Abstract
The social dimension to sustainability is now widely accepted as important alongside with environmental and economic sustainability. Safety and security as one of the aspects of social sustainability has been undertheorized in the built environment fraternity. Research has proven that theories that dominate the field of urban safety come from social sciences, but the motives of this paper are to report and discuss findings from a critical review of local and international literature of the role of other perspectives, especially those developed by built environment professionals and practitioners. In addition, to assess the design deficiencies of urban public paces (UPS) that lead to them creating an environment for criminality and exposure to threats and vulnerabilities. Based on a five-stage literature review, 39 articles on safety and security of UPS were critically analysed. A bibliometric analysis using the visualisation of similarities (VOSviewer) software was adopted. The review findings reveal that safety and security in UPS is associated with the environmental design features such as accessibility, visibility, etc. Secondly, surveillance measure in UPS do not address the safety concerns rather concentrates mainly on controlling the space rather than people, in that it interferes with spatial planning. This paper argues that spatial structure affects citizens to do crime. An innovative urban management is necessary, and it would result from a synergy between social and structural elements of a city. To guarantee inclusive and accessible landscape designs, personal safety should be part of the design features of UPS. Spatial planning as a discipline should incorporate measures to combat crime in the city.