Abstract (English)
According to Edward Glaeser (2012), cities deal with many challenges in becoming liveable spaces. Criminality is one of those challenges, and urban design is one component of many that can impact the safety of cities. This paper presents the relationship between street crime and urban design, based on a literature review in this field of research. The paper is guided by the question how urban design, as our field of study, can contribute to forming and preserving safe cities regarding street criminality. Urban design elements can affect human behaviour, thus it appears they can be applied to shape peaceful and attractive neighbourhoods, or even to prevent crime. In this paper, urban design refers to physical design elements, their effect always having to be considered on the level of the whole city. Crime likewise has no universal definition, since it depends on the context, for example, country, time and subjective sense. Therefore, a definition of street crime is developed after giving an overview of common strategies for defining and measuring crime. Further, the CPTED approach will be examined as one of the leading methods to prevent crime. To give a practical insight, Birmingham, a city in Great Britain burdened by high crime rates, is chosen as a case study. The City Council of Birmingham recently published new strategies regarding the city's comprehensive development. One of those strategic paper's main goals is reducing crime. Within this context, the investigation of this paper shows which of the presented urban design principles can be identified to lower the crime rate in Birmingham.