De-Opportunizing Design and its Lessons for Building Security and Counterterrorism

Abstract

Recent broad concerns for “Homeland Security” have renewed the field of ‘hard’ security design and directly resistant design strategies for buildings. However, there is an associated field of research and practice on ‘soft security’ design, which is equally applicable and less impacting on the general user populace. This approach works on the general principle of ‘de-opportunizing’, which examines the explicit control loops that a malefactor must engage with the setting in order to carry out their intentions. Then explicit interventions are designed into settings in order to disable or frustrate such needed controls. The result is enhanced security without regular users being inconvenienced or often even noticing the interventions. This paper reviews the applications of such de-opportunizing environmental design to thwart vandalism, burglaries, bank robberies and physical and sexual assaults, and extends it to counterterrorist situations using Perceptual Control Theory, which provides the theoretical basis for its use.