Concerns about partnership building, goal-setting, implementation, capacity-building, measurement and evaluation, are common to crime prevention, urban renewal, and comprehensive community initiatives (CCI’s), and in health promotion, poverty reduction and drug prevention fields.  They have been tackled in a number of different ways with the development of broad evaluation methods which try to capture the outcomes of multiple interventions in diffuse community settings. CCI’s, for example, (as ICPC’s recent work underlines) are a new generation of urban renewal strategies with a number of characteristics including using a locally-based approach (defined neighbourhoods); citizen participation (residents, stakeholders); a comprehensive approach which sees problems as interrelated and to include social, economic and physical issues; collaborative public-private partnerships (residents, corporations, community organizations, local government); consensus orientation, working in partnerships (rather than confrontation); and community-building through partnerships.

 

The Colloquium provided an opportunity to explore some of the lessons and achievements of these broad-spectrum interventions in terms of what they have to contribute to the future development of community safety at the city level. It is also an opportunity for a real exchange of experience in both directions between the North and the South, after more than a decade in which the ideas of local authority and city-based partnership crime prevention have been implanted in many countries.

 

In the UK the initial New Deal for Communities programme is investing some £2 billion over 10 years in 39 deprived areas, administered by the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit’s (NRU). It stresses multiple partnerships, innovative approaches to community engagement, and aims ‘to deliver significant and lasting improvements in five key areas’: housing education, worklessness, crime, and health. They focus on the local examination and analysis of local data, including citizen input, using robust evidence of ‘what works’, capacity building and implementation issues. The government’s New Commitment to Neighbourhood Renewal: A National Strategy Action Plan was launched in January 2001, investing £900 million over 3 years in the 88 most deprived local authority areas, and building on the experience from the initial programme. It aims to improve the economic, educational, housing, health and safety of those communities. It will attack the core problems of deprived areas, using a variety of mechanisms including floor targets, local strategic partnerships, involving the local community, funding mechanisms, management, skills and knowledge improvement, and neighbourhood wardens. There is strong practical emphasis on attacking implementation problems and capacity building eg. The Learning Curve is the NRU’s new ‘strategy for learning and development’.

 

France has some fifteen years experience of integrated city-based crime prevention. In 1989 the National Crime Prevention Council and the National Policy on Urban Renewal were merged, leading to the creation of the interministerial delegation to the city (DIV). Since that time, France has attempted to follow an integrated approach to urban renewal and crime prevention. The DIV has in effect been responsible for integrated action in the quartiers sensibles, including housing and urban management, sustained job creation and employment measures, improving educational facilities and access, and crime prevention. Among its priorities were increasing access to justice (maisons de justice), strengthening parental abilities, and providing sport and leisure activities for youth at risk. In 1997, local safety contracts, directed by the  Ministry of the Interior, replaced the old contrats communaux de prevention et de securite. More recently, the DIV has been criticized for a failure to develop effective and efficient preventive measures. This fifteen years of experience provides a good basis for reflecting not only on what has been accomplished, but also on the more difficult question of what has not worked well.

 

In South Africa the National Urban Renewal Programme (NURP) was initiated in 1999 by President Mbeki. Its main focus was initially on safety and security, but includes housing, economic development, and education, and it is seen as one of the most ambitious crime reduction experiments in South Africa. It is using a comprehensive approach, emphasizes innovation, the integration of local agencies and community stakeholders, and multi-disciplinary interventions. It is administered at the national level by an Urban renewal Unit in the Dept. of Provincial and Local Government. An Urban Renewal Forum brings together local, municipal, provincial and national representatives on a monthly basis. Four pilot areas in metropolitan cities have been established (and seven Integrated Sustainable Rural Development Strategies in rural areas). The South African Police Service (SAPS) commissioned a report on the social crime prevention component of the strategy in 2002, which explores some of the problems experienced in the metropolitan pilot areas, and the relationship with the government’s crime prevention strategy in the 1996 White Paper on Safety and Security.