Designing out Crime - Voices from the Fields: Editorial for Special Edition of Safer Communities

‘Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED)’, ‘designing out crime’, ‘safer by design’, ‘secured by design’ or any of the other ‘flavours’ of manipulating the built environment to prevent crime, invariably engender an inter-disciplinary approach. This work is frequently the domain of architects, urban planners, police, security professionals, local authority planners and community safety professionals (amongst others). Despite the real work being undertaken by these actors, the diverse disciplinary and practitioner perspectives are insufficiently heard within criminological discourse. We have sought to rectify this by bringing together contributions from built environment and local authority practitioners from England, Australia and New Zealand in this ‘Designing out Crime – Voices from the Fields’ special edition of the Safer Communities journal. We believe that these perspectives provide fresh insights into a body of work that is now many decades in the making (and perhaps centuries in the making – see Cozens (2008)). The different disciplinary and jurisdictional perspectives uncover numerous practical dilemmas, competing priorities, and tensions in how this work is approached and implemented. By viewing these issues through various disciplinary, organisational and jurisdictional perspectives, it is possible to not only compare and contrast approaches, but to also identify emerging themes consistent in these different locations, ensuring that this edition will be of great interest to policy makers, practitioners and scholars alike.