The authors of SafeScape were familiar with Newman's work, but they chose to misrepresent it. "Newman took the 'eyes on the street' concept," Zelinka and Brennan wrote, and "argued that the reason 'eyes on the street' provide safety in urban, mixed commercial and residential areas is because there is a visible link between residents and the street." In fact, Newman specifically criticized what he called "the unsupported hypotheses of Jane Jacobs." Newman's work showed that mixed-use development led to significantly higher crime, while he couldn't find any evidence that "eyes on the street" would reduce that crime. "'Natural surveillance' is not automatically created by high-density environments," he wrote, "unless the grounds around each dwelling are assigned to specific families."
Table 1 contrasts some of the major differences between the models advanced in SafeScape and Defensible Space. Newman's book shows that virtually all of the things that Zelinka and Brennan want to change about the suburbs actually would lead to higher crime.
Public space vs. private space: One New Urbanist concept built into SafeScape is the idea of maximizing common areas to create "a sense of community." While one of SafeScape's principles is "stewardship and ownership," the authors don't want private areas so much as they want to give people a "sense of ownership" in community property. To that end, say the authors, "Communities should include places that support the coming together of people," such as shops, pedestrian paths, parks, and community gardens. While these things are fine if people want them, when planners impose them on neighborhoods, the results are often disastrous.
Newman took exactly the opposite approach. "The larger the number of people who share a communal space," he found, "the more difficult it is for people to identify it as being in any way theirs or to feel they have a right to control or determine the activity taking place within it." To solve this problem, "'Defensible Space' operates by subdividing large portions of public spaces and assigning them to individuals and small groups to use and control as their own private areas."
Mixed uses vs. separate uses: "Mixed land-use patterns contribute to a safer, more vital public realm," say Zelinka and Brennan. In contrast, Newman found, mixed uses "generate high crime and vandalism rates," and housing units next to commercial areas "suffer proportionally higher crime rates." More recent research in Baltimore and Philadelphia by Temple University criminologist Ralph Taylor and several colleagues confirms that mixed uses increase both crime and the cost of policing.
The reason mixing retail with residential areas increases crime is simple: Space is only defensible if residents have the clear right to influence and control what takes place there. In commercial or public areas, everyone has the right or excuse to be present, and offenders are indistinguishable from law-abiding citizens. Mixed use therefore reduces residential control over the neighborhood and provides criminals with anonymity as they merge into the background.
Alleys vs. no alleys: New Urbanists like alleys because they allow people to hide cars in back while keeping the fronts of homes close to the street. Yet alleys make houses easier to burgle and are dangerous routes for pedestrians. SafeScape recognizes that alleys "provide easy access and escape routes into/from a neighborhood by nonresidents, while allowing those individuals relative anonymity." Yet instead of gating alleys, as the defensible-space approach would, SafeScape's lame solution is "to provide 'eyes on the alley'" by redesigning buildings to face alleys.
In sharp contrast, Closing Streets and Alleys to Reduce Crime, a new report from the U.S. Department of Justice, urges cities and neighborhoods to close alleys and take other actions to block off escape routes for burglars.
Houses close to the street: New Urbanists want to create "active, vibrant," pedestrian-oriented streets, so they design homes and businesses close to the street and place parking in rear courtyards. Such rear courtyards increase burglary by providing criminals with more public access to private homes and create needless common areas that are costly to protect.
Pedestrian paths: New Urbanism promotes pedestrian paths both to encourage alternatives to the auto and to create a sense of community. Defensible space restricts footpaths.
Gridded streets vs. cul-de-sacs: Zelinka and Brennan approvingly cite a case in Madison, Wisconsin, where cul-de-sacs were eliminated to provide more eyes on the street. Yet the British Crime Survey, regarded by the U.K. government as the most reliable guide to crime, found that houses on main roads were at more than twice the risk of being burgled as those in a cul-de-sac. The Department of Justice's Closing Streets cites numerous studies in the U.S. showing that reducing connectivity reduces crime. It also finds that "most research supports the idea that burglars avoid houses in cul-de-sacs."
When Dayton, Ohio, asked Newman to apply defensible-space concepts to a neighborhood suffering high rates of drug-related violence and property crime, his solution was to gate numerous streets--in essence, to turn a traditional street grid into cul-de-sacs. Within two years, violent crime in that neighborhood fell by 50 percent and overall crime by 25 percent, even as crime in Dayton overall increased by 1 percent.
Out of 17 case studies included in SafeScape, only one offered any data indicating that crime declined after application of Zelinka and Brennan's principles. Ironically, that one example relied primarily on street closures, as recommended by Newman, not by the New Urbanists.
"I am not very impressed with the work of the New Urbanists," Newman wrote shortly before he passed away in April 2004. "It is nostalgia--a throwback to the past, with little thought about what made those environments work then (long-term occupancy by an identical economic class and ethnic group), and unworkable today. The residential environments they are creating are very vulnerable to criminal behavior, unless, of course, these environments are exclusively occupied by high-income groups." The New Urbanists, of course, abhor exclusive, high-income neighborhoods and insist that communities should include people of all incomes.
The Advantages of Private Space
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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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