Crime-Friendly Neighborhoods
How "New Urbanist" planners sacrifice safety in the name of "openness" and "accessibility"
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GoogleBurras Road was a pleasant cul-de-sac of 21 new homes in Bradford, England. Its residents were blissfully unaware that, just east of the site, approval for a proposed new shopping center required the breaching of their cul-de-sac by a bicycle-pedestrian path.
Planners favored this requirement because, they say, cul-de-sacs do not encourage movement and therefore are "auto-dependent" and "anti-urban." Opening up the site would connect residents to local services, and the path would promote walking and cycling.
The path connecting the shopping center to the cul-de-sac opened in 2000. Although there is no evidence that the path has led residents to drive less, it did have a profound effect on their lives. During the next six months, a neighborhood that had been virtually crime-free saw its burglary rate rise to 14 times the national rate, with matching increases in overall crime, including arson, assault, and antisocial behavior.
Because a secondary school was located west of the cul-de-sac, the pedestrian path opened the neighborhood to a constant stream of students and others going between the school and the shopping center. Crime and vandalism became commonplace. "The path turned our piece of paradise into a living hell," one resident complained.
At a late stage, the local police crime prevention officer had tried to prevent the route from opening, predicting it would be a disaster, only to be told that the path was "sacrosanct." Residents' quality of life apparently was less important than the dubious goal of reducing auto dependency.
Architects and urban planners who call themselves New Urbanists say their proposals, including developments that mix residential and commercial uses, have homes with tiny private yards and large common areas, and feature pedestrian paths, will solve all sorts of social problems, including crime. Yet the housing and neighborhood designs they want to substitute for the modern suburb almost invariably increase crime.
Eyes on the Street
The idea that mixed-use neighborhoods reduce crime goes back to 1961, when the social critic Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs described her book as "an attack on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning." More specifically, she attacked urban renewal, the planning fad of the 1950s and '60s.
Much of urban renewal was inspired by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, whose Radiant City envisioned modern, high-rise apartment buildings separated by green spaces and broad avenues. Le Corbusier claimed this would provide the "three essential joys of urbanism: sun, space, and greenery." Unfortunately, he forgot an even more essential joy: privacy.
To get federal funds for urban renewal, cities had to find that the areas to be renewed were "blighted." Jacobs, who lived in Greenwich Village at the time, believed federal funding gave cities incentives to find blight everywhere, and she demonstrated that the "slums" planners wanted to clear were often living, thriving neighborhoods.
Jacobs also wanted to show that inner cities were not necessarily as crime-infested as people feared them to be. She observed that mixed-use neighborhoods had people watching the streets throughout the day, both from the ground-floor shops and the mid-rise apartment buildings above those shops. These "eyes on the street," she argued, reduced crime.
Whether or not Jacobs was right, her "great American cities" really included just a half-dozen or so dense cities that were largely built before the 1890 invention of the electric streetcar: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, and perhaps Baltimore and a few others.
Jacobs never claimed her inner-city urban villages suffered less crime than the suburbs--or, indeed, that any part of her analysis applied to the suburbs. "I hope no reader will try to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs which still are suburban," she wrote. "We are in enough trouble already from trying to understand big cities in terms of the behavior, and imagined behavior, of towns. To try to understand towns in terms of big cities will only compound confusion."
Thirty years later, the planners Al Zelinka and Dean Brennan made exactly that mistake.
The Overselling of New Urbanism
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Disgraceful distortions of the facts; written by someone who clearly hasn't read Jane Jacobs. This is clear as the author seems unaware that he is actually regurgitating most of Jacobs observations. Just take his last paragraph: a semi-public interior courtyarded project was apparently a complete failure. Is the dimwit that wrote this article aware that Jacobs spent a whole chapter of 'Death and Life of Great American Cities' explaining why semiprivate courtyards always generate the highest possible crime rates? Is the dim wit who wrote this article aware that Jacobs spent a fith of her book explaining that density can only work if it maintains a rigid and absolute distinction between private and public space; that confusions in the barrier between those two generates massive crime? That nowhere did she say that permiblity was a good idea? (You seem to be confusing Jane Jacobs and Cristopher Alexander - likely by 'virtue' of having read neither) Famously, she said that shopkeepers should not even feel at liberty to introduce two regular customers to one another - even that should be an unacceptible invasion of private space. Nowhere did she argue that density causes less crime; she listed dozens of streets that where dense and failed, and in every case found that there are a million things that may go wrong in the specific fabric of any street or district. So saying some dense or mixed use streets have failed is meaningless: the district is not an abstraction, the point she actually argued was districts must be understood inductively. I also find it intresting that the examples you give that you 'imagine' have been built according to Jacobs methods and subsequently failled where actually built (in the 1950's) before Jane Jacobs first published her book (1961) - so how can they possibly disprove her theories when it was a physical impossiblity that those projects could in anyway have been influenced by Jacobs?
You have said what you think is idiotic, I shall tell you what I think is idiotic: writing articles about books you clearly haven't read, on research you clearly haven't done, about theories you clearly didn't understand.
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This intemperate comment comes from someone who is offended on behalf of Jane Jacobs and has missed the point. The authors certainly have read Jane Jacobs and believe that the New Urbanists have used her work as a fig leaf to suggest that their work has taken account of crime prevention. The facts are simple enough: crime pattern analysis in the UK has repeatedly shown that sites built to New Urbanist principles suffer very high levels of crime and that the crime prevention promises made on behalf of this design are completely contrary to the evidence and independent analysis carried out, for example, on the police Secured by Design initiative. Oscar Newman fully supported this analysis. I know because I discussed it with him. The article mentions two example of urban regeneration that took place in the mid 1990s in Hulme, Manchester and Royds, Bradford. Both areas had serious crime problems. Hulme was built to New Urbanist principles and produced a burglary rate of three-and-a-half times the national average. Royds was built to totally contrary principles outlined in the article and produced such dramatic crime reductions that it is now one of only five examples in UK national planning guidance shown as crime prevention best practice (pages 58 and 59 of Safer Places: The planning System and Crime Prevention). Let’s put people first and do what’s right, supported by best evidence, not follow hopeful, well intentioned beliefs that repeatedly create misery in our cities.
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