Monograph 24: Environmental Design for Safer Communities: Preventing Crime in South Africa's Cities and Towns
Preventing crime has become a key challenge for the government in post-apartheid South Africa. The government’s core policy document on crime prevention, the National Crime Prevention Strategy (NCPS), places environmental design on the agenda. A review conducted for the NCPS on the extent to which environmental design is being implemented suggests that there is little local experience to draw from.
Environmental design, as it is currently practised in the country, is often indistinguishable from target hardening — building higher walls and securing properties and suburbs to prevent crime. The purpose of this study is to show how the concept of environmental design can be applied more broadly. The analysis explores the relationship between the environment and crime, as well as mechanisms for preventing crime through design interventions.
While crime prevention through environmental design appears feasible at a conceptual level, it requires detailed case studies and analyses of crime patterns in specific locations. This study therefore examines crime trends in South Africa’s major cities — Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town — to inform the conceptual debate around environmental design and possible interventions.
More specifically, environmental design needs to be placed on the agenda of local government and urban planners. To support this, guidelines and principles for environmental design have been developed. These are based on the framework outlined in this report, which establishes the links between crime and the physical environment in which it occurs.
Central to understanding how environmental design can reduce crime is a review of victimisation patterns across the diverse built environments found in South African cities. This involves focusing on high-crime locations and considering the environmental factors that make these areas conducive to criminal activity. The analysis seeks to identify issues that can be directly associated with an increased risk of victimisation.
Such an analysis suggests that the areas with the highest levels of crime in South Africa — townships and informal settlements — could benefit from focused environmental design interventions as part of broader development projects and local crime-prevention strategies.
Many townships were poorly planned from the outset, with little or no attention given to community safety, as distinct from social control. In informal settlements, professional design is often entirely absent. In some settlements, however, planning by residents themselves has created safer environments than those designed by outside professionals.
Both formal and informal settlements present a range of urban management and planning challenges, of which security is only one. State interventions in the built environment should therefore prioritise areas where planning has been lacking or where existing design features contribute to criminal victimisation.
In South Africa, high-crime areas are also the least likely to be adequately served by the public police. They are occupied by people who can least afford to protect themselves and their homes and who are less able to absorb the financial and social costs of crime once victimised.
Design interventions are critical in these areas because of these vulnerabilities. At the same time, such measures may be difficult to implement because of weak policing, underdeveloped local government structures and limited resources.
In contrast, areas such as city centres, which are often considered the natural targets of design interventions, have comparatively lower crime levels. However, the crimes that are prevalent in these public spaces, such as mugging and robbery, are particularly likely to increase citizens’ fear of crime.
This affects how the city is used and, by implication, its growth and development. Design interventions in these contexts are therefore important for reducing fear and reversing negative perceptions of the inner city. It is important to address fear of crime separately from actual victimisation in areas where such fears are high, even when crime levels are relatively low compared with other parts of the city.
This report begins by defining crime prevention and examining the potential role of environmental design within this framework. It then analyses crime patterns and trends using victimisation surveys conducted by the Institute for Security Studies among representative population samples across the metropolitan areas of Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town in 1997 and early 1998.
These findings are supplemented by police statistics and in-depth interviews with police and local government officials in the cities concerned.
An examination of crime levels and victimisation patterns in townships, informal settlements, suburbs and inner-city areas suggests that specific environmental factors increase the risk of victimisation and the fear of crime in particular locations. By identifying and addressing these factors, priorities for environmental design interventions can be determined.
