Tackling Crime in Residential Parking Facilities through Secure Design - A Study of South Korea

Tackling Crime in Residential Parking Facilities through Secure Design

  The researcher looks at high-rise apartment car parks in the Seoul metropolitan area of South Korea with respect to physical security and design features. This paper employs CPTED originated from the Newman"s "Defensible Space "theory and some situational crime prevention techniques to find the actual picture of crime risk and physical security features in the car parks based upon site-specific surveys. Through analyses of the police crime data and the site survey results, a number of opportunity-related crimes and the physical environmental factors affecting their risk were identified. It was found that a large part of them could have been deterred and prevented if there had been proper security measures to reduce the crime opportunities. Nearly the half of whole households in Korea are high-rise apartments and most of their car parks are fall short of proper physical security system and management. It might therefore be urgent that the quality of security should be improved for the high-rises. Recently introduced integrated security system (a.k.a. TAS) and 100 per cent underground parking design by several Korean security companies and housing firms are considered to be one of the appropriate steps dealing with the car park crime problems.