‘Casual surveillance’ makes people safer

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What’s known as “casual surveillance” makes people safer... It involves designing in a way that will maximise visibility.

Madonna Locke View Profile

“Sometimes people think building a really tall fence is safe,” she says. “You’ve actually created a space for someone to hide, so once they’re over the fence they’ve got free rein into your house. If you have a low fence and a window, you get the opposite effect.”

The streets of Amsterdam are alive well after dark, thanks in part to the appointment of a night mayor. It’s the kind of innovation that attracts creative industries and drives local economies, making urban precincts inherently safer, says Locke.

Newcastle in NSW has a strong night-time economy and mixed-use development, including a university in the middle of the city, she says. It means that when students finish classes in the evening they’re moving through the city and keeping it alive.

But we shouldn’t be thinking in terms of making cities safer just for women, says Poppy Wise, a specialist in community safety policy at Urbis. A better philosophy is to create public spaces with universal inclusion in mind. It takes into account all user groups, including the most vulnerable, and how they want to feel in an area.

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A better philosophy is to create public spaces with universal inclusion in mind.

Poppy Wise View Profile

City parks used to be lit by big, tall floodlights, she says. When a person entered a park, they felt as if they were walking into a spotlight. When they exited, they felt like they were disappearing off the edge and into the background. Now, generally, human-scale lighting has replaced that and people feel more secure.

It’s also essential for large high rises, Locke says. Making sure the ground-level design incorporates human-scale elements makes people feel safe.

We’re on the brink of a mini revolution in our ability to build safe cities, she says. 5G data and the emergence of smart cities will make better information available, and will help measure places, spaces, activities and patterns in our cities.

“We need to know the right questions to ask, but with more data available we’ll be able to ask different questions,” she says. “At the moment we measure traffic and things like that, but rarely what groups of people are walking, how much and where, because we don’t have the data.”

This article first appeared in The Australian’s The Deal Magazine.