Assessment Overview
Students are required to engage in a site analysis.
Assessment Information
Each student must take photographs (maximum of 5 each) of two different public sites: one that demonstrates a successful environmental crime prevention initiative and the other of a site in need of improved environmental crime prevention. You must use this template (Links to an external site.) to provide your answer. This site audit resource will help you too. You may not use anywhere on RMIT campus or any site covered in the practice exercise in Week 4.
Students should provide the following analysis:
Site 1: Provide an overview of the site, detail the improvements that have been made and explain why this is an example of successful environmental crime prevention, referring to concepts, techniques, and examples from the course and additional research as necessary (400 words).
Site 2: Provide a brief overview of the site, explain why this site might be conducive to crime, then use course concepts, techniques and examples, along with additional research, to detail the environmental crime prevention techniques that you would recommend to reduce crime (600 words).
Further Information
Students should look at demonstrations of broad-based planning such as crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) and more targeted situational measures. The best advice here is to find the spaces that give you lots to work with in terms of demonstrating your course knowledge.
Our preference is that you identify these public locations in your own cities or communities to help you to develop an understanding of how environmental crime prevention shapes the areas in which we live, shop, work and travel. If it is safe to do so you may wish to take photos of these sites at different times of the day. If taking photos yourself is not possible for genuine reasons we will approve students finding appropriate examples of locations online, provided they are appropriately referenced (with URL included). Please Inbox staff in advance to arrange this. Failure to do so will result in a reduced grade.
Students must support their arguments with reference to research literature. You should refer both to the course materials, such as the textbook and readings, as well as complementary sources relevant to the particular locations and solutions you examine. For example, if you chose car parks there is considerable research on crime prevention initiatives in car parks, as is the case with shopping centres, train stations, public housing estates etc. Similarly, if you are praising or recommending CCTV, its use must be well supported in the published research literature for this particular type of location and the crimes that may occur there. These guides may help.
You must properly support and reference (Links to an external site.) any and all environmental crime prevention techniques that you recommend. We want you to be very specific when you discuss Situational Crime Prevention or CPTED techniques. For example, it is not sufficient to recommend: “The trees should be pruned to make the space more open and reduce crime.” Rather you would say: “The pruning of trees would facilitate “natural surveillance” by allowing passers-by to see the area; this would “increase the risk” of crime, a key situational crime prevention approach outlined by Clark & Eck (as cited in Sutton, Cherney & White, 2014, p. 59).”
