Pesquisas em História da Educação no Brasil e em Portugal: caminhos da polifonia

Este texto representa um esforço de reflexão sobre a produção intelectual apresentada ao 3º Congresso Luso-brasileiro de História da Educação, realizado em Coimbra em Fevereiro de 2000 e subordinado ao tema “Escolas, culturas e identidades”. Não há dúvida quanto às mudanças na escrita da história da educação, tanto no Brasil como em Portugal, como vêm sugerindo os três últimos Congressos. Tais alterações refletem-se na quantidade crescente de pessoas envolvidas em pesquisas nesta linha; na polifonia presente nos temas, periodizações e fontes; na articulação de grupos de pesquisa e nos esforços relativos à organização de acervos e roteiros de fontes. Podemos hoje afirmar que a História da Educação possui uma certa visibilidade no campo das ciências sociais, mas, entretanto, precisamos estar atentos à maneira como se vêm constituindo os seus aspectos metodológicos, para que este campo de conhecimento tenha uma credibilidade científica que identifique uma comunidade de historiadores, por natureza polifónica, mas cuja identidade necessidade de passar pelo ofício do historiador no compromisso com a escrita da história

A Virtual Reality Approach to Personal Safety and the Design of Built Environment Facilities

The Suzy Lamplugh Trust Research Institute at the University of Glamorgan is conducting research that focuses on personal safety issues as they relate to the design and maintenance of built environment facilities. The project, funded by Valley Lines (a network of 66 railway stations in South Wales) seeks to investigate the perception and reality of personal safety (against crime and nuisance, as opposed to health and safety) on these stations and their immediate access routes and environments. Customer satisfaction surveys have consistently reported that although recorded incidents of crime and nuisance are relatively low, rail users perceive their risk to be significantly higher and therefore discourages people from using the trains. The project uses interactive virtual reality (VR) scenes as the environmental stimuli for investigating perceptions. VR ‘walkthroughs’ of a sample of stations have been shown to focus groups representing samples of users and potential users. The standardisation of the ‘personal journey’ to, from and through the station represented by this approach and its ‘dynamic’ (rather than static) and interactive nature, make it a realistic avenue for evaluating how people decode the railway environment in personal safety terms. A pilot study for three stations was very encouraging and illuminating. The respondents provided a rich source of data, concerning their personal safety concerns in and around the station environment and the findings broadly support Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) theory. It also highlights the crucial importance of user perceptions in the design and management of built environment facilities. This methodology will also be employed to investigate perceptions of personal safety within the University campus environment, its immediate environment and access routes. Within this community, fear of crime has been shown to exist in locations where, according to recorded statistics, crime is low. Therefore, the objective is to develop applied solutions to improve personal safety on the campus. Finally a package of recommended solutions and a generic model shall be developed that can analyse problems and generate solutions to any campus University

Designing Crime Precipitators in Northbridge after dark: Urban Governance in Slumber

Entertainment districts play a significant role in the post-industrial place-making for the night-time economies of many Western cities, and they are significant contributors to these economies. However, many cities are experiencing increased levels of crime in their alcohol-oriented entertainment districts. This paper explores crime in Northbridge entertainment district in Perth, Western Australia and highlights how the legacy of governance can operate counter-intuitively, to foster crime precipitators (Wortley, 2008), which can increase opportunities for crime. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) are briefly discussed and the authors argued that SCP is a more appropriate strategy to use in the dynamic and complex environmental setting of Northbridge. Based on several years of scientific observation, land-use surveys and pedestrian surveys, the authors provide a critical narrative of Northbridge and crime precipitators after dark. This narrative is expressed from the perspective of environmental criminology and SCP. This exploratory study concludes that Northbridge is in part, a legacy of previous single-issue governance, which has inadvertently created crime precipitators, which exacerbate the problems of crime in the entertainment district after dark. The need for further research is identified and the adoption of a more strategic, multi-issue and multi-agency approach is recommended