Urban public spaces. Concepts for safety and inclusion

Abstract

Unsafety, real or perceived, acts as an obstacle to the management and use of public spaces, limiting everyone's freedom and negatively affecting the quality of settlements. The pursuit of safe conditions, including from the various forms of threat and crime, requires the integration of the different existing approaches in order to achieve effective and lasting results. A specific consideration should be made in relation to the security conditions of urban green spaces. Previous empirical evidence has found that the cleaning and greening of empty lots is associated with a reduction in crime. The aim of this EU-funded project (Next Generation EU), with the PRIN projects ‘SeTUP’ and ‘NatSolis’, is that the results of this research will lead to the definition of models that can be implemented in policies, plans and regulations. This work is, in fact, an opportunity for a more careful reflection on the topic in order to identify the key aspects that allow Urban Planning to be oriented towards the environmental prevention of crime risk and towards the definition of specific actions, for the adaptation, over time, of urban spaces to security criteria.

Keywords: safety, urban public parks, security, urban public spaces, inclusion