Safety in the Urban Space

Sammanfattning: Creating safe environments is a necessity within urban planning. In each element of the urban planning process, it is essential to reflect upon how the proposed plans can affect safety within the chosen environment. The purpose of the thesis is therefore to develop an analysis tool based on scientific research, to assess the perceived safety that is mediated through environmental design. The report aims to answer the following research questions, Which theoretical perspectives and scientific research can be used as a research basis, to develop a analysis tool that seek to increase perceived safety through environmental design? How can the perceived safety through the environmental design be assessed using the analysis tool? The method consists of a literature study, to give a broad and global insight on data as well as results that have been in previous research on safety. International studies and articles have been primarily used with few elements from the Swedish context, with the aim of obtaining a broad mapping of different contexts where safety in the physical environment has been investigated. The used search engines consist of the Royal Institute of Technology's Primo, Google and Google Scholar. Through these, the theoretical perspectives and the scientific research that underlies the work were found.  The analysis tool consists of a checklist that includes six different categories; Lighting and mobility, Maintenance of the physical environment, Technical monitoring, Natural monitoring, Physical design and orientation as well as Vegetation in the physical environment. Within each category there are various claims that the user of the tool will rate in an assessment scale from 1 to 5. To take position to the presented claims, the user must perform a site visit to observe the surroundings.