“The public square and civic infrastructure are the front lines against this kind of attack”, proclaimed then-President of the American Institute of Architects, Thomas Vonier. The decades since 9/11 and mass violence have pressured cities, in the United States and globally, to reconsider what “safety” means. Is it about barriers, bollards, surveillance? Or is it about trust, visibility, evidence, resilience? Several projects confront these questions at various scales to demonstrate how architecture and forensic thinking can collectively protect communities and civic life.
The Domestic Scale
Southeast London’s Erith Park, was a high-rise concrete tower, faltering social infrastructure, gangs, and drug trade. In 2013 a regeneration plan was launched where tower blocks were demolished and replaced by low and medium-rise homes. Traditional street layouts were established and the design for mixed-tenure housing was guided by Secured by Design (SBD). The effort was carefully sown to meet an evident result – crime was approximately 80% less than in the rest of its ward. Within the estate boundary there were zero recorded burglaries, weapons offences, drugs-related crime, robberies or personal thefts.
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Erith Park’s transformation was driven by intentional design around natural surveillance – clear sightlines and fewer hidden alleys, frontages that face the street, defensible private/semi-private space, lighting, controlled access, robust doors/windows, layouts that avoid ambiguous, in-between spaces. In this context, architecture plays a proactive role, with architects, law enforcement, developers, and the community collaborating to integrate safety into their neighborhoods.
Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space Theory posits that the very layout of the built environment can shape social behavior by building a sense of ownership and responsibility that discourages crime. Beyond sightlines and fences, neighborhood regenerations can emphasize aesthetics and maintenance as instruments of social control. Landscaped gardens, robust materials, and illuminated pathways enhanced the environment visually but communicated that the space is cared for and valued. Architecture becomes a form of social persuasion that subtly deterred unwanted behavior.
The City Scale
At this scale, threats are less about individual crimes and more about public safety in the context of mass gatherings, vehicle-borne attacks, and terror. As journalist Anne Quito wrote in Quartz, “erecting fortress-like protections is, in a way, giving into terror – it allows fear to dictate how we live.” The alternative is a new generation of security design that blends protection with civic life. Once purely functional, the humble bollard has evolved into an emblem of defensive design, often veiled as planters, benches, or sculptural forms.
Thomas Vonier, speaking from the 2017 Paris CityLab conference , urged architects and urban planners to rethink public and civic infrastructure. His call was not for more barricades, but for design that anticipates risk in subtle, yet integrated ways such using lighting, street layouts, and unobtrusive barriers.
Vonier’s approach reveals a tension – how much security without erasing comfort and openness? How much barrier without barriering off citizens? There’s also the equity dimension where certain populations are disproportionately subjected to scrutiny. Any security design in public urban fabric must balance safety, inclusion, transparency. This is architecture as geopolitical; as ethics.
Across domestic and city-scaled interventions, architecture anticipates risk rather than reacts to it. Safety is not an afterthought, retrofitted as gates, cameras, or barricades, but a guiding logic integrated into street patterns, building layouts, and civic infrastructures. In London, Erith Park’s streets and frontages are configured to “design out crime,” while the city infrastructure seeks to embed vigilance without erasing the everyday rhythms of life.
Scale shifts, but the principles echo. Natural surveillance, defensible space, legible public/private boundaries, material robustness, and transparency build a toolkit to replicate protective architecture. The built environment can reinforce fear or scaffold trust. When architecture aligns with criminology and forensics, safety is reframed from an absence of crime to the presence of resilience.
Surveillance versus privacy, fortification versus openness, and the politics of whose safety is prioritized all converge in the intersection of architecture and safety. Protective measures can displace or stigmatize, giving the illusion that architecture alone resolves social inequities. The tension allows architecture to assert ethical charge. Safety is not merely built – it is imagined, performed, and continuously contested, a reflection of both the values and the vulnerabilities of the people it serves.
This article is part of the ArchDaily Topics: Architecture Without Limits: Interdisciplinarity and New Synergies. Every month we explore a topic in-depth through articles, interviews, news, and architecture projects. We invite you to learn more about our ArchDaily Topics. And, as always, at ArchDaily we welcome the contributions of our readers; if you want to submit an article or project, contact us.