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Article Excerpt
L'auteur etudie les facons dont les praticiens et les adeptes dc la Prevention du crime par l'amenagement du milieu (CPTED) cadrent, dans leur discours, les risques relies a la criminalite. Il soutient, en effet, qu'on cadre ces risques de trois facons inter-reliees: (1) en tant que danger previsible; (2) en tant que potentiel depolitise; et (3) en tant que potentiel presupposant la responsabilisation entiere de l'individu. Il enchaine en pretendant que ces pratiques constituent, pour les intervenants, des mecanismes servant a legitimer leur domaine d'expertise professionnelle tout en leur offrant la possibilite d'exercer un controle de type > sur le client. Enfin, il soutient que ces cadres servent a demontrer la transformation du risque en objet d'un discours essentiel permettant l'emergence de certaines ideologies gouvernementales neo-liberales (Foucault 1991) en matiere de repression de la criminalite.
To the untrained eye, a property built in accordance with the principles of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED, pronounced sep-ted) may look like any other property. Clear lines of sight, textured walkways, and perhaps even the careful positioning of certain outdoor amenities (e.g., benches, tables, and playgrounds) may even border on the mundane, as if the landscape were anything but the end product of designers concerned with crime prevention. Yet such transformations have become increasingly common across North America as the popularity of CPTED has continued to grow. (2) Although there is some debate as to how often a belief in CPTED actually translates into its application (Schneider and Kitchen 2002), there is little doubt that police officers, landscape architects, urban planners, academics, and private security professionals from across North America continue to join the ranks of those who have been touting CPTED's potential since the early 1970s.
In brief, the CPTED rationale suggests that through the proper design and use of the built environment, it is possible both to reduce the actual incidence of criminal activity and to mitigate fear of crime (Crowe 2000; Cozens, Hillier, and Prescott 2001; see also Newman 1972, 1996). CPTED experts, therefore, advise others as to how design can be used to modify potential or existing opportunity structures such that, for the rational offender, the environment appears less amenable to crime and/or disorder. In this capacity, CPTED experts are like other risk-management experts--such as the environmental consultant who identifies the risks associated with global warming or the nutrition expert who warns us of the ill effects of fast food--in that they must identify, rationalize, and concretize the crime-related risks in question so that the layperson believes CPTED to be a logical and prudent course of action. (3) Thus, the pertinent question, and that which guides this study, becomes, What discursive mechanisms do CPTED experts commonly employ such that CPTED is perceived by those seeking expert advice to be a legitimate and necessary course of action? The answer, I argue, involves the use of particular frames of crime-related risks. (4)
CPTED experts frame crime-related risks in three interconnecting ways. First, they use what I will call a framework of "foreseeable danger" in order to establish the salience of crime-related risks and subsequently to establish the need for professional CPTED advice. Second, the operative logic of CPTED is depoliticized, as if it were capable of operating on a level untainted by subjectivity and thus resistant to whatever political misgivings might arise as a result of its use. Finally, CPTED experts responsibilize the management of crime-related risks (Garland 1997, 2001; Johnson and Shearing 2003) such that the application of CPTED becomes the moral, ethical, and civic responsibility of the client. (5) Together, these frames reveal not only how CPTED experts legitimate their area of expertise but also how risk discourse has become an important means through which neo-liberal governmentalities (with respect to crime control in particular) are actualized--that is, how they become manifest in the conduct of conduct (see Foucault 1991).
Following a brief introduction to the CPTED literature, I will clarify the theoretical link between legitimating discourses of risk management, on the one hand, and pastoral control and neo-liberal governmentalities, on the other. I will then delve into the qualitative data in order to demonstrate how these theoretical linkages "come alive" in the field of risk management. I will conclude with a number of more detailed observations about risk discourse, pastoral control, and the future of crime prevention vis-a-vis neo-liberal ideology.
CPTED
In 1961, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs (1961/ 1992) chastised the professional planning community, arguing that urban disorder and decline were, in part, a function of poor design and a planning ideology built on false premises (13). In place of the status quo, Jacobs demanded that communities be reconceptualized and reconstructed in ways conducive to strengthening the informal social controls believed to be instrumental to social solidarity and a subsequent sense of "community" (Jacobs 1961/1992; Poyner 1983).
In 1971 environmental design was once again linked to crime and disorder, albeit in a more scientifically rigorous way. C. Ray Jeffery's Crime Prevention through Environmental Design was (1971/1977) a scathing critique of the academic and criminal justice communities for their apparent inability to understand either the nature of criminal activity or how it could be prevented. Like Jacobs, Jeffery understood the importance of the physical landscape when it came to explaining the aetiology of criminal conduct; however, he also stressed the importance of understanding the relationship between environmental, biological, and psychological factors (Jeffery 1971/1977; Schneider and Kitchen 2002).
Embracing the spirit of Jacobs but (perhaps unknowingly) eschewing the social behaviourism of Jeffery, Oscar Newman (1972) once again touted the importance of design with respect to crime prevention. Like Jacobs, he too was convinced that the deterioration of America's public housing complexes was, in part, a function of poor design.
In Defensible Space, Newman argued that a properly designed living environment must incorporate the principal strategies of territoriality, natural surveillance, image, and milieu (1972). Contemporary CPTED is now indebted to Newman's defensible space principles (see Schneider and Kitchen 2002). (6)
Newman's ideas have been transformed since their original formulation (see Taylor, Gottfredson, and Brower 1980, 1984; Crowe 2000). Timothy Crowe (2000), for example, adds "access control" (reducing access to potential crime targets) to the list of important CPTED strategies. Still others emphasize the importance of population management via the scheduling or organization of proximate social activities (see Crowe 2000; McInnis and Burgess 1984). Variations aside, however, CPTED is grounded in the principles of rational choice theory and is fundamentally about modifying the social and physical environment so as to prevent criminal activity while improving quality of life. (7)
Risk management and expertise
In its applied form, CPTED is about risk management. Therefore, instrumental to its successful application is the ability of CPTED experts to effectively identify crime-related risks and render them seemingly concrete and calculable (see Ericson and Haggerty 1997). In this capacity, CPTED experts working "in the field" are inevitably tied to their own bourgeoning expert system (see Giddens 1990). Yet, as Zygmunt Bauman (1992) argues, there is nothing self-sustaining about the demand for professional expertise. Therefore, experts of all kinds must work not only to establish a demand for their area of expertise but also to establish the legitimacy of the knowledge they possess. According to Eliot Freidson, this is achieved through various discursive "acts of persuasion" (2001: 105). (8)
This is not to suggest that CPTED experts are dedicated to anything less than the absolute well-being of their communities and/or clients. What is being suggested, however, is that CPTED professionals are now in a position where both a demand for, and the legitimacy of their expertise must be constantly negotiated if CPTED is to remain socially, economically, and politically viable within a very competitive risk-management market place. Of course, the perceived legitimacy of CPTED is, at least in part, a function of the public's willingness to comply with the experts' directives.
Neo-liberalism, governmentality, and risk discourse
While operating under the pretence that adhering to their expert advice is in everyone's best interest, risk-management experts seek public compliance. With respect to CPTED in particular, the expert attempts to exercise a form of pastoral power over the knowledge recipient, who is, ideally, (re)subjectified (Garland 1997) such that his or her own compliance is assured not through physical force but through the offering of advice that is believed to reflect the most prudent and moral course of...
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