Designing spaces carefully can make them safer. In recent years practitioners have focused on designing out crime from housing estates. The QUERCUS Project develops this research and practice, applying it to linear open spaces and river corridors.

All three partners in the QUERCUS Project experience problems with crime, fear of crime and anti-social behaviour along their river corridors. If improvements to the river environments were made without a focus on designing out crime, it is likely they would be spoilt through vandalism, losing the benefit of any investment. For this reason many local authorities have, in the past, simply fenced rivers off or enclosed them in ugly concrete channels away from the general public.

The QUERCUS project aims to overcome this barrier, designing the space specifically to minimise opportunities for crime. The partnership asked Groundwork South East London to develop a model, enabling each partner to design out crime effectively from its river corridor.
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As well as being applicable to Chester, Lewisham and ‘s-Hertogenbosch – the model is designed to be generic and can be applied to any urban river corridor.

Links to:

Designing out crime groundwork report –

• Executive summary
• Full Report
• QUERCUS review of current designing out crime information