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GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC
We insist our students spend time assembling asset maps before they come up with strategies during their crime prevention work. We call it tapping into the latent neighborhood talent. That talent staggers the mind. It represents an untapped source of potential energy waiting to be transformed into its kinetic form, what social scientists call community efficacy. Read the social science description of this effect in Robert Sampson's epic Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. For firsthand evidence check out these fabulous cityscape photos taken by talented photographers - students participating in, or connected with, SafeGrowth trainings over the past few years. John Thurston and Roberto Contreras kindly provided birds eye views of their respective cities in past SafeGrowth trainings. The latest offering is at the top of this blog; a beautiful time lapse portrait of City Hall by Philadelphia police officer Albert Cruz.
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GUEST BLOG: Tarah Hodgkinson is a senior researcher in the Integrated Risk Assessment Instrument Research Group in Vancouver, Canada. She is a member of the International CPTED Association and a certified SafeGrowth instructor. She is completing Ph.D in criminology at Simon Fraser University. **** On a recent trip to New Jersey, I had the opportunity to discuss the CPTED concept called activity generators with a local community group. I was reminded of the distinct differences between day time and night time economies. Activity generators (ways of activating spaces for legitimate or positive uses that put eyes on the street) are easy to support during the day time. Examples include food trucks, scheduling outdoor sports games and encouraging community fairs. However, I struggled to think of examples of night time activity generators until I went walking around in the city at night. Hoboken night time economy After dinner with friends in Hoboken, we headed back to the train station. Hoboken has a beautiful main street that was bustling. When I think of activity generators for night time, I often think of bars or pubs that might attract people, but not always with positive results. While Hoboken had a few pubs, it also had outdoor fruit markets and late night coffee shops. Legitimately activating their main street, Hoboken businesses encouraged non-drinkers to use the space as well. The following night another friend took us to the New York High Line. As mentioned in The future of sidewalks, the highline is a well-lit, pedestrian friendly public space that encourages legitimate day and night activity. Through proper lighting, lots of seating, close proximity to homes and shops and incredible design, the High Line draws both tourists and residents alike. Winter evenings in Vancouver? While both were great examples of activity generators at night, as a Canadian, I couldn’t help but wonder what to do when the snow falls. Upon returning home to Vancouver, I walked by Robson Square. In the centre of downtown, surrounded by commercial buildings, this square is largely deserted after five o’clock at night. However, this space is activated with events throughout the summer and is transformed into an ice rink in the winter. Skating takes place both day and night at Robson square with live music, local vendors and tons of people embracing the night and the cold at the same time! The possibility for night time activity generators are abundant. We need only look at spaces where people feel safe exploring their neighbourhoods both day and night. A recent email from a planner friend asked about reconfiguring a roadway: "I am working on rightsizing a suburban arterial. There have been some assaults and break ins. There is some speculation as to whether converting it from 6 lanes wide setbacks to 4 lanes with buildings up to the street will change this dynamic" It made me think of other 6 lane, car-dominated cities. It also brought to mind some environmental criminology (EC) research supporting cul-de-sacs. The EC crowd is generally critical of New Urbanist designs for grid streets and increased neighborhood permeability. The New Urbanism version goes like this: If we narrow the streets and avoid wide boulevards to slow car traffic we will encourage a more walkable street. If we use grid designs versus cul de sacs we can better provide walkable locations for people, activate neighborhoods, and make them safer. The EC version goes like this: Grid layouts increase permeability and let more strangers through and that increases the risk of crime. That's why corner houses have more crime! Cul-de-sacs have less crime than grids for the same reason. Not exactly. Environmental criminology and burglary What most EC studies actually show isn't patterns of crime. They show patterns of burglary. In fact the preponderance of EC studies (at least in the early years) were on burglary and theft versus robbery, interpersonal violence, shootings, gangs or drug crime - the crimes people fear most. Still, EC's burglary-obsession should not detract from the point. Tantalizing answers emerge elsewhere; within the library of Problem Oriented Policing projects. The POP library lists hundreds of projects on a wide variety of crimes. They describe both physical place-based prevention combined with social prevention. In most cases it was not physical tactics - design-out-crime - that did the trick. It was the holistic ones that did, tactics that carefully considered context first and design impact second. Interestingly, one EC reviewer says this about context: "Today, interior