Vania Ceccato

I am a Professor at the Department of Urban Planning and Environment, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. I am the head of the UCS - Urban & Community Safety Research Group and the coordinator of the Network Safeplaces. I am interested in the relationship between the environment and safety. GIS and spatial statistical methods underlie my research on the geography of crime and fear in urban and rural environments, transit safety, the intersectionality of safety, the impact of crime on housing markets,  and safety governance. 

On sabbatical in 2023 at  MIT Senseable City Lab in Boston,  UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning in LA. In 2024, I am part of the Faculty of Police work (20%) at the University of Borås and a visiting professor at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, UK.

For a complete publication list, see publications.

• Systems Thinking for Sustainable Crime Prevention: Planning for Risky Places(Open Access)(Routledge, 2024)
• Säkra städer: Aktivt arbete mot brottskoncentration(Studentlitteratur, 2024)
• Crime and safety in the rural: Lessons from research (OpenAcess), 2022
• Kriminologiska perspektiv på situationsbaserad brottsprevention (Libris), 2022
• Crime and fear in public places: Towards safe, inclusive and sustainable (OpenAccess), 2020
• Transit Crime and Sexual Violence in Cities: International Evidence and Prevention (Routledge), 2020

Recent reports (In Swedish)

• Att främja trygghet i biblioteksmiljö: En utvärdering av Högdalens modell, Brottsförebyggande rådet, 2022
• Stationsmiljön, brott och resenärers trygghet: Delrapport 1, 2022
• Kritik, kriminalitet och hot mot svensk djurproduktion–Lantbruksföretagarnas perspektiv, 2022
• Cannabisbruk och langning i Stockholms län: Situationella mönster och samhällskonsekvenser, 2022
•  Brott på tunnelbana 2009-2019, 2020
• Trygghet i kollektivtrafiken i Stockholm i ett internationellt perspektiv: En handlingsplan mot sexuella trakasserier och brott i transitmiljöer (2019)
• Trygg stadsmiljö i praktiken:  Visioner, exempel & tips, 2019
• Trygg stadsmiljö Teori och praktik, 2019

Research relevant activities

Ceccato has served as guest editor of several special issues in urban studies and environmental criminology. Ceccato is a member of the board of the journal International Criminal Justice Review (Sage) and theNordic Journal of Criminology (Taylor and Francis). She is a peer reviewer for a number of international journals such as Urban Studies; Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Cities; Environment and Planning A, B and C; Gender, culture and place; Nature, Journal of Rural Studies, The professional Geographer; Urban Affairs, Crime, Law and Social Change, Geographical Analysis.

Teaching and advisory

In education, she promotes the use of spatial data in a number of research fields by offering methodological courses at KTH in spatial analysis and spatial statistics. Ceccato has an ongoing blended learning course Säkerhet och trygghet i praktiken (AG1167) and is the head teacher of Applied urban and regional analysis: A spatial approach (AG2130) and post-graduated courses: Applied Spatial Analysis: An introduction (AG3170) and Environmental Criminology: Theory for Planners (AI3302), Security in the Context of Urban Sustainability (AG2165). She has been the main (and co-) advisor of several PhD students and Post-doctoral students in Sweden and in Brazil. She is an affiliated scholar in two Brazilian universities: the Institute of Economy, University of Campinas, Sao Paulo, and Sao Paulo state university, Brazil.

Outreach

Ceccato is the national coordinator of the network Safeplaces (Säkraplatser) which aims to improve knowledge and practices in situation-based crime prevention in Sweden. Since 2019, the network has become a partner of UN-Habitat SaferCities program. She also administrates the international user mail list TCR-Network, Transit crime research network with more than 110 members worldwide. For more details about how to subscribe to the list, go to  https://maillist.sys.kth.se/mailman/listinfo/abe.kth.se_tcr-network.

Ceccato aims at promoting research that is gender-informed. She is an active member of European Society of Criminology Working Group Gender, Crime and Criminal Justice. Ceccato was member of the genderSTE which is an EU initiative that aimed at better integrating the gender dimensions in science and technology by promoting women’s careers in science and technology through structural change of institutions. She took part in the first PhD mentor program in mid-1990s devoted to women and science at KTH.

Ceccato contributes to the public debate with appearances on TV, radio, and other media. For example, see TEDTalk Dec 2018 Can architecture and planning ensure safety for women?  TEDxKTHWomen  and PodCast Urban planning and safety – Katja Grillner & Vania Ceccato. Follow Vania Ceccato at Twitter: https://twitter.com/cambvace

Background

Ceccato is currently serving as a historian for the Division of 'Community and Place' of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and as an international ambassador of the British Society of Criminology. Ceccato is a Brazilian-Swedish Geographer, post-doctoral education at the University of Cambridge, UK. She was awarded a doctorate degree at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm in 2001. She was a visiting research fellow at IIASA, Austria (The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis), and at the University of Sheffield, the UK in 1999. She holds a Master's Degree from INPE - National Institute for Space Research, Brazil, and a bachelor's in Geography, UNESP - Sao Paulo State University, Rio Claro, Sao Paulo, Brazil. On a personal note, Ceccato's family is on both sides of the Atlantic. She lives in Danderyd, Stockholm region, Sweden, and spends vacations in Rio Claro, Sao Paulo, Brazil, where she was born.