Comparative Analysis about Third Space location and cognitive map of citizen safety feeling, Toward a strategy to reduce fear of crime- Case study: Esfahan

Designing and planning safe public spaces means creating spaces that enhance safety and safety feeling. While designers and architects place special focus on visibility, lighting, landscaping, and pedestrian traffic in order to detract the fear of crime measures nearly none of them proposed the urban space model to conquer this issue.
Third Place as any public place used for informal, voluntary, regular urban life, coined by Oldenburg (1999). It can cause some individual-social benefits for people. One of the best opportunities for this space is social communication.
This study attempts to analyze where fear of crime actually means to citizens in the context of urban life evaluated to Third Place over that community.
Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this study seeks an urban solution by testing the district of feeling safe and third place range to find out if they are overlapped or not.
The model starts by assuming that the fear of crime is related to experienced levels of urban space quality. We proposed a relationship between the cognition maps of feeling safe and quality of urban spaces in a city.
Each family interviewed at the first stage was classified according to 5 zones of Esfahan. Totally 385 persons grouped in 130 families (with at least 3 person) were considered by random to name five places of city with the qualities that matched safe feeling, then the collected data turned to the cognition map in order to clarify statues of the five zones.
To assess third place, 3 expert urban designers were interviewed to score five zones of Esfahan in order to Third Place criteria. The result through AHP method is the ranking of the zones in order to qualifying Third Place criteria and its map.
Analyzing both maps together, the result shows that it is proper to distinguish Third Place criteria and feeling of safety in Esfahan. Moreover there are suggested qualities in detail to improve the safe feeling and reduce the fear of crime.