Crime and Fear in Public Places : Towards Safe, Inclusive and Sustainable Cities

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429352775 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

No city environment reflects the meaning of urban life better than a public place. A public place, whatever its nature―a park, a mall, a train platform or a street corner―is where people pass by, meet each other and at times become a victim of crime. With this book, we submit that crime and safety in public places are not issues that can be easily dealt with within the boundaries of a single discipline. The book aims to illustrate the complexity of patterns of crime and fear in public places with examples of studies on these topics contextualized in different cities and countries around the world. This is achieved by tackling five cross-cutting themes: the nature of the city’s environment as a backdrop for crime and fear; the dynamics of individuals’ daily routines and their transit safety; the safety perceptions experienced by those who are most in fear in public places; the metrics of crime and fear; and, finally, examples of current practices in promoting safety. All these original chapters contribute to our quest for safer, more inclusive, resilient, equitable and sustainable cities and human settlements aligned to the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Vania Ceccato is a Professor at Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. Her research covers the situational conditions of crime and fear in urban and rural environments. Gendered safety and the intersectionality of victimization are essential components in her research. She is the author of several books, including Rural Crime and Community Safety and is co-editor of Transit Crime and Sexual Violence in Cities. She is the national coordinator of Safeplaces, which is a network for knowledge sharing between academia and practice devoted to the situational conditions of crime and best practices in situational crime prevention.

Mahesh K. Nalla is a Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. His research interest centers on crime governance with a focus on public and private policing. His research has appeared in the Journal of Research and Crime and Delinquency, Justice Quarterly, and Annals of the American Political and Social Science, among others. He has coordinated and led a global project into firearm-related violence prevention programs for the United Nations and crafted the International Protocol Against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition and Other Related Materials, as a supplement to the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime.