1Criminological theories grounded on a behavioral approach to crime prevention have surfaced for the last decade in a growing number of urban regeneration programmes targeted on crime-ridden French deprived public housing neighbourhoods, along once-predominant paradigms of crime causation. Emerging modes of prioritizing and of labeling urban risks, as defined by new “experts”, inexorably call for the engineering of new responses to urban disorders (Giddens, 1991). The profound remoulding of the structural landscapes of public housing projects has been brought about by a set of social and societal mutations that have unfolded at higher levels of spatial aggregation – unregulated flux of globalization, the rise of terrorist threats with no clear outlines, processes of “detraditionalization” (Giddens, 1998), the expansion of individualism. Unlike its Anglo-American counterparts, this is a comparatively new experiment in France.

3Second, as design devised for the purpose of deterrence takes shape and becomes normalized, it is ordinarily assumed to occur with a subsequent process of anchoring of distrust (Crawford, 2000) towards the strangers to the neighbourhood – the “dangerous outsiders”. Another charge which is often brought to the fore against deterrent design is that it is believed to produce homogeneous and barren places of living, disregarding established social practices. How then and to which extent would it be possible to reconcile somewhat conflicting goals in at-risk low-income neighbourhoods – on the one hand, enhancing community building and social cohesion; on the other hand, promoting a new governance of urban risks underlying the deployment of technical and abstract situational systems.

Responses to insecurity in ‘difficult-to-let’ public housing projects (1995 – the present) – a resort to evidence-driven policies?

From « nothing works » … to « what works? »

5Indeed, in the mid-1970s in the UK, with Ron Clarke and Ian Sinclair (1974) at the Home Office, and in the United States, with Robert Martinson and James Wilson (1975), the « nothing works » argument was used as a paradigm for change (Sullivan, 2000:83). The effectiveness of rehabilitative treatments, and with them, the positivistic model focussed on individual pathology, were increasingly called into question. As a sign of the adjustment of the use of the new paradigm, slightly more than two decades later, when Lawrence Sherman and his colleagues (1997) reintroduced the question of « what works » in the public debate, they actually meant to warn against any ideological resort to symbolic politics. Hence for the French situation, would it be legitimate to put forward the averred limitations of the social approach in dealing with urban delinquency? The sheer scarcity of criminal justice public policy evaluations in France (Robert, 1994) – not to mention strong research design ones – precludes any attempt to adopt any firm position on that matter, despite soaring urban disorder rates. Some researchers have argued in favour of implementation failure as opposed to theory failure. They would notably point to the compartmentalization of implementing agencies, to the multi-layered administrative procedures, to the diffusion of financial aids, etc. (Body-Gendrot, 1993). As a result, the impact of social policies can hardly be gauged by an absence of crime and disorder.

The rise of a performance culture

6No doubt, the situational approach seems to be a better way to promote rationalities heralding a managerial culture. A great number of local crime and disorder observatory tools – not all of them very elaborate though – have growingly been employed by local stakeholders, like the social landlords, who had not hitherto incorporated safety concerns into the everyday management of public housing. New devices for measuring what previously constituted missing values are now made available. The capacity to produce figures can also be seen as the golden way to gain the consideration from other partners in local safety partnerships. Since more attention is drawn to opportunity reduction through environmental design, adaptation must ensue, and hence the issue of the social inclusion of potential offenders is purposefully left aside for some time. Urban planning is therefore to be more responsive to opportunist crime by making it situationally and perceptively more difficult and risky, by reducing the rewards, provocations, and by removing excuses ( Clarke, 2003).

Pragmatism as a given

10The French adaptation of the notion of defensible spaces thus aims to redefine modes of spatial organization, of motion, and of interactions between users in communal spaces. The suggestive and symbolic functions conveyed by urban design are used as means of regulating the flux of residents and passers-by going to and fro, of reducing opportunities for encounters, and of generating orderly environments, undisturbed spaces where social screening (Berman, 1982) is at work.

