Introduction

People have always protected themselves and their property by modifying their environment, even before the construction of permanent buildings began. Archaeology and history reveal a succession of architectural inventions, from thorn hedges, ditches and ramparts to palisades, doors, drawbridges and the like, accompanied by specialised security fittings such as locks and bolts. However, as an explicit movement and field of practice, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) emerged only some four decades ago. Situational crime prevention (SCP) focuses, as its name implies, on changing people’s offending behaviour not by influencing the predispositions that they bring to crime situations but by changing those situations themselves. CPTED and SCP have both, in their different ways, remained outliers from mainstream approaches to crime and security. The originators of SCP chose deliberately to cut themselves free of conventional criminology and policymaking, with their emphasis on offender motivation and its societal causes and the functioning of law enforcement and the criminal justice system.