MEASURING CRIME PREVENTION THROUGH ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) has considerable support among the built environment professions. Yet the underlying assumptions on which it is based have rarely been evaluated to assess their effectiveness or efficacy. This paper reports the development and use of a scale that measured the actual levels of "incidental" CPTED in two residential areas in Gold Coast, Australia. The scale was administered in parallel with a victimization and social attitude survey. Analysis based on the combination of the two suggests that CPTED measures may have some effect on reducing victimization, particularly the kind of CPTED measures that apply to the group of dwellings on a single street, but the effect on fear of crime is surprisingly limited. It also indicates that there is potential in the application of such a scale in a wider assessment of the effectiveness of operationalizing CPTED design measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]