Designing-in Crime by Designing-Out the Social? Situational Crime Prevention and the intensification of harmful subjectivities

Raymen, T.W.

Abstract

Situational crime prevention and CPtED (Crime Prevention through Environmental Design) strategies have been broadly criticized within much of theoretical criminology. Most of these criticisms dismantle the notion of the fully rational criminal actor, questioning the shaky ground of classical criminology on which its claims are made. Through positioning hyper-regulated city centres as post-social, post-political ‘non-places’ of consumption, this article builds upon these critiques arguing that attempts to ‘design out crime’ create environments which are not only doomed to fail in their primary objective, but actively create environments which perpetuate and exacerbate the decline in symbolic efficiency and the narcissistic, competitive-individualist and asocial subjectivities which, as recent work from left-wing criminology consistently reveals, have the capacity to significantly contribute to forms of harm, crime and deviance.

Citation

Raymen, T. (2015). Designing-in Crime by Designing-Out the Social? Situational Crime Prevention and the intensification of harmful subjectivities. The British Journal of Criminology: An International Review of Crime and Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azv069

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 12, 2015
• Publication Date: Jul 20, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jul 21, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 20, 2017
• Journal: British Journal of Criminology
• Print ISSN: 0007-0955
• Electronic ISSN: 1464-3529
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azv069
• Keywords: Situational crime prevention, Urban space, Harm, Deviance.