NZ First to campaign on foreign investment, gun crime on the rise in Auckland and King Charles tours Australia and Samoa. Video / NZ Herald / Getty / AFP
Opinion by Jarrod Gilbert
THREE KEY FACTS
Christchurch’s Te Kaha Stadium is set to open by April 2026.
Over coffee a couple of weeks back, the city’s top cop talked to me about researching what happens when a new stadium is developed in the centre of the city. It was sharp and forward-thinking.
Te Kaha Stadium in Christchurch under construction in August.
What does a stadium built anywhere mean for crime? Particularly one that is going to funnel most people in a single direction, into and out of drinking establishments.
When it comes to building projects, the best time to think about crime is not when it’s constructed, but when the blueprints are being devised. In doing so, you can design in elements that mitigate concerns around crime.
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a crime prevention tool, which is poorly understood and seldom used. Intelligently done, it can prevent victims and lower justice costs.
Exactly what is CPTED is a big question, but a couple of examples will illuminate it better than a definition. Common examples are security cameras and effective lighting.
Cameras deter, and lights mean we avoid dark hiding places and allow members of the public to see into spaces and thus become a deterrent.
While they have an important place, lights and cameras are the least-cool examples. If we look at, say, bus exchanges, these are most often in busy areas, where people are both waiting and walking. By having one footpath design closer to the structure, you subtly demarcate where people wait, while a different path pattern further out creates an unconscious decision as to where to walk. This separates the waiters from the walkers, thereby preventing people from being jostled, which can lead to conflicts (particularly at times when alcohol has been consumed).
Public toilets, with clean lines of sight through to cubicle doors, stop people from loitering around them, because the visibility makes that behaviour conspicuous.
A further example of creating conspicuous behaviour, albeit for different reasons, exists around the Supreme Court building in Wellington. The moat running around the building is shallow and not filled with sharks, so it won’t stop anyone from crossing it. But if someone did, the behaviour would be so peculiar that it would attract attention.
In these ways, design – that will be unnoticeable to most – stops unwanted behaviours.
Following the quakes in Christchurch, the city council wisely – albeit modestly – invested in staff to put CPTED into the mix of the massive rebuild. Yet staffing reshuffles and reprioritisation cut the CPTED staff to less than one fulltime person – at which point I was asked to evaluate the programme. Despite the review demonstrating positive results, the CPTED initiative was culled, which is only explained by the mysteries and nonsense that exist in the bowels of large bureaucracies.
It isn’t just big projects that benefit from CPTED. The skatepark being constructed down the road from me in Sumner is replacing a popular skate ramp that has been enjoyed for years on the corner of Main Rd, basically in the centre of the village. The existing site is highly visible to people, which deters nefarious activities. The new site is tucked back away from the main road and therefore the number of eyes on it will be fewer. It’s also much larger, so will attract more users.
I spent all my spare time skating as a teenager, so I welcome this venture. While it now looks to me like a broken hip, it would once have filled me with tremendous joy. But I do rather hope it has been designed with CPTED principles at front of mind. If it has, it will not be because of the council. New builds always promise tremendous community benefits, but the reality is – and goodness knows there are plenty of examples – they can also bring problems.
One new bus hub I evaluated in Riccarton was not designed with CPTED and immediately became a crime hotspot. To retrofit CPTED factors after the fact can be costly, and sometimes embedded behaviours can be hard to break.
As a community, we often share concerns around crime, and these are almost always sparked by criminal events, meaning the debate is always after the fact. We need to get much smarter about things and get ahead of the game, CPTED is one tool to do just that.
The payoff is not just less crime, it also means more liveable spaces and better communities.
