Environmental Criminology

According to Rondeau , Brantingham and Brantingham’s article,“The Value of Environmental Criminology for the Design Professions of Architectures, and Planning.”, environmental criminology is developing. Environmental criminology focuses on how environment impact the possibility of crime. By learning the effect of environment on crime, people may figure out methods for decreasing criminal opportunities.

Although unintentionally hinder or enable, the environments designers create still can impact crime rate. An excellent architect needs to master environmental criminology and design knowledge well so that he or she can balance crime and design challenges well. Using the environment to reduce crime is called Situational Crime Prevention, one of a significant subfield of environmental criminology. The content of Situational Crime Prevention mainly includes five aspects: improve the difficulty of crime, improve the danger of crime, lessen the criminal anticipation avails, eliminate the irritation of crime, and eliminate the pretext of crime. Situational Crime Prevention not only prevents potential crime events, but also helps existing crime challenges from becoming more seriously.

The design process need designers own perfect background knowledge. The reason is that like most people, designers have subjectivity about crime places. They normally believe that the circumstance of crime sites is “isolated, dark” and so on. However, the fact is some places which are thought “high crime places” have less crime. In contrast, those places seem that safe suffer higher crime compare to “high crime places”. In order to identify exact crime places, designers’ must manipulate environmental criminology and design knowledge well. If designers lack criminology knowledge, they will be less likely to create more safe environments.