Safety and inclusion of urban public spaces

There is a growing need to design and/or redesign usable, comfortable, but also safe urban spaces, roads and equipment, in which everyone can feel included. The pursuit of safe conditions, including from the various forms of threat and crime, requires the integration of the different existing approaches in order to achieve effective and lasting results. Specific consideration must be made in relation to the safety conditions of public spaces, with particular reference to urban green areas. More specifically to greening interventions, previous empirical evidence has found that cleaning and greening of empty lots is associated with a reduction in crime. The objective of this EU-funded project (Next Generation EU) is that the results of this research will lead to the definition of models that can be implemented in policies, plans and regulations. On the basis of the research carried out so far, the competitive call for the above-mentioned research project was won, representing the starting point for the achievement of the set objectives. This work is, in fact, an opportunity for a more careful reflection on the topic in order to identify the key aspects that allow Urban Planning to be oriented towards the environmental prevention of crime risk and towards the definition of specific actions, possibly to be contemplated in the municipal urban plan, for the adaptation, over time, of urban spaces to security criteria.