spaces within the home are dominant, and are commonly filled with electronic multimedia technologies and entertainment (also providing more opportunities for crime). The interior is now defined as the ‘leisure action space’ for both adults and children. This has led to exterior/public spaces being less used and this withdrawal has led to them being re-labeled and re-defined, often as ‘dangerous’ spaces." Exterior spaces less used and defined as dangerous? If ever there was ever a context for New Urbanism, there it is! Good design Good urban design should make exterior spaces less vacant, boring and unfriendly. It should create interesting walkable streets, places to go within walking distance, and a lively outdoors with ample social spaces for diverse people to socialize. Urban guru Enrico Penalosa, and former mayor of Bogota during its widely-acclaimed redevelopment, finishes the thought: "The most dynamic economies of the twentieth century produced the most miserable cities of all. I'm talking about the U.S. of course - Atlanta, Phoenix, Miami, cities totally dominated by private cars." Today banks of fog rolled in one after the other formed by moist fall-time air blowing over cold ocean currents out in the Straight. Echoing through the quiet streets of our neighborhood, a maritime foghorn accompanied our walk through the mist, no doubt replacing the clop clop of horses hooves on cobblestones as Sherlock Holmes raced off to solve yet another murder mystery… At least that's the image our misty walk conjured in my mind. In all, it was a magical evening for a seaport town. Obviously none of this is possible unless walking is made easy, fun and safe. And walkability is not only important for activating streets and keeping crime in check, it's a very big deal for quality of life too. In Walkable City author Jeff Speck describes how some cities kill walkability. In such places fog is just a roadway hazard. Those cities rob their citizens of the interesting or necessary places to walk - a grocery, park, coffee shop, playground, or a corner store. We've seen plenty of micro examples on how to improve walkability: lifestyle malls, bright paint, better designed laneways, or planting strips along sidewalks. Speck reminds us there are macro lessons too. URBAN DENSITY To Speck urban density holds the key to a better quality of life. Low density cities breed less healthy people because they walk less and accumulate more health related ailments. For example, he says 14 people die for every 100,000 residents in low density Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's 23 in Orlando. But in high density cities like New York and Portland it is only 3. Crime doesn't correlate so neatly, yet the walkability links on the right of this blog show street activation makes a difference. Check out Jeff Speck and the Walkable City on this Ted Talk. There is a TV show worth seeing and a book worth reading. The TV show because it is excellent. The book because I think it's wrong but I also think it is excellent. It's an intelligent counterpoint to the depressing malaise in the US body politic, an aspirin to the headache that passed for Congressional politics this past week. Controversial author and professor in urban development, Joel Kotkin, uses the suburb to tell the story of America in 2050. The Next Hundred Million describes the suburbs of the future. To Kotkin they are a place of hope. Says Amazon: "Suburbia is the future, but not the wasteful lonely suburbia of the 1950s. Instead we must fashion a new kind of suburban landscape, one that selectively borrows the successful and vital elements of big city life and uses them to make more vibrant small cities." Maybe. But what will happen with the increasing number of suburban poor, spikes in suburban crime, and the class gentrification in American downtowns? A new TV show called Continuum points in another direction. This new cop thriller is a well-acted and brilliantly made Canadian sci-fi (with outstanding FX) filmed in Vancouver (Showcase network in Canada and the SyFy channel in the US and UK). The Continuum storyline pushes Occupy Wall Street, government shutdowns, and corporate greed to a very different place than Kotkin. Check them both out. Knowing different futures helps us choose more wisely. Santiago, Chile is enticingly filled with contrasts fair and foul. During my visit here this week I feasted on a buffet of visual and cultural treats foremost of which was a growing CPTED movement. Like any 6-million person metropolis, Santiago struggles with air pollution. Winter-time temperature inversions from the surrounding Andes mountains make matters worse. Yet those same mountains offer world-class skiing and snow capped vistas. Driving in from the airport, roads are lined with garbage strewn shanties. Yet elsewhere the city is clean, modern and exciting. Oddly, residential areas are lined with security fences, razor wire and cameras. For a country with the lowest crime rates in the region, that is a mystery. Aside from reports of some gang-run pockets in the city, Santiago is one of the safest cities in Latin America. It's homicide rate is far lower than most American cities. THEN THERE IS CPTED In Chile and other parts of Latin America, CPTED has been led by Macarena Rau and her dynamic team at PBK Consulting. Macarena is Vice President of ICA and chair of the Latin American Chapter of the International CPTED Association. Yesterday Macarena delivered her amazing story at a TED.com talk in Argentina - the second-ever CPTED practitioner to describe CPTED on the world stage, the first being defensible space guru Oscar Newman at the inaugural UN Habitat conference in 1976 Vancouver (technically he didn't discuss CPTED but rather declining urban conditions which is more SafeGrowth than CPTED. I digress.) That's quite a feat! I have admired Macarena for years. This week we presented at CPTED conferences and seminars in Santiago delivering the South American model of CPTED, a holistic and community-based version of CPTED. I suspect holistic 2nd Generation CPTED is easier in a culture already rife with interesting urban innovations. URBAN INNOVATIONS Consider this... A program to rent street corners to confectionary and flower vendors. Each vendor determines the fiscal viability of corners. They then rent an attractive flower kiosk predesigned by municipal architects (to control the quality of the neighborhood image). Since the kiosks are easily moved, if the economics of the corner don't work the kiosk is moved. The vendors add a valuable service to the neighborhood and they are in demand. They also add to land values and safety by locating more legitimate eyes on the street. It's private sector entrepreneurial savvy matched with public sector quality control to improve neighborhoods. Remember the old Mayberry vision of Mom and Pop corner stores in the neighborhood? It seems the Santiaguinos have figured how to revise, beautify and activate that vision and provide jobs at the same time. Also quite a feat. The phrase urban apocalyptos came to mind this week - those activists who write about collapsing neighborhoods and make their living by hollering Armageddon. Consider those decay-chic writers who feed on the coolness of reporting blight, gang infestations and acres of abandoned houses. Existential nihilism gone amok! Of course, sometimes they were (and are) right. Remember those Michael Moore documentaries on corporate corruption, public fear and government inaction? He was probably right on many points especially the gun-ownership mess and the national health-care travesty (it helped Moore trigger an American renaissance in independent social cause films). My personal favorite was Roger and Me describing the decline of Flint, Michigan. He targets Big Auto and claims they did little to save their cities, especially General Motors. He seeks out GM CEO Roger Smith to ask why. Against that backdrop Detroit's recent bankruptcy, the largest in US history, is a poignant reminder of Moore's message. Subtopia - the good news Subtopia was a term originally coined by UK urbanist Ian Nairn, (and later commandeered in eclectic music videos and by European apocalyptos). The new subtopia arises phoenix-like from the ashes of the Great Recession. It is an idea similar to Capitalism 3.0, a book about a new economics where citizen-owned, market-based commons trusts purchase back their city. Subtopia offers a way to rethink dying cities, a kind of survival-through-planned-shrinkage. While New Urbanists return to Mayberry, the Subtopians turn abandoned properties and buildings into community land banks. Fed up with slumlords who let empty homes sit and rot for years, they shut down entire neighborhoods of abandoned homes. The posterchild for subtopian land use experimentation is Flint, Michigan (Moore's hometown). The hope is they will ignite a renaissance to revitalize blight. Says the New York Times: The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval. This came to mind as I read a national plan to bulldoze acres of urban rot and decapitate what was once urban life. Subtopia is an interesting twist with all sorts of possibilities like Karen Dybis's story Designing a Better Detroit. Is it possible that out of this crisis new ideas will emerge for rebirth? Simulation of Saint Paul's new Transit Oriented Development light rail Few CPTED or community development types think about Global Warming or climate change when they do their craft. That is a mistake. Plan B tells us why. Plan B is an axiom in environmental studies meaning we cannot afford to wait before airborne carbon - a greenhouse gas - destroys our ability to sustain cities. Global Warming triggers food shortages, diminishing freshwater, extreme weather, and water and air pollution with all the associated illnesses like emphysema or cancer. Crime matters little if we cannot eat, drink, breathe or walk without fear of some threat to our mortality from the environment. In fact, desperation for those things might trigger more crime (as we saw in New Orleans during Katrina). Plan B suggests that doing nothing is suicide. Plan B recommends making changes to our urban growth and transportation habits like reducing car dependency. This means Smart Growth planning (after which Safe Growth is fashioned). Introducing: Transit Oriented Development. TODs are one type of Smart Growth and they may be our future. They connect mixed use high density residential and commercial land uses and then cluster them within a half mile of a transit node, usually light rail. This encourages easy access to transit use at all times of day, high quality pedestrian connections, and amenities like local grocery stores. That reduces car dependency, increases walking, and builds social connections. At least that’s the theory. The truth is that high urban densities, TODs and Smart Growth neither promotes nor prevents crime. The devil is in the details. Where do people walk and recreate? Do they have local opportunities to know each other as friendly neighbors? How does the design treat lighting and sightlines. And what about security and safety? We’re running a SafeGrowth program in Saint Paul, Minnesota (shown in the simulation video above). Participants are working on SafeGrowth plans on that city’s first TOD development, a light rail in a city that does not have one. Safety and security