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Safe Urban Design
Safe Cascadia advocates understanding relationships of economic patterns, built forms and their function/appearances, mobility patterns and social behavior that create the perceived or real safety of our environments Safe urban design is at the center of several related and convergent fields: architecture, landscape architecture, development, regional and local planning, social policies and human behavior patterns, and how all those systems work to create the ambiance and flavor of our cities.
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Integration
Safe Cascadia is about integration of crime prevention strategies with sustainable design practices to create safe human environments. We are a nonprofit dedicated to educating planners, architects, business owners, law enforcement personnel, interested allied professionals about the aesthetic, safety and economic benefits of creating safe human environments.
With an emphasis on the bottom line of economic efficiency, our society has a history of hiding or removing evidence of our functional relationship with the environment as in the phrase “out of sight, out of mind”, from our storm and sanitary sewer systems, our ways of dealing with homelessness, or even the use of harsh and ill-conceived or reactive CPTED measures that sacrifice art and aesthetics for fortressing public and private space.
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Ethical Responsibility
Safe Cascadia engages in and advocates the responsibility we have for holistic systems thinking. This includes the impact of development, design, and building on social and criminal behavior, and its effect on the appearance and care of our living and working places. We believe a large part of safe urban environments derives from people realizing a greater degree of responsibility to the well being of a place, whether that is the home, yard, neighborhood or town. We aim to emphasize personal responsibility to civic affairs and to community life in our efforts.