ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses four primary obstacles to the adoption of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED). First is a lack of knowledge of CPTED by environmental designers, land managers, and individual community members. For this reason, allocating substantial resources to community educational programs is often required. The second major obstacle is resistance to change. Many specifically resist the type of cooperative planning that is required to use CPTED. Beyond that, skeptics reject the research and historic precedents that support the validity of CPTED concepts. The third obstacle is the perception that CPTED claims to be a panacea for crime that will be used to displace other more traditional approaches rather than a small, but important, complementary tool in deterring offender behavior. The fourth obstacle is that many existing built areas were not designed with CPTED in mind, and modification would be expensive, politically difficult, or require significant changes in some areas of the existing built environment.