on and near that line will determine the economic success of the system. Success in safety will increase transit ridership, decrease car ridership, and provide one more tiny step to save the planet and our children. A win-win. Not much pressure! Who said CPTED and SafeGrowth was simple? The Vision of Paulo Soleri - a new documentary film on Paulo Soleri. Paulo Soleri died this week at 93. To students of the city he is legend. Former student of Frank Lloyd Wright, featured in films and books, Soleri created "arcology" long before the eco-sensible married the environment with urban development. To Newsweek his laboratory-city-in-the-desert north of Phoenix - Arcosanti - is "the most important urban experiment undertaken in our lifetimes." Over 50,000 urban design and planning students visit it each year. Twenty years ago I was one of them. I went to find out what he thought of cities and crime. Soleri told me he worried about a lack of equity in cities and the social corrosion emerging from it, a sentiment recently featured in Wilkinson and Pickett's bestseller The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Solari thought we need to remove cars from cities and we need more urban density (the basis of an arcology). Nowadays that's echoed everywhere in urban planning, such as MIT scholar/architect Kent Larson (check out his talk on TED.com) "What about crime?" I asked him. "There are very dense European cities with very low crime," he replied. "There are ways to do it right." "What of policing an Arcology?" I asked. He thought for a minute and smiled. "Well I guess the first thing would be to leave the guns at the door." Paving paradise? Joni Mitchell's classic lyric to "Big Yellow Taxi" ran through my mind yesterday during research for an upcoming webinar on downtown safety next Wednesday, April 4 It happened during a visit to the U-Village Mall - a lifestyle mall in Seattle where I uncovered an example of Penalosa's maxim: "We can have a city that is very friendly to cars or a city that is very friendly to people. We can't have both." A few years ago I wrote about Enrique Penalosa, the urban visionary from Bogota, Columbia. He's the former Mayor who helped transform a nightmare downtown during his country's narco-war into a vibrant and safe place. He did that by building for people first and cars last. The U-Village Mall shows how we can do that in a parking lot. This re-imagined mall sacrifices sprawling lot design that maximizes quantity for a pedestrian friendly design to maximize quality. Playground areas for kids, water features, sidewalks and gardens - the works. The U-Village Mall ignores large lots in favor of smaller clusters of 100 cars. This reduces the number of parking spaces (to the chagrin of some), but it creates a livable urban village feel (to the joy of everyone else). Activating public spaces is a key for safety. My prior blogs on parking lot design show design errors of size and shape. Parking lots at the U-Village show how to mix people and cars. I suspect Penalosa would approve. The webinar is next Wednesday, 3-4pm EST (12-1 PST) sponsored by the International Downtown Association. Their website lists details -IDA Trending Topics #5 From the streets of Mexico City to the streets of Montreal. A modern megalopolis sprawling on the plain of an ancient volcano that, a millennia ago, held a population larger than Imperial Rome. A beautiful island city larger than Manhattan and nestled in the St. Lawrence River, re-settled by Samuel de Champlain in 1611 from the original native inhabitants. There's nothing quite so jarring as culture-jamming from one country to another, the biggest shock being the weather; cool, mild evenings in one, winter's first snow in the other. One day I watched 1,000 demonstrators protesting working conditions in Mexico City. A few days later I watched 20,000 students protesting tuition hikes in Montreal. They are a world apart in sensibility and logic. Then there's crime. Both cities have pernicious corruption epidemics, though lately Montreal's mob penetration of the construction industry probably tops Mexico City. Murder rates are similar, slightly higher in Mexico City with over 2 per 100,000 compared to just under 2 in Montreal. Taxis are riskier and poverty much more prevalent in Mexico City. Drivers, in both, are crazy. In spite of the differences these cities prove that vast differences in demographics and urban form cannot determine, or prevent, success. Both have lively, exciting and safe downtowns, streets teeming with young and attractive fashionistas, cell phones growing from their ears as they bleat Spanish or French versions of "what...ever". City culture, it seems, can pacify and amuse even the most skeptical observer - me being the perfect example. Sometimes a successful neighborhood just grows organically with gentle nudging from planners. It isn't really planned. In fact, Jane Jacobs tells us, the best neighborhoods rarely are. At this week's International problem-oriented policing conference I mentioned to my audience they should begin understanding prevention not by analyzing high-crime hotspots, but rather by looking at low-crime coolspots. Those are the places where we learn what to do right. Toronto's Annex neighborhood, where I strolled today, is the proof. Well-known in the city, it is a busy, sometimes gritty, and successful neighborhood. It is neither trendoid and expensive like The Beaches in the south, nor coiffured and rarified like wealthy Forest Hill to the north. There are street people and graffiti. But the graffiti is artistic and interesting and the street people seem less desperate than elsewhere. It's certainly not a crime hotspot.
