Sustainable Infrastructure in Conflict Zones: Police Facilities’ Impact on Perception of Safety in Afghan Communities

Engineer Research and Development Center, Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (ERDC-CRREL), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Hanover, NH 03755, USA

Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham, NH 03824, USA

Department of Health Management and Policy, College of Health and Human Services, University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham, NH 03824, USA

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Civil Engineering Department, Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845, USA

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Carsey School of Public Policy, University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham, NH 03824, USA

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Sustainability 2019, 11(7), 2113; https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072113

Received: 25 February 2019 / Revised: 24 March 2019 / Accepted: 30 March 2019 / Published: 9 April 2019

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Environmental Engineering: Critical, Interdependent Infrastructure Sustainability and Resilience)

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Abstract

The notion of sustainable infrastructure for the delivery of social services is to fulfill basic human needs; in war-torn societies, human safety is a critical basic need. The relationship between sustainable infrastructure development and human safety remains underresearched in Afghan neighborhoods. Therefore, this study examined the effectiveness of the police facilities constructed for stability enhancement in Afghan communities. To do so, this study used Afghans’ polling datasets on the police presence and the public safety perceptions, including newly collected survey data related to the influence of the police facilities on human safety and other factors contributing to the neighborhoods’ well-being. The datasets are organized with a multilevel structure in which different individuals are sampled within neighborhoods and analyzed using a multilevel model approach to capture the randomness of the responses. The results showed that police facilities are more important to perceptions of safety in less safe areas and that Afghans in villages perceived themselves as safer than in urban areas, relative to their own immediate region. Those perceiving themselves as being safer were older, more highly educated, and widowed respondents. Overall, Afghans perceived the police facilities as institutional symbol for promoting improvements and opportunities for fulfilling basic human safety needs. View Full-Text

Keywords: Afghanistan; infrastructure development; perceived safety; police confidence; resilience; stability; sustainability; trust; war-torn environment

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

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MDPI and ACS Style

Affleck, R.T.; Gardner, K.; Aytur, S.; Carlson, C.; Grimm, C.; Deeb, E. Sustainable Infrastructure in Conflict Zones: Police Facilities’ Impact on Perception of Safety in Afghan Communities. Sustainability 2019, 11, 2113. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072113

AMA Style

Affleck RT, Gardner K, Aytur S, Carlson C, Grimm C, Deeb E. Sustainable Infrastructure in Conflict Zones: Police Facilities’ Impact on Perception of Safety in Afghan Communities. Sustainability. 2019; 11(7):2113. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072113

Chicago/Turabian Style

Affleck, Rosa T., Kevin Gardner, Semra Aytur, Cynthia Carlson, Curt Grimm, and Elias Deeb. 2019. "Sustainable Infrastructure in Conflict Zones: Police Facilities’ Impact on Perception of Safety in Afghan Communities" Sustainability 11, no. 7: 2113. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11072113

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