11However, how do the main recipients welcome these changes that affect them most directly on a permanent basis – are they active or passive beneficiaries? How then to rejuvenate deserted public spaces?

How to reconcile community building and urban safety?

Of costs and benefits? The inside views of users

12Bringing both urban safety and hence upgraded quality of life back to disadvantaged neighbourhoods are objectives based upon joint assumptions about the users of these spaces, may they be law-abiders or unlawful intruders. On the one hand, the normalization of target hardening systems, reflected noticeably in protected door-entryphones, in higher iron fences, etc., should deter potential offenders and restrain them from engaging in harmful activities. On the other hand, the social connotation attached to the concept of « residential units » (Tabet, 1999) should convey to residents the feeling that they have moved upwardly, at least in the urbanistic trajectory. In return, they are tacitly required to bear some responsibility for taking care of communal areas and for maintaining improved quality of life for the collective interest. However, there does not seem to have been much consideration for the issue of the ‘social costs’ (Skogan, 1981) that the « intrusion » of such abstract systems into the everyday lives of residents brings about. Focussed intervention is assuredly justified given the ecological concentration of crime in particular residential neighbourhoods. Nonetheless, this type of governance of urban risks often fails to take into consideration residents’ specific grievances. Hence, either by lack of motivation or of awareness by the latter of the real stakes implicit with the installing of situational techniques – a situation further exacerbated by the absence of an educating process – the operation of these situational systems inevitably turn out to be a mere failure. This is precisely where a possible weak link might lie in the whole safety structure. The ethical question deserves more attention, at the very time of an unquestioned expansion of situational schemes in France.

13As part of the doctoral research, a longitudinal survey with public housing tenants, prior to and following the incremental implementation of some situational measures, has been conducted for the Parisian case study. Besides, a comparative work with both London and New York City has sought to investigate reception of the safety schemes by local stakeholders and residents and should therefore – when released – shed new light on the interactive interrelated mechanisms at work.

The road towards participative planning?

15In order to appease rather tense relations between the public housing management and the main tenant association – in my Parisian case study –, the former, via the initiative of the new manager, formally agreed to promote a better communication scheme with the latter. It entailed the engineering of a problem-solving approach featuring the very specific priorities voiced by the residents and related, for example, to the inconvenience generated by some design arrangements which had resulted from concerns about safety. As a consequence, a responsibilization process was set up, and it involved a small number of residents who informally willingly took up the role of place managers afterwards. During a tour of the housing project in December 2003, one of the residents who took part in it scolded a group of youth gathering in one of the lobbies: unless they stayed quiet and they would not smoke or make a mess on the premises, they had no right to be there. And the crowd went away. The causal link between enhanced resident participation to local management decision-making and the development of « pieces » of informal surveillance is far from being unmediated. In a long term perspective nevertheless, the aggregation of these – however frail – individual efforts should contribute to promote the social framework instrumental in fostering sustainable residential defence. Again, this novel participative approach does not allow for a rigourous scientific evaluation. It would nonetheless be more accurate to take into account the unfolding of informal social control practices as a possible way – non-exclusive of others though – to fill the cognitive void as regards the real, actual social impacts of these preventative measures.

16To democratize access to safety and to upgraded quality of life in « at-risk » deprived neighbourhoods, should no doubt go hand in hand with focussing on the social and human dimensions of civilian demands for enhanced urban safety. Henceforth, this endeavour is more likely to engender a common urban culture (Audoin and Bossavit, 2000), shared by both the safety service providers and the recipients. It is indeed all about a holistic approach that should carefully consider local cultural and social idiosyncracies.

17Evaluations of public policies in France have usually remained in the hands of a few experts and they have not been legion, given also political and administrative resistance to monitoring. The incorporation of strong social science research designs into evaluative methodologies should allow for the justification of the – otherwise undebatable – widespread resort to situational schemes, beyond mere anecdotal success. The issue of the opportunistic rise of situational crime prevention would hence no longer seem relevant at all.