Shops, restaurants and bookstores line the street for students and tourists. Grocery stores, postal stations and dentist offices mix in for locals. There are street watchers from sidewalk cafes, proliferate bike racks, and lovers glancing down from rooftop perches between smooches. There's just enough disorder to make things interesting and just enough eyes on the street to make it safe. This is where Jane Jacobs lived most her life. I can see why. Reflecting on the allure of a pleasant downtown stroll in the fading days of late summer, a thought occurs; the quality of urban design sets the stage for crime or vitality.
Downtowns can draw people in for pleasant strolls or for traversing a no-man's land where drug dealers, hookers, and gang-bangers ply their trade with impunity in dark nooks and crannies. In one way or another land uses are the key to urban safety and from what I saw this summer, success or failure depends on one particular type of land use - the surface parking lot. PARKING LOT DESIGN We obsess on the parking lot as though cars are old enough to want their own room. They are everywhere. By some estimates they comprise up to 30% of downtown land use. It's as though cars have their own vote in the urban household. And if you talk to developers and shop owners, they do. Yet to anyone amendable to reason and unwilling to sing the praise of the status quo, most parking lots are shameful. They are under-lit (or over-lit), poorly designed and offer poor access controls (or fortress-like walls). They are perfect spots for crime. CPTED consultant John Roberts has written a passionate story about suburban parking lot crime in Target: Wal-Mart. Similar risks exist in urban parking lots. The obvious design flaw is wayfinding. Wayfinding is an abysmal mess in most parking lots. Wayfinding is one of the easiest problems to solve. A few years ago Saskatoon planner Elisabeth Miller and myself created a design guidebook including 24 design recommendations for surface parking lots. Here are a few other examples: I came across this statue of Galatea in a downtown public fountain this week. Occasionally "decorated" by locals having fun, reality can reflect myth. After all, Galatea is the ancient Greek myth of the statue brought to life by her creator. Neighborhoods and streetscapes too can come to life when residents have, or seize, the latitude to act. Neighborhoods decline when the people who live there lose their connection and no longer feel part of their community - The Great Neighborhood Book Streetscapes appear in a prior blog titled Beauty, eh? From the beginning of CPTED we've known the importance of streets and sidewalks. Professor C. Ray Jeffery, author of the first CPTED book stated the obvious: "People must have some reason for using the sidewalks; otherwise they stay indoors." Jeffery mapped out CPTED 40 years ago in two simple equations: "Crime can be controlled through urban design, wherein safety and security are designed into streets, buildings, and parks." "Cities can also be designed so as to increase human contact of an intimate nature. Loneliness and alienation need not characterize our urban life." The first idea of design is 1st Generation CPTED. The second idea of contact (culture and cohesion) is called 2nd Generation CPTED, reintroduced in 1997. This week I searched my town for streetscapes that fit both ideas and found great examples of design and culture. In a few cases residents modified public spaces on their own. Apparently when given (or when seizing) the latitude to act, residents can create lots of beautiful and fun reasons to use the public street. Galatea can come to life. One of my favorite quotes in The Wire is when a 16-year-old drug dealer points to a run-down apartment and says, "…this shit! This is ME, y'all. Right here!" I've heard real drug dealers say that. Author Arthur C. Clarke once wrote the only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture a little way into the impossible. Unworkable neighborhoods demand a different future. Higher density housing may replace sprawling suburbs for reasons both environmental and economic. But too often we get old style house design and traditional apartment buildings. We get unmanaged and decrepit public housing that ends up as gang-breeding warehouses. Witness all-too-real neighborhoods in The Wire. The Wire never won a major award and had modest ratings. Yet it's described as the greatest TV series ever made. Part of that is due to its bleak existential portrait and the warning it offers. Clearly, we need to venture into the impossible. I recently saw just such a vision in Victoria BC - Fernwood Urban Village, an elegant and well designed development proposal for density co-housing. FERNWOOD URBAN VILLAGE Cohousing is resident-planned, owned and managed equity housing. When I contacted cohousing projects around Seattle, many had affordable rental units. Enough of those in our future and maybe we could eliminate public housing altogether! Like most cohousing, Fernwood is pedestrian-oriented with common dining rooms, media rooms, and workshop. Residents own their private residence but the design "makes social interaction easy and integral to everyday life." Each unit has it's own kitchen but residents usually choose to share a few meals each week in the common house. Unlike gated communities, resident-owners share co-housing design and management. Thus, residents learn problem-solving and collaborative decision-making skills for handling conflict later on. Municipalities rarely encourage or provide financial incentives for cohousing. That needs to change. We need to venture into the impossible. Check out co-housing movements in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and Australia. David Kennedy’s book Don't Shout for eradicating gang violence describes only the first step. It skims root causes