Effects of changes in neighbourhood environment due to the CPTED project on residents’ social activities and sense of community: a case study on the Cheonan Safe Village Project in Korea

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to analyse the effects of changes in neighbourhood environment due to the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) project on residents’ social activities and sense of community through a case study of Cheonan Safe Village Project. The study conducted an observing survey and questionnaire survey in order to collect data, and a total of 314 residents’ social activities and 502 surveys were used in analysis. The analysis results can be summarized as follows. First, after the CPTED project, residents’ social activities showed a sustained increase. Compared to before the project, social activities increased by 30.5% immediately after project completion, and by 90.4% at the 1 year after completing the project. Regarding different types of social activities, greetings and conversations between neighbours and children’s play activities showed a sustained increase around the areas where the physical environment changed due to the CPTED project. Second, compared to before the project, the changes perceived in characteristics of the neighbourhood environment showed a 13.7–18.5% increase in the quality of the pedestrian environment, 13.4–24.8% decrease in neighbourhood disorder and 12.7–21.9% decrease in fear of crime. Also, the sense of community increased by 5.4–7.9% after the CPTED project. Third, neighbourhood disorder, fear of crime and participation in neighbourhood activities were significantly correlated with a sense of community of residents. These results suggest the changes in the neighbourhood environment due to the CPTED project, combined with resident participation in neighbourhood activities, had positive effects on improving the sense of community and social ties among community members. The above results shows that changes in neighbourhood environment due to the CPTED project have a positive impact on residents’ social activities and sense of community as well as local crime safety.

KEYWORDS:

• CPTED project
• social activities
• sense of community
• perceived neighbourhood environment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Gehl (1961) classified the activities that take place in the neighbourhood outdoor spaces into essential, optional and social activities. Social activities includes greeting, conversation and children’s play.

2. Neighbourhood disorder refers to the disrespectful behaviour or threatening environment that hinders normal life in a neighbourhood and is divided into social and physical disorders (Ross & John, 2001).

3. The observation path method designates a path in advance, and an observer follows the path and records all outdoor behaviours that occur.

4. In order to extract each latent variable, the questionnaire was composed of five-point Likert scale and the mean value of each item was used as a variable. The reliability analysis was performed to determine whether the average value of each item was available as a variable. The cronbach’s alpha coefficient of each variable was 0.6 or more, and it was possible to use the average value of each item as a variable.

5. Comparing the changes in the amount of pedestrian travel on major streets of the project site before and after the project, showed the daytime activity increased by 12.5% and nighttime by 3.6%.

6. ANOVA is a statistical technique to test the significance of the main difference observed among three or more populations. The null hypothesis assumes that the mean differences observed across reference groups are attributed to sampling error and samples are derived from the same population (Lee & No, 2012).

7. The number of crime in the site decreased by 13.3% from 45 in 2014 to 39 in 2015 after completing the Safe Village Project.

8. Among the explanatory variables, the highest correlation was observed between age and marital status at 0.632, suggesting the absence of the multicollinearity problem because the value was below 0.7, which was also supported by the maximum variance inflation factor of 3.574 (Lee & No, 2012).

9. The Cheonan Safe Village Project included improving school route and alley to improve the walking environment, and demolishing empty houses, creating a community garden, and installing guerrilla gardens, trash and recycle stations, and security facilities, such as CCTVs, security lights, and designated houses for neighbourhood safety to decease neighbourhood disorder and fear of crime.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the research grant of the Kongju National University in 2014.