Designed Safety? CPTED and Women's Fear of Crime in Public Space

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is among the widely applied frameworks for environmental crime prevention, resting on the premise that the design, use, and management of the built environment can influence both crime and perceptions of safety. This article examines whether, and under what conditions, CPTED can contribute to women’s perceived safety in public space. Through a conceptual and narrative synthesis, it maps the three generations of CPTED onto the principal explanations for the fear–gender gap: women report substantially more fear than men, while conventional statistics record lower female victimization — a discrepancy that partly dissolves once largely unrecorded everyday harassment is taken into account. The mapping shows that the vulnerability perspective corresponds to first-generation design principles, the shadow-of-sexual-assault hypothesis to the interface between physical design and social meaning, and the feminist-geographical account of power and space to the social and livability orientation of the later generations, while also marking the limits of design. The empirical evidence is asymmetric: individual interventions are better substantiated than integral programs, and effects on perception are better documented than effects on crime; some measures reduce crime without improving women’s perceived safety. The Dutch context illustrates institutional receptivity alongside a divide between design instruments and harassment policy. The article concludes that CPTED can contribute only as a situational, gender-sensitive approach, and recommends participatory involvement of women, assessment across day, night, and the temporal rhythms of use, evaluation of behavioral adaptation (safety work) alongside reported fear, and experimental testing of effects.