that create gangs in the first place. There is more - the neighborhood and the street and the housing where gangs breed. A few years ago an HBO crime drama, The Wire, portrayed contemporary gang life and a cultural war against the urban underclass. Striking to me was the similarity between gang ghettoes in The Wire and the actual housing projects we work in SafeGrowth programs. We call them "gang breeders" because that is exactly what such nightmarish places create. Five years after The Wire ended we are deep in recession and housing is undergoing a transformative tsunami. Foreclosed houses in outer urban rings are leaving swaths of ghost suburbs. Inner urban rings are densifying into a new kind of suburb where demands for multi-family housing and apartment rentals are exploding. A WIRE-ESQUE FUTURE? Are Wire-esque nightmares in our future? Suburban ghettoes? A new kind of vertical poverty, growing in cities like LA, Chicago, Toronto and New York? How can we build denser, environmentally friendly housing? How can we satisfy the needs of the future and make livable and safe habitat? Intentional communities provide a proven answer. One successful version is co-housing. I've studied co-housing for 20 years and visited dozens in different countries. I've spent time with architect Jan Gudmand-Hoyer who pioneered the idea in the 1960s. In North America co-housing has been around for a few decades. There are about a hundred in the US and Canada. In Oregon, Washington and British Columbia alone there are 24 projects, a third of which have been running for over 15 years. McCamant and Durrett write about co-housing. Their recent book Creating Cohousing describes it. Next blog: How can we make this a reality? "The homeless man said he believes the trail ought to be closed at night for safety." That's an ominous quote from an unlikely source. It regards a new bike trail winding through a rough part of Seattle called The Jungle. Concerns about crime near bike trails are not new. Beyond Seattle they have surfaced in Los Angeles, and Virginia Beach. The takeaway message? There are ways to master bike trail design and ways to botch it. This blog has shown how proper analysis and design can humanize and insulate urban designs, from ATMs and street furniture to lighting and trails. Last month I spent time in St. Petersburg, Florida on the Pinellas Trail. It is an award-winning bike/jogging/walking trail that runs 40 miles from Tarpon Springs and Clearwater to St. Petersburg. The trail is 20 years old and I was impressed at the extent, quality, and resources the community invested in making this work. Along the Pinellas trail you find art, bike shops, and bus stops located nearby for walkers who decide to bus home. Pinellas encourages vendor concessions and adjacent parks with places for wedding photos. In CPTED these are called activity generators. Parts of it run through downtown St Petersburg, where some crimes do occur. For example about a dozen robberies are reported each year, mostly teens stealing from other teens (but not always). Consider that a quarter million residents in St Petersburg experience over 1,000 robberies each year, and crime on Pinellas Trail seems remarkably low. The day I visited there were walkers, joggers and bikers. It has an emergency response system and fairly strict rules (no alcohol, daytime only operation, no headphones permitted while biking). Here's the question: Do municipalities demand a proper crime analysis, safety consultation and CPTED review before they construct bike/jogging/walking trails? If SafeGrowth planning was part of municipal development, that question would be irrelevant. No doubt considerable fear exists on the streets of London after this week's riots. Whole books are written on urban crime and fear. What about rural places far from urban mayhem? The Gabriola Island murders from last blog suggest rural crimes too ferment fears of public places like nature trails. This is ironic. Parks and trails are statistically far safer than bars at closing time or inside homes when domestic strife turns violent. Study after study tell us public trails are safe, such as Tod Schneider's article on bike trails back in 2000. Yet those are urban studies. Research has yet to examine rural nature trails and crime. CPTED was born, after all, in the city. I was recently interviewed by a horticulture magazine about trees and crime asking these very questions. The article, Trees Thwart Shady Behavior, described a study on crime and residential trees by examining 2,813 single-family homes in Portland, Oregon. Controlling for visual appearance, presence of barriers, and street activity, the study showed "houses fronted with more street trees had lower crime rates". That was all crime rates, including vandalism and burglary. Read it HERE. Navigation, for most humans, isn't by GPS. At least not yet. For most of us it is just a matter of getting around by looking where we are going. Sometimes maps help. Sometimes we ask for directions (even males do this occasionally)! Designers call this wayfinding. In CPTED we call it "movement predictors". When it comes to urban safety and what people feel about a street, it matters. A lot. A year ago I blogged on walkability, Jane's Walks, and the Walk Scoreto measure the walkability of your neighborhood. This week a CPTED friend sent this NY Times article about City Signs to Help Pedestrians (they aren't just for tourists). My favorite part is NY TImes writer Michael M Grynbaum's description: "One feature is novel for city maps: concentric circles that represent an approximate walking time." Woo hoo! Honoring pedestrians over the car. A breakthrough! Sometimes it seems like we have more problems than we deserve and more solutions than we apply. Whether Arab Spring, Sputnik moments, tea parties…whatever. Whether silly or sensible, we long for rebirth.
