Developing & maintaining sustainable communities: Managing the output focus of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED).

Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) is long established and used in many parts of the world today. Over time underlying themes, definitions and successful communication of concepts has suffered significant decay and interference, evidenced through 2 years of research and reported on at last year’s CUF conference. By 2013 we had comprehensively identified and ranked problem areas of CPTED and the extent of this decay, leading to development of a new, deeper and more integrated utilisation framework clarifying definitions, maintaining theory driven concepts and assisting communication. Research continues to refine, test and develop that framework through successful collaboration with a developer in Trinidad, final results from which we hope to report on at next year’s CUF conference. Further work has explored the parameters of developing sustainable communities during which we sought to identify, through in depth research, just what issues need consideration and collation when creating or maintaining a sustainable community and how, if at all, CPTED would fit within that theme. Seeking a preferred model for the provision of contextual information to inform the integration of CPTED we establish sustainable community development as providing clear and informed parameters clearly linking with CPTED and therefore within which ‘context’ can be set, so reducing the risk of unnecessary complexity, diversity and irrelevance within the provision of contextual information to the urban professional. This paper relays our research outcomes and emphasis, highlighting how CPTED can contribute to the development of wider planning goals considering the development and maintenance of sustainable communities. Understanding and managing this potentially new direction enables clear links with development and maintenance of sustainable communities through urban planning to be profitable and impactful.