Spatial Vulnerability and District Resilience for the Next Generation of CPTED

A case study of crime preventive spatial design targeting arson

Abstract

Concurrently with the advance of urbanization, many urban problems have increased in our everyday life. It is said that there has been a decrease in the number of crimes committed in Japan, but the number of urban crimes is, on the contrary, increasing. Accordingly, crime prevention has been one of the biggest issues in city planning. A number of arguments about CPTED (crime prevention through environmental design) or other crime preventive methods have been already carried out. While most papers show the relationship between macroscopic geographical aspects and the occurrence of a specific crime, the impact of more microscopic objects and/or spatial design in the crime site as the spatial vulnerability against a crime has not been clarified. Moreover, there is a clear need to find resilience, in other words the difficulty to commit a crime. Therefore, this paper’s purpose is to reveal the vulnerability and resilience against one specific crime, arson, in Fukuoka and more specifically in Haruyoshi district, through consecutive researches from urban planning and environmental psychological viewpoints. As a result, we found that there are temporal and spatial vulnerabilities against arson in Fukuoka and Haruyoshi which remain to be improved intensively. However, at the same time, Haruyoshi has some resilience against arson, and we conclude that the human traffic, observability and inanonymity are high in the district. Consequently, at the end of this paper, based on the knowledge about both vulnerability and resilience of the district, specific suggestions are proposed on the way to install CPTED in Haruyoshi against arson.