Take transportation. Crime loves transportation. It festers at bus stations and clusters near subway or rail stops. Parking lots make easy pickings for crooks. Poor design makes all this worse. What might rebirth look like if we could rebuild from the ground up? Maybe with privacy, cool design, and the environment in mind? Turns out the future is already here. Masdar City is a city in a city - in this case in Abu Dhabi, UAE. It's the world's first zero carbon, zero waste city powered entirely by renewables. Construction - now on hold for the recession - is already well under way. Masdar transport planning is remarkable, one part of which is a fleet of driverless, free-moving podcars called PRTs. A Huffington Post article says Nevada is changing laws to allow driverless cars. PRTs are already in operation at London's Heathrow Airport. Masdar's system (built by Europeans) is planning for 3000 electric PRTs each transporting 2 to 6 passengers in privacy and safety. Wi-Fi computers maneuver them on dedicated routes, so no traffic congestion. The engineers say PRTs will get you there faster than cars. Rebirth indeed! What, I wonder, does this mean for personal security and crime? Rules can oppress or invigorate. Consider a satellite image of lights on the Korean peninsula. Look at what years of oppressive rules have done to the north compared to the open society in the south. My recent blogs on homelessness made me wonder if cities fail the homeless because of rules? Why can't they do better? Paul Romer has a fascinating idea. He calls it the Charter City. Charter Cities are reform zones where people can escape bad rules of today's cities and opt for a new kind of city with better rules. In his first TED.com talk he described charter cities as special administrative free-trade zones. They will be safer, environmentally friendly, and will contain all the needed resources for residents, especially the poor. Romer is no woo-woo slouch. He's an economist who transformed growth theory in the 1980s. He's also senior fellow at Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy. His idea behind Charter Cities is this: It is easier to start cities from scratch on vacant land rather than get bogged down by the oppressive political rules, legal traps, and special interest groups blocking progress in today's cities. The City Journal says once a host government designates an uninhabited land area and establishes an independent charter, anyone can choose the rules of a charter city and move there. The full idea is described on the Charter City website. Apparently the idea is catching on. This year the Honduras Congress adopted Romers idea and passed a constitutional amendment to create charter cities. Will the rural poor move into these special economic zones and end up in 3rd-world styled sweat shops? Romer claims factory workers need not live in slums. Instead, Charter Cities will have laws to ensure proper utilities and decent low-cost housing. Why not wait for technology to solve problems of poverty and pollution? Romer says new technology will come too late. Instead he says more relaxed rules and new ideas about how people interact will unleash creative potential. Creating independent and open cities allows that to happen. Check out Romer's latest TED.com talk. Far from a tourist's trip of the river, Downtown Winnipeg this week looks bleak and hollowed out. It's a story of one-way streets, homelessness, shuttered storefronts and drunken disorder. There are bright spots like the Exchange District. And not far away a few other gems…Osborne Village and Forks riverside park on the historic Red River. Harbingers of what the city could be? Elsewhere, downtown is another story. A recent Globe and Mail article says "The city’s population in 2006 was 633,451, but of those, only 13,470 lived downtown." Bicycle lanes are as rare as a prairie ski-hill. In peak hours streets are vacant. Are these vacant streets the same ones in a 1905 museum photo of a crowded downtown? They are. What befell this place? A few years ago I wrote about some exceptional local initiatives by the Winnipeg Committee for Safety and an award-winning prevention program that cut auto theft. Sadly, that's not enough. Winnipeg still has the worst robbery rate in Canada. Frontier Centre is a right-wing think-tank on public policy with views about rehabilitating downtown Winnipeg. Be warned: Wide-angle views from Frontier can seem Twilight Zone-ish, for example reconsidering justice policies like zero tolerance for domestic abuse - a policy that research shows actually reduces future violence. Yet zoom in a bit and Frontier's images are less scary. Two papers in particular are worth a read: Turf war between cops and BIZ patrollersabout security patrols to reduce disorder, and Fixing Winnipeg's Downtown about subsidies for the poor, removing one-way streets, and new zoning to revitalize shops. NHL Hockey returns downtown This week the NHL announced a hockey francise will return to the downtown MTS arena. That might spark good times. More good news: The city has been spearheading new construction, renovation projects, and a new mixed use zoning bylaw. Says that Globe article "Winnipeg is desperately trying to realign itself, drawing life back to its centre as a way to sustain its economic core." Says Planetizen "Winnipeg has joined other North American cities in trying to reverse its suburban expansion by targeting its downtown". Frontier published an article describing how immigration helped Winnipeg: Can the Winnipeg Model save Detroit? From what I saw, Winnipeg should save itself before it saves others. What happens when you build low income residential units upwards and not outwards? Those familiar with CPTED will recall Oscar Newman's Defensible Space work in the 1970s and 1960s describing how this is usually a bad idea. In places that do just that sort of thing like New York, Chicago and Toronto, you end up with vertical poverty. The United Way in Toronto has just released a fascinating study called Vertical Poverty documenting disparity in 3-D urban space. Toronto has for decades tried to make the sprawling and cost inefficient suburbs more efficient with high rise residential. Vertical Poverty tells one chapter in that sad tale. It also describes the San Romanoway apartments solution that led to some of the earliest breakthroughs in SafeGrowth. Check it out HERE. This week I visited a lovely central Florida town. Annual family income: twice the Florida average. Poverty rate: same as similar towns elsewhere. Crime rate: low. (It did recently suffer it's first murder in 14 years and another troubled fellow committed suicide). Of 100 homes sold this past year 40% were foreclosures, just like other towns suffering the Great Recession. For a small town this is all fairly typical, except for one thing. This town is the world-famous, Disney-built, Celebration. This is a model of new urbanism, a place of NY Times feature stories,and a place where best selling books are written. Celebration is a cultural archetype; think films like Stepford Wives and The Truman Show. One Celebration street runs straight into Disney World. Acolytes glorify Celebration as a return to Mayberry. In 2001 the Urban Land Institute called it the "community of the year". They ignored the lack of elected government and the control by a corporation that owns Celebration. Definitely not typical! Detractors revile Celebration as the cult of the mouse. They describe an "oppressive Declaration of Covenants" restricting political signs, house colors, unruly pets and so on. They ignore that restrictive covenants are common in suburbs everywhere! The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. What I saw: • A picturesque, downtown and enchanting lakeside boardwalk • Relaxed strolling areas, rocking chairs, beautiful architecture • Abundant shoppers and walkers - most, it seemed, were tourists • No downtown grocery or drug stores (walkability?) • A closed-down cinema but open ice-cream shoppe • No visible graffiti or vandalism. When it comes to urban habitat, we tend to judge everything. Our yardsticks range from aesthetics and walkability to prosperity and safety. By some measures (aesthetics and environmental sustainability here versus gas-guzzling suburbs) Celebration succeeds over other places. By other measures, less so. Celebration offers a special kind of lifestyle choice. Some would not choose it. Others would. It's fascinating. I've blogged before about urban scale and crime. As the recent murder and suicide confirm, idyllic large-scale design cannot eradicate all social ills. Yet I would probably try living there. At least for awhile. You may have noticed in these blogs my intrigue about the future. I believe thinking about the future is not only entertaining, but it is useful for visioning better forms of social life.
In architecture and planning I've more than once blogged on this: Organic architecture The Venus Project The Rio Olympics The archology of Arcosante Project H\ A similar movement exists in policing. It is called the Police Futurists International (PFI) PFI is an excellent organization in which I briefly participated in the recent past. PFI founder Bill Tafoya, an old friend, has been a pioneer in futures research for awhile. The Police Futures Working group is another leading organization thinking about directions for the future. Check them out! |
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