Author: Barry Poyner
ISBN No: 0-95456-073-6
Review date: 13/12/2025
No of pages: 122
Publisher: Willan
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
A short and learned study into how to cut crime, and keep crime down, based on the evidence? Whatever next!
In essence, badly designed [housing] layouts attract crime, but if they are well designed the criminal is never tempted. No doubt the mechanism is continually reinforced, so an area will gain a reputation or image of a safe neighbourhood, rarely attracting crime as it presents few easy targets and little reward. A badly designed environment will gradually suffer more and more crime. So argues Barry Poyner, an architect and an authority on designing out crime, in his new book Crime-free housing in the 21st Century, an update of a 1991 book. The 2006 one is published by the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London (www.jdi.ucl.ac.uk). As Barry says, and as Stephen Town, Bradford police architectural liaison officer, laments, there is little evidence out there about what layouts help or don’t help residents control their surrounds, to deter and prevent car criminals and burglaries. Rather than saying cul-de-sacs attract crime, good old-fashioned terraces don’t – what I would have assumed – Poyner goes by the evidence. Avoid trees and shrubs obscuring the front door; and the front door needs to be clearly visible to walkers and drivers going along the street. And avoid through routes for walkers. In a word, deny the thief an opportunity – for instance, to spot that post and milk is not taken in, and to knock on the door to find out the house is empty; and then the break-in and get-away unobserved.
Low-crime aim
Good design, then, does not mean you need heavy locks and other security measures; though Poyner does call for high fences at the side and rear. The bottom line is that if we want to live in a low-crime society, we have to look at why some places have more crime than others. Barry Poyner is on the right side of the barricade on that one.
Pleasure to read
Is this book relevant to business security managers? Certainly to university security folk who have some responsibility for students in rented homes being burgled. The book matters to us all in that public money is thrown at regeneration schemes in cities and crime-friendly design aids burglars. Needless to add the book is well-designed, good-looking and easy to navigate. It was a pleasure to read a book about security matters informed n not by fashion but the evidence, and by wider currents – in this case, urban thinkers such as Jane Jacobs.
