2015/07/20 by Thomas Raymen
Social Sciences · Environmental Science · #Crime Patterns and Interventions #Crime, Deviance, and Social Control #Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/bjc/azv069
Situational crime prevention and CPTED strategies have been broadly criticised within much of theoretical criminology. Most of these criticisms dismantle the notion of the fully rational criminal actor, questioning the shaky ground of classical criminology on which its claims are made. Through positioning hyper-regulated city centres as post-social, post-political 'nonplaces' of consumption, this article builds upon these critiques arguing that attempts to 'design out crime' create environments which are not only doomed to fail in their primary objective, but actively create environments which perpetuate and exacerbate the decline in symbolic efficiency and the narcissistic, competitive-individualist and asocial subjectivities which, as recent work from left-wing criminology consistently reveals, have the capacity to significantly contribute to forms of harm, crime and deviance.