Two presentations took a more global look at the future of urban renewal and crime prevention strategies.

 

Ugi Zvekic, Senior Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Expert, UNODC Regional Office South Africa. International Cooperation in Crime Prevention, discussed the need to place crime prevention in a wider international context. Recent UN Guidelines for Victims and for Crime Prevention, and such initiatives as the the work of UN HABITAT’s Safer Cities programme, have helped to raise the profile of prevention, but obscure the fact that the developing and developed worlds experience crime in different ways, and at different levels of intensity.

 

Crime appears to affect urban areas primarily, but official surveys tend to highlight the developed world, and there is little data on the developing world. Variations across countries or within regions also tend to be obscured. Such crime includes not just the ‘volume crime’ (street crime, theft, robbery etc) which concern developed countries so much, but also organized crime, corruption of public officials, drug trafficking, money laundering and economic crime. Drug cultivation and trafficking starts in rural and developing countries. Organized crime affects regions such as Central South America, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, more than North America and Europe. This is supported by data from the International Crime Victimization Survey (2000) and UNODC data on organized crime and other issues.  The four major crime areas: conventional crime, organized crime, corruption and drug abuse (HIV/AIDS), all require a combination of different prevention approaches, although they often overlap. Prevention strategies targeting conventional crime and drug abuse should include individual and community-oriented crime prevention, those targeting organized crime and corruption should focus on organizational crime prevention. In all cases they need to use partnerships, empirical evidence, evaluation and international cooperation. Yet since four prevention domains interact in an urban context, it is fundamental to use international cooperation to further the work of prevention.

 

Michel Marcus, Executive Director, European Forum for Urban Security, outlined the emerging European framework on crime prevention policy, from the European Charter and the Treaty of Amsterdam, to the establishment of the European Union Network on Crime Prevention in 2001. This has been accompanied by the development of partnership structures at national and local levels. The big challenges for Europe for the future include how they respond to growth in ethnic communities, and the problem of the ‘ethnicization’ of policies in many countries; the traffic in immigration; and the development of cities. The responses in many countries had been to draw lines between ‘good and bad’, ‘rich and poor’ populations and areas, and to place too much emphasis on the surveillance and cleansing of public space, eg. using CCTV’s. All of this acted to restrict the freedom of movement of citizens. The stronger links between cities, brought about by better transport and the media needed to be exploited to counter the big challenges. Working to strengthen the role of elected officials and communities in urban development zones was an important way forward. The City of Liege, for example, has included urban renewal in its urban security strategy, based on principles of shared ownership for the initiative; working globally, across all sectors; building capacity at the local level, and transparency and accountability. Security - like water and health – is a common good. 

 

Chaired by Yves Van de Vloet, included invited Mayors and Elected officials, and provided an opportunity for an exchange on experiences and challenges for strengthening complex multi-sectoral urban renewal and crime prevention initiatives. Panel included His Worship Mayor Joe Aketch of Nairobi, Kenya; His Worship Mayor Kleist Sykes of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Councillor B J Buthelezi Town Clerk of eThekwhini/Durban Municipality, South Africa, Councillor Mike Pagtakhan, City of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada; and Marc Boucher Director of Social Development City of Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

In his concluding remarks, Yves Van de Vloet, Permanent Secretary for Prevention Policy, Federal Public Service, Home Affairs, Belgium, stressed the importance of recognizing the very different conceptual and historical contexts in which crime prevention and urban renewal initiatives have taken place in the countries represented in the Colloquium, as well as the variety of actors implicated in each. In all cases, however, financial resources are always insufficient, and it is important to work to ensure that financial investments in urban security are coherent and stable. All of this reinforces the need for the North and the South to learn from the richness of each other’s experiences, for the ICPC to continue to support the development of training and tools. 

Concluding remarks (in French only)