Chair: Jonatan Abraham (KTH)
Sustainability, resilience and safety: challenges & opportunities in rural environments
Speaker: Karina Landman, University of Pretoria, South Africa, Email: karina.landman@up.ac.za
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for safe, inclusive and sustainable human settlements, ranging from large cities to smaller towns and public places within. Sustainability aims to achieve two things, namely improve human well-being and quality of life, and secondly, to ensure the continuous functionality of the socio-ecological systems with human settlements. Although the exact nature of ‘quality of life’ differs between various contexts, safety is generally regarded as one of the key performance qualities to ensure human well-being. Resilience is concerned with the adaptive capacity of settlements and is thus directly connected to sustainability in an attempt to ensure the continuous functionality of the socio-ecological systems. This presentation focusses on the relationship between sustainability, resilience and safety with specific reference to examples from smaller rural towns in South Africa. The discussion reports on the role of public places to contribute [or not] to human well-being and quality of life in terms of safety. Following this, it then explores a number of spatial determinants of resilience and shows how these are related to aspects of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) in rural environments. I argue that Resilience Thinking and a focus on spatial resilience, not only offers a mechanism towards greater sustainability but also have the ability to increase safety in human settlements.