Zelinka and Brennan are the authors of Safe-Scape: Creating Safer, More Livable Communities Through Planning and Design, published in 2001 by the American Planning Association. As the subtitle suggests, the authors believe the right sort of town planning can reduce crime. Unfortunately, the planning principles they advocate were borrowed from the New Urbanists--a group whose philosophy, Zelinka and Brennan have written, "clearly plays an important role in eliminating fear of crime and the perception of crime."
New Urbanism combined two movements in the architecture and urban planning communities. The first, sometimes called neotraditionalism, focused on using urban design to give people a sense of community. The loss of community in "placeless suburbs," the neotraditionalists believed, caused all sorts of social ills, ranging from crime to teenage suicides. Neotraditionalists recommended design features such as sidewalks, front porches, parks, community centers, and other common areas, all aimed at getting people to interact with one another.
The second movement focused on the relationship between land use and transportation. Modern suburbs had made people "auto dependent," planners said, which led to pollution, obesity, and other social ills. To remedy this, planners recommended higher-density "compact cities" that mixed housing with retail and commercial uses so that people could walk to the grocery store or places of employment.
There clearly is a market for New Urban�style communities, mainly among young singles, double-income-no-children couples, and people who appreciate bohemian lifestyles. Families with children, empty nesters, and people who prefer a quieter neighborhood are not so interested.
For many New Urbanists, it isn't enough to build to the market. The Congress for the New Urbanism, founded in 1993, declares on its Web site that "all development should be in the form of compact, walkable neighborhoods." New Urbanists eagerly helped write zoning codes that forbade things that had previously been mandated--broad streets, low densities, separation of residential from commercial uses--while mandating things that had formerly been forbidden, such as narrow streets, high densities, and mixed uses.
To promote this crusade, its advocates oversold New Urbanism, promising it would solve every urban problem. Do you commute to work? New Urbanism will reduce congestion. Suffer from asthma? New Urbanism will clean the air. Are you a parent? New Urbanism will improve schools. (In fact, there is no evidence that New Urbanism can do any of these things, and plenty of evidence that it does the opposite. Denser development did not significantly reduce per capita driving; it just increased driving per square mile and thereby increased congestion. Since cars pollute most in congested traffic, New Urbanism also contributed to air pollution. Since New Urban developments mainly attracted singles and childless couples, residents had little interest in improving schools.)
With SafeScape, Zelinka and Brennan added one more urban malady to the mix. Their book asserts, without substantial evidence, that mixed uses, pedestrian paths, and interconnected streets (as opposed to cul-de-sacs) reduce crime. The book's publisher, the American Planning Association, has 30,000 members who work for city and county governments throughout the country, many of whom are New Urbanists eager for support for their preconceived notions. Police, lacking their own experts, often assume that planners know what they are doing: At least one police chief, Mark Kroeker of Portland, has taken it seriously.
The book relied heavily on Jane Jacobs' notion of "eyes on the street." Single-use residential suburbs, the writers claimed, are easily preyed upon by criminals because they "display clearly identifiable behavioral routines and patterns"--that is, most people leave for work all day. Mixed-use neighborhoods "contribute to a safer, more vital public realm" because shopkeepers and shoppers have eyes on the street at all hours of the day.
It might sound persuasive, but there are a few problems with this position. One, as we've seen, is that Jacobs was writing only about cities, not suburbs. Another is that this was one area where Jacobs wasn't even right about cities. Jacobs' claims were based solely on qualitative observations, not on any actual crime data. When the architect Oscar Newman took a look at those data, a quarter century before SafeScape was published, he found a more complex story.
Defensible Argument
A teacher of urban design at St. Louis' Washington University, Newman watched the decline of Pruitt-Igoe, an award-winning high-rise housing project that had closely followed Le Corbusier's vision of a Radiant City. Completed in 1956, the project suffered so much crime that it quickly became unlivable. Despite offering essentially free housing for many poor people, its high vacancy rates led to closure, and its 1972 demolition has come to symbolize the failure of government housing projects.
Newman noticed that there was a low-rise housing project across the street from Pruitt-Igoe whose residents were in the same socioeconomic class but that "remained fully occupied and trouble-free throughout construction, occupancy, and decline of Pruitt-Igoe." What, Newman wondered, were "the physical differences that had enabled one to survive while the other fell apart"?
With funding from the National Science Foundation, Newman carefully compared crime rates with the design features of thousands of blocks in hundreds of urban neighborhoods that collectively housed nearly half a million people.
The result was his 1972 book Defensible Space, which showed that the safest neighborhoods maximized private space and minimized common zones. Safe areas also minimized "permeability," that is, the ease of entry to and exit from the neighborhood or housing area. Cul-de-sacs are thus a crime-prevention device, and any breaching of cul-de-sacs will predictably increase crime. Newman didn't include suburbs in his study because they had much lower crime rates than the urban neighborhoods he did examine. This, he believed, was because the suburbs were less permeable and more defensible.
Relying more on mid-rise developments than high rises, New Urbanism claims to have fixed the problems of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. Yet New Urbanism shares many features with Pruitt-Igoe, including the large communal areas and permeability that Newman found caused so many problems.
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Nicholas|2.24.10 @ 4:44AM|#
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.
|11.18.11 @ 9:07AM|#
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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