture magazine about trees and crime asking these very questions. The article, Trees Thwart Shady Behavior, described a study on crime and residential trees by examining 2,813 single-family homes in Portland, Oregon. 

Controlling for visual appearance, presence of barriers, and street activity, the study showed "houses fronted with more street trees had lower crime rates". That was all crime rates, including vandalism and burglary. 

Read it HERE.