Helping Create Safe Communities & Neighbourhoods

Isn’t it interesting how, when people have been traveling to the world’s most popular tourist destinations, they come home with tales about great streets? Colourful memories about buskers, street artists, great little restaurants, unique shops selling stuff that’s cool and original.

Some of those same people, once home from New York and Paris and Montreal and Vancouver, fail to see the potential in their own home town. Back in the day-to-day grind of going to work, taking kids to school, and meeting obligations, it’s easy to revert to thinking just about one’s own home and a handful of key destinations in the community.

Steve asked me to contribute some thoughts to this blog because he knows that I’m passionate about great streets. I believe that great communities are created, for the most part, in the public sphere – outdoor spaces and common spaces where we interact with one another.

This involves the design of buildings, streets, parks and other spaces. Watch how streets work and notice how they encourage or discourage behaviors. CPTED (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design) of course looks at design that discourages criminal behavior – avoiding hiding places, keeping areas lit and so on.

But beyond discouraging criminals, it’s interesting to notice how much our physical environment influences our everyday behavior, often without us being consciously aware of its influence. One downtown retail specialist I heard at a conference noted how our shopping behavior is influenced by blank or empty spaces. If we are browsing down a retail street, window shopping and popping in here and there, and come upon either a large building with blank walls or an empty space (including parking lots), we instinctively reverse direction. We have subconsciously decided that it’s not worth our effort, or perhaps a little risky, to leave the cluster of retail shops in hopes that there might be more beyond the blank spaces.

So successful urban design is a complex and subtle art. But we know that in addition to structural design, the planning and encouraging of street activity is important.  We are safe, and we feel safe, when we are surrounded by others.

I love the stuff that community activists are doing at www.livablestreets.com. Their focus is on all the potential constructive activities that can happen on well designed streets – streets that not only move cars but encourage people to walk, shop, stop to talk to one another, sit and people-watch or watch performers.

Another positive approach to development is Appreciative Inquiry – an approach that helps groups of people focus on creating their ideal future.  The key here is creating – not complaining, attacking, or ‘going to war’ against this problem or that. A war mentality and language will give you just that – war.

I like Steve’s approach on this blog site: “helping create safe communities and neighbourhoods.”  They key word there, I think, is “create.”

Safe and healthy communities are creative places – where kids, adults, and seniors are all engaged in doing great things.  Did you know that the presence of children’s chalk art on a city street slows cars?  I was reminded of this while walking down a street in Victoria’s Fairfield neighbourhood, where I live part-time.  There in the middle of the street were a bunch of kids’ chalk drawings, along with a message “slow down, children at play” – in chalk.

The kids in that neighbourhood are safer in their streets because they live in them – they don’t fear them and stay locked up in “safety” indoors.

I am also encouraged by the potential for social media – Facebook, Twitter and many others – to contribute to our sense of community. Contrary to what many would assume, much social media activity online actually involves discussion about our face-to-face communities – that ‘real world’ out there on our streets and in our parks.

So the answers to community safety, in my mind, start with active, engaged citizens who care enough to interact with one another in public spaces – and work to design those spaces so that they encourage, rather than discourage, community life.

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Lorne Daniel is a writer, communications consultant and strategic planner whose work (www.grandviewconsulting.com) has won awards from the Canadian Institute of Planners and International Downtown Association. You can subscribe to his blog at www.lornedaniel.com and follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/LorneDaniel

Filed under Community Crime Prevention, Crime Prevention through Environmental Design, Odds & Ends