Crime and Urban Environment: Impacts on Human Health

In recent decades, crime levels have given increasing cause for alarm, bringing material and immaterial consequences that have still to be properly understood. Anti-crime strategies urgently need to be implemented in order to promote safe communities and contribute to their sustainable development. Crime needs to be taken into account during the planning process, as valuable components can be provided that can offer effective approaches to crime prevention and the improvement of community safety. These almost inevitably require long-term, strategic and multi-disciplinary interventions for urban and suburban areas, such as Amadora in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA). Crime, and especially the fear of crime, affects the mental and physical wellbeing of victims, causing behavioural alterations, with serious consequences for the whole community. It is also the main contributor to the decline of quality of life in urban areas in Portugal. This paper assesses: i) the relationship between (participated) crime in an urban area (Amadora) located in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, and the characteristics of the area of occurrence, in accordance with "Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design"; ii) areas (with high rates of crime and fear of crime) that are considered to pose a health risk in Amadora, as demonstrated by multivariated, spatial statistics techniques and the Geographic Information System (which reveals the geographic distribution of certain health factors, thereby offering a potentially useful tool for strategic urban planning). In the municipality of Amadora, vulnerable situations tend to cluster together, leading to the co-occurrence of various factors that magnify crime and fear of crime, and cause the place to be less healthy. The spatial variations found in the Amadora crime records indicate that crime is not distributed randomly, but that there are certain "hot-spots" (i.e. areas that may be relatively small, but where crimes occur frequently, making them highly vulnerable and predictable). Fear of crime was reported by the residents as the main problem (54%), increasing by 28% the likelihood of reporting bad health. Recognition of the environment's contribution to quality of life and health has meant that place is now considered an important factor in explaining health and quality of life. These results highlight the need to reassess specific elements of urban design and their relationship with crime levels, particularly as regards citizens’ fear of crime and its consequences on health. We aim to answer two questions: 1. Can urban planning help reduce urban crime and violence? 2. How can planners create safe and healthy places?