The social dimension to sustainability is now widely accepted as important alongside environmental and economic sustainability. Safety and security as one of the aspects of social sustainability has been undertheorized in the built environment fraternity. Research has proven that theories that dominate the field of urban safety come from social sciences, but the motives of this paper are to report and discuss findings from a critical review of local and international literature in the role of other perspectives, especially those developed by built environment professionals and practitioners. In addition, this paper assesses the design deficiencies of urban public spaces (UPS) that lead to them creating an environment for criminality and exposure to threats and vulnerabilities. The review findings reveal, firstly, that safety and security in UPS is associated with the environmental design features such as accessibility and visibility,