Crime and fear in public places: an introduction to the special issue

A safe environment is one that maximises the use of public places; it is a place that encourages socialinteraction. A safe environment depends on what happens in this place, and what happens in it dependson how safe it is perceived to be. Public places are collectively shared entities and carry the assumptionthat the space is safe. They can be an indoor or an outdoor area, more often publicly owned, to whichanyone has access. Crime opportunities are influenced by the design of these spaces and how they arearranged in the urban fabric. They can take different shapes: from parks, streets, and transit environments,to shopping malls or interstitial spaces, each with its features. Public places may gather thousandsof people (e.g., stadiums, airports, major central stations) or be desolate paths or empty stations. In eithercase, poor design and bad maintenance of these places can maximise crime opportunities or give users thenotion that nobody is in control and, therefore, they are felt as unsafe places to be.An individual’s risk perception often reflects something other than the likelihood of beinga victim of crime. Koskela and Pain (2000) suggest that we create mental maps of feared environmentsand unsafe places based on our prior experiences and media stories, and others’ accounts.Sandercock (2005) argues that expressions of fear of crime are a fear of others. The intersectionalityof an individual’s safety (age, economic status, ethnicity, and differences in physical and cognitiveabilities, see, e.g., Sokoloff & Dupont, 2005), is a recurrent element of the articles presented in thisspecial issue. In other words, fear and victimisation are not only a function of age or gender butrather a result of the intersection of a set of individual’s characteristics with the environment anindividual spends time. As examples from this special issue (SI) shows, this spatial context is notgender-neutral and is predetermined by society’s cultural norms of behaviour and accepted valuesinserted in social and political contexts. So what makes a public place safe?To tackle this question, we selected six articles for this SI. These articles do not offer absolute answers;they offer instead examples of how current research around the world is attempting to grasp thecomplexities of crime and fear in public environments. This special issue offers a robust internationaloutlook containing articles discussing cases in Japan, Pakistan, Sweden, the UK, the US. Moreover, thisSI’s contributions are characterised by high-quality applied research that relies on traditional environmentalcriminology theories, such as routine activity principles and situational crime prevention, whilebeing open to multidisciplinary thinking, with clear critical lens and gender informed perspectives.Authors stem from different disciplinary backgrounds, from sociologists, criminologists, geographers,urban planners, psychologists to policing, to name a few. Crime and fear in public places is a relevanttopic on its own and deserves more attention from all the disciplines mentioned above, mainly whensocieties around the world are focused on finding more inclusive and sustainable pathways to the urbanfuture (UN-Habitat, 2015; United Nations, 2019)