2008-11-05 P & R Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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5 The marginal role of form The importance of aesthetics or form is well known to marketers, retailers and interior designers. It can be used to create an ambience that is appropriate to almost any setting. It has also brought about significant drops in vandalism and major cost savings as was demonstrated by an aesthetically pleasing makeover of a community centre in the City of Mississauga (see "Security Centered Around Self-Respect" in the June 1998 issue of Security Management magazine). It is therefore disappointing that form plays such a marginal role in CPTED. This comment notwithstanding, it is unlikely that form will ever have the emphasis it deserves due to CPTED's function oriented bias and the general lack of concepts and strategies that are related to form. CPTED as a seminal work CPTED developed in a remarkably naive time given that it predated most of the significant work done in the field of environmental criminology. Today, the modem criminologist has a much better understanding as to how criminals move about in urban space and why they select the targets they do. The relatively recent development of geographic profiling demonstrates the potential of a scientifically based practice developed from this knowledge. Classic CPTED theory fails to reflect these advances. Behavioural based design is best suited to this task. BBD 101 The essence of Behavioural Based Design can be captured by the following six propositions: 1. The probability of a particular behaviour manifesting itself is a function of its known rate of recurrence in a comparable and conducive setting. 2. The reasons for recurring behaviour are instructive and must be clearly understood. 3. All behaviours may be considered desired, supportive or unwanted depending on the setting. 4. Setting characteristics can be linked to desired and unwanted behaviours. 5. Desired behaviours may be induced by replicating the setting characteristics that are associated with the behaviour. 6. Unwanted behaviours may be discouraged through the manipulation or removal of associated setting characteristics. For practical reasons behavioural based design is only interested in desired or unwanted behaviours. Supportive behaviours, such as the need to use a washroom or family change room, are treated as necessary but ambivalent. It should be noted that these classifications avoid the CPTED pitfall of grouping people into normal and abnormal categories. The reason for this is that a behaviourally based design theory recognizes that people's behaviour is not so cleanly disposed such that: