Creating Self-Secured City Through Design

 Creating Self-Secured City Through Design

Since past few decades the global societies has witnessed an unprecedented growth in urbanization with over fifty percent of the world’s population residing in city. Undoubtedly increased urbanization coupled with significant rise in global migration put front the new challenge of public safety. In the overpopulated metro cities like Kathmandu, concerns related to street crimes have become more evident these days. The problem analysis triangle deduce that crimes are likely to happen when (1) potential criminal and (2) vulnerable targets come together in (3) suitable space and time. Unfortunately, Kathmandu homes lots of such crime potential space in different corners of city.

In past the abundance of public space encouraged people’s needs to venture out, creating safe public domain. Shared spaces for refreshment, gathering parks, squares for daily talks and commerce were the fundamental features of traditional Kathmandu. Nowadays in absence of such public space and increase in more private life has become one of the prominent causes of reducing people’s mobility. Crime thrives amid the context when individuals are detached form physical social network and feel difficult to distinguish between outsiders and neighbors which make them more prone to criminal assault.

Now the big question remains: who are responsible to ensure public safety? Is it the police force or courts? Practically yes. However my argument roots on different ground that even city planners, architects as well as public space manager are also responsible for establishing safer public space. I’m not pointing to the construction of high walls, bolts or any other physical barriers but my focus is on creative designs that need to be carried out during per-planning phase. There are some successful cases of non-invasive security approaches such as Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) which include strategies like the construction of sight lines to keep eye on street, coherent web of pedestrian streets and connecting edges of narrow alleys with main road to ensure maximum mobility may reduce crime rate. Though there exist easy ways like imposing security measures in public but such imposition detach peoples from public spaces, discourage gatherings and public space no longer remain public in absence of peoples mobility. Cities functions lively when people are free to enjoy social space without any security barrier. Excessive safety concern can violates people’s right to access public spaces, create environment of fear and knock off the basic principles of democratic society.

Similarly the loss of publicizes in night-life of Kathmandu has amplified due to the improved but old fashioned security measures and access controls. The pendulum of landscapes security has already shifted from militarized imposed security system to softer and less obtrusive public policy approach more commonly known as, architecture security. Big cities in advance societies are endeavoring to design self-secured public space where people’s mobility itself function as their own security shield.

The new city planners should seek for theoretical framework to endorse the use of design as a system to facilitate better security in public spaces. The creative integration of security measure in space design can make well organized city with secure platform for public mobility. While planning safe city spatio-temporal arrangements formed through the connections of people, space, time and crime prone context must be considered. In modern urban planning environmental criminology no longer exist as afterthought; instead more research in geography of crime has been carried out to institutionalize the discourse of spatial crime analysis. The behavioral and social implications of geography on crime can be reduced through proper space design.

During Maoist revolution mass migration inside capital became rampant phenomena. Then city was forced to locate thousands of incoming crowds and fulfil the needs of growing business, housing and automobiles. Such mono-functional urban design leaves no public space inside valley resulting zero mobility in off hours. According to government statistics only 0.48 per cent and 0.06 percent open spaces are available in Kathmandu and Lalitpur district. Absence of public space minimizes the rate of mobile ‘eyes on street’ as coined by urban planner Jane Jacobs. Safe public space attract people movement, be it a street hawker, pedestrian or group of coffee talker who involuntarily function as surveillance agent. Such spatial web can discourage potential criminals because there will always be witnesses that can interfere. Also when cities become more residential, they create ‘non-space’ or ‘small piece of abandoned space’ outside the walls of their gated buildings and those leftover narrow space which belongs to no one, will thrive as potential crime hub.

In order to maximize the degree of public security in today’s cosmopolitan cities, the governments should urgently update their out-dated urban planning approach and strive for innovative strategies to create a walk-able city. If Nepal government consider the dimension of spatial security design in new city projects, future metros will not face same security doom as contemporary Kathmandu is going through. Despite some criticism regarding its effectiveness, the foundation of CPTED relies on the concept of ‘self-defensive environment’ which subside government expense in surveillance and security. May be it will not completely eradicate the crime from society but can gradually minimize the rate of crimes.