City, safety and safe city planning in case of Bursa

Today, raising in urban crime rates and increasing levels of fear of crime, associated with the social, economic and techonological changes and developments of cities, threaten the urban life significantly. Substantially, crime is one of the most significant facts and problems of modern world. With modernization of urban life, all societies interfere with increasing crime incidents by enacting laws to prevent or decrease them and from ancient times to today, judgement authorities and security systems are effective in ensuring safer places. However in recent years, increasing crime rates both in worldwide and in Turkey, reveal that judgement or policing systems are not sufficient alone in order to create safer places. This causes urban safety to become one of the main problems of cities and interdisciplinary studies become essential also because of multi-dimensional terms of crime. Thus, in order to tackle with urban crime problem, which is common for all cities, urban planning discipline that orders places must be effective besides judgement and policing systems. From this point of view, the propose of this thesis is to analyze the relationships between crime incidents and place and to emphasize the importance of spatial interventions from the view of urban planning discipline in order to prevent/decrease urban crime rates in cities. Therefore in this thesis, correlations between crime and place and adequate methodology and analyses that can expose this relation are determined and stages that constitute safe city planning are also presented. For this reason, terms of crime and urban crime are described from the view of concerned disciplines and how crime becomes widespread in all cities and the processes are analyzed. The term of safe city planning is handled by evaluating theories, methods and approaches about preventing crime in urban places. In case study, therotical framework is tested in Bursa and its Osmangazi District with qualitative and quantitative crime analysis based on crime datas from General Directorate of Security and Bursa Police Deparment by using Geographic Information Systems. Findings from these analysis are compared with theoritical framework and finally suggestions are presented in creating safer urban places. This thesis would alos be helpful for various disciplines such as urban planners, urban designers, security workers and sociologist to secure safety in cities and it would open new perspectives in term of safety.