ABSTRACT
Crime prevention practice has often struggled to keep pace with ever-adaptive criminals. It is, therefore, a field undergoing constant change, borrowing liberally from a variety of disciplines, everyday policing and development practice as each evolves. This chapter aims to address some of the challenges that emerging urban design analytical concepts, development trends and realworld events pose to classical place-based crime prevention theory. The confluence of these factors strongly influences on-the-ground crime prevention practice. The first section of the chapter reviews space syntax theory’s analysis of crime incidents in urban settings, while the second focuses on reputed crime-preventive effects of a popular urban design trend, the new urbanism. Both space syntax and new urbanism raise questions about key tenets of the classical core theories relative to surveillance, access control, permeability and mixed uses as described in Chapter 2, and these challenges are discussed in this chapter on the basis of the available evidence.
