What can Built Environment and Health Professionals Learn from Crime Prevention in Planning? Introducing ‘HPTED’

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) has emerged over the last 30 years as the umbrella term for environmental interventions aimed at reducing crime and the fear of crime. The supportive role of the built environment for human health is a concurrent area of interdisciplinary research, evidence-based policy development and related practice. In many countries, health has struggled to gain an explicit mandate in the urban planning process. In some of these same countries, however, crime prevention has succeeded in staking a place in matters regularly considered by planners in plan-making and development assessment. This article explores whether there are lessons to be learned from CPTED's development and implementation that might be applied to health promotion. As a sister suite of controls, we introduce the concept of HPTED—Health Promotion Through Environmental Design. We review the development of various elements of CPTED and reveal several key lessons that can be applied to the promotion of health as a planning concern. Taking these recommendations further, we conclude with an outline of some proposed key characteristics of HPTED.