The purpose of this study was to investigate whether various security
measures in residential environments affect perceptions such as safety,
beauty, and status. It was expected that some of these security measures
would actually decrease perceptions of safety in opposition to their purpose.
The study also investigated whether different types of individuals had different
perceptions of different types of security measures-specifically whether
street gates were perceived differently by individuals who lived in gated
communities vs. those who did not.
This study involved a mail survey. Subjects were 518 residents of gated
and non gated middle-class suburban communities in central California. In
the survey, photographic simulation methods were used to isolate elements
of security design and measure inadvertent effects that are unrelated to
crime prevention. Images of residential environments-either individual residences
or streets-were modified to add or remove security measures that are commonly
found in these environments. Alternate test subjects were shown different
combinations of the images with or without security measures in place. Each
subject was shown one version of each image and no subject evaluated the
same base image or modification more than one time. Subjects were asked
to evaluate the images on a semantic differential using adjective pairs
derived from the literature on aesthetic evaluation and perceptions of safety.
These included adjectives such as safe-dangerous, beautiful-ugly, and mysterious-obvious.
As expected, many of the security measures at the scale of individual residences
had a negative effect on perceived attractiveness, safety, and even status.
Barrier type security measures may indicate increased concern about crime
and hence lower individuals' estimation of the safety of neighborhoods.
However, all street treatments designed to accentuate street entry had positive
effects on perceptions of safety, status, and attractiveness. It may be
that these design elements help define a sense of territory, and at the
street scale, such security measures may make a neighborhood feel more exclusive
and hence higher status.
The results indicates that the scale at which a security measure is implemented
may play an important role in its effectiveness in reducing fear and other
perhaps unintended perceptions. Measures which are implemented at a scale
more public than that of the individual residence may indicate a larger
community action and hence be seen as both an effective deterrent to crime
and be perceived as attractive.
From: People Shaping Places Shaping People: EDRA 34/2003 Conference
Proceedings, Minneapolis, MN, 105-111.
Perceptions of the risk of criminal victimization in a particular environment
are affected by both design and social factors. Familiarity with the place
may lead to a decreased perception of risk. The purpose of this study was
to examine the relationships between perceived safety and design elements
excluding contextual variables such as myth about place and previous experience.
The perceived safety of different environmental scenes as rated by twenty-three
female subjects was compared with the design elements in each scene as
rated by seven individuals with environmental design backgrounds. Females
were used for the safety evaluation because they have been found to experience
a greater level of fear of crime in their environments than do males. Subjects
who rated the photographs on safety were also interviewed to determine
whether they consciously perceived design elements that contributed to
their perceptions of safety. Four design variables (presence of hiding
places, lighting, maintenance, and enclosure) accounted for r 63.7% of
the variance (R squared) in the rated safety scores. Variables related
to enclosure and maintenance correlated more strongly with perceived safety
than did the prominence of vegetation. This indicates that efforts to improve
perceived safety in public environments should involve more than simple
defoliation of spaces.
From EDRA 20/1989, Conference Proceedings. pp. 173-178
Individuals' perception of their safety from crime in an environment
is determined by a variety of factors including personal experience of
a place, its physical appearance, and characteristics of the individual.
This perception may affect how the place is used, regardless of the actual
occurrence of assaults in that area. Male and female students at the University
of Illinois campus at Urbana-Champaign were mailed surveys that asked how
safe they felt in eighteen specific campus areas and to rate what factors
contributed to their feelings of danger in a particular area. The areas
students felt to be most dangerous were not areas that were statistically
the most dangerous. Design elements, such as lack of lighting, were more
likely to be mentioned as contributing to a feeling of danger than were
personal experiences of a place. Female students generally had lower safety
ratings for areas than did men, and they were more likely to report using
place avoidance behaviors in order to cope with the threat of assault.
The findings of this study imply that the perceived safety of an area may
be directly modified through design and management decisions.
From Sime, Jonathan, ed. Safety in the Built Environment. London: E.&F.N. Spon, 1988, pp. 285-296.
Last update: August 1, 2005