New ECOH interview: Vania Ceccato

Vania Ceccato is a Brazilian-Swedish Geographer and a Professor at the Department of Urban Planning and Environment, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. She is the head of the Urban & Community Safety (UCS) Research Group and the coordinator of the Safeplaces Network (Säkraplatser), which aims to improve knowledge and practices in situational crime prevention in Sweden. She is also an international ambassador of the British Society of Criminology. Prof Ceccato’s research interests concern the relationship between the environment and safety, specifically 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.

Gilda Santos (University of Porto, Portugal) interviewed Vania Ceccato in the framework of the 25th annual conference of the European Society of Criminology, held in Athens in September 2025. In this interview, Prof Ceccato reflects on the current state of the academic subfields in which she has been particularly active, namely the geography of crime, environmental criminology, and the spatial analysis of crime. As one of the first Nordic scholars interviewed for the European Criminology Oral History project, she also comments on criminology in Sweden, her role within the Safeplaces Network, and the relationship between scholars, practitioners, and policymakers more generally. Furthermore, Santos and Ceccato address topics that have been scarcely explored in previous interviews. They analyse the implications and opportunities for innovation deriving from the interdisciplinary nature of criminological studies, and the role of technology in advancing (and shifting) the criminological research agenda. Additionally, Ceccato underlines the significance of personal experience in shaping a research agenda. Finally, in exploring criminology in Brazil, she reflects on the downsides of using English as criminology’s lingua franca, how languages frame objects of study and research questions, and ultimately on the need to decolonise criminology.