SAFEGROWTH® BLOG
regular contributors
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC · LARRY LEACH
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC · LARRY LEACH
 Shopping mall parking lot - LPS lighting with halide lighting in adjacent property Stargazing is a remarkable activity and even if you don't know what to look for, an overhead canopy filled with stars is awe-inspiring. The Dark Sky Society (and astronomers everywhere) agree. Me too! Nowhere does this have more power than Tucson, Arizona where I've been this past week. The city has some of the strictest regulations to keep light pollution down. Like other communities with national astronomy observatories, it promotes those dim, orangish-hue low pressure sodium lights (LPS) for streets and parking lots. I visited mall parking lots this week in and around Tucson. LPS are everywhere. They are awful!  Shopping plaza parking lot with pedestrians walking across - look carefully The engineering lighting standard for mall parking lots is 3 footcandles (FC). An on-line survey of 9 communities reports an average 1 FC in most of those communities. In one lot that I visited I doubt LPS produced 3 FC or even 1 FC! I love stargazing but I would not enjoy walking those lots at night. Thankfully the economy is changing the story. Tucson is in the midst of the nation-wide LED transformation for more savings and it is switching LPS street lights over to Light Emitting Diode lighting. I hope mall owners in and around Tucson get the message. I would not want to be a victim walking to my car. Nor would I want to be a property owner sued by a victim of violent crime in those spooky, target-rich lots.  Tree tops benefiting from LPS lighting
0 Comments
 Uplighting sidewalk tree canopies with green tint - all photos from Ian Dryden A few months ago I met award-winning industrial designer Ian Dryden from the city of Melbourne, Australia. He taught me about Melbourne's street lighting program. Given the links between fear and street (in)activity, this is a very big deal. Most cities get poor grades for night lighting. Melbourne gets an A. Melbourne has an incredibly active downtown night life. It wasn't always. One long-term resident told me it was once a waste-land with few people daring to walk dark downtown streets. When the city changed direction and chose to attract an evening crowd to socialize in a safe, positive way, designers and planners stepped up.  Decorative lighting above and below bridges Ian and his colleagues were among them. Melbourne's public lighting program is sophisticated. It creates both a luminous and carbon neutral city, no small feat with current energy costs. They light parks, tram stops, news stands, benches, and sidewalks. They string interesting blue (and energy efficient) LEDs above intersections. Where most cities inadvertently obstruct street lights with tree canopies, Melbourne embellishes them with tinted uplighting.  New induction lighting for Swanson Street tram stops This week the 2014 Australian Smart Lighting Summit is in Melbourne and they get to celebrate among lighting peers. They should. Congratulations!  Melbourne park lighting  Blue LEDs over intersection - a canopy of stars Reading studies on crime and place I was recently struck by a mystery among environmental criminology researchers who study CPTED, particularly territoriality (the wall) and natural surveillance (the window). It brought to mind other concept errors in crime and place research, specifically crime generators, permeability, cul de sacs, and the Achilles Heel within routine activity theory. This time the mystery cycles around guardianship. Here’s the storyline… Researchers regale the power of natural surveillance to enhance guardianship. Guardianship presumes to increase the risk that offenders will be seen and caught. Natural surveillance has appeal because you can observe whether a space has lighting, sightlines and nearby windows. Because surveillance presumably will produce more preventive action by residents (or reluctance by offenders to show up), you can then measure what happens. EYES ON THE STREET Natural surveillance assumes that people who see something out of place will act, thereby providing guardianship. Thus it is “real”. It's an assumption borne out nicely in low-crime, upper income areas but not so much in lower-income, high crime areas where residents are afraid to step outdoors and when they do their presence doesn’t deter anything.  Fences, windows and flowers creating territorial control on a San Diego public walkway On the other hand researchers question the power of territoriality to enhance guardianship, mainly because they say territoriality lacks "definitional rigor" and it isn’t “real”. Floral decorations or landscaping…is that it? Maybe it’s access control, walls and gates? Even worse, territoriality varies from place to place. Horrors! They suggest natural surveillance is preferable to territoriality because it seems more measurable. That’s how they solve the mystery of territoriality. They ignore or downplay it, label it with definitional problems and claim it isn't "real". THE SECRET Historian Howard Zinn warns us about such storylines: “Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to accept without much questioning someone else’s version of what that reality is.” Consider this: If territoriality isn’t real, then how is guardianship any better? And why shouldn’t territoriality vary from place to place? “The real world,” says Zinn, “is infinitely complex and constantly changing.” Perhaps social science research methods are too simplistic to tell us anything complex? Perhaps it is guardianship that has a definitional problem, especially given territoriality’s much longer provenance. What provenance? Consider Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, Robert Ardry’s The Territorial Imperative, Edward Hall’s The Hidden Dimension, Oscar Newman's Defensible Space, and Alice Coleman's Utopia on Trial. And all that territorial work still continues today such as Kevin Leydon’s study on walkability and social capital. MYSTERY SOLVED CPTED practitioners seldom complain about such things because context always comes first. For example in SafeGrowth practitioners and residents use a Risk Assessment Matrix for surveys, safety audits, site visits, and asset maps. Together they create a profile of the neighborhood and what residents feel about it. Only then do they determine to what extent designs enhance territoriality. Overcoming "definitional rigor"? Simple: Ask the residents and work with them to discover what they feel enhances their territorial control, a method known as action research and action learning. Mystery solved.  My architect friend Frank Stoks sent me a news clip of an emerging graff war in Melbourne. Frank is a well-known CPTED expert in New Zealand. Back in the 1980s questions from his PhD thesis comprised the basis for the Toronto's Women's Safety Audit - now the United Nations Safety Audit. Melbourne Australia is a remarkable city of culture and walkability. Our SafeGrowth teams continue their exceptional work in 4 neighborhoods, recently highlighted at a recent Australian criminology conference. Melbourne is also known for its vast array of street art and graffiti, particularly in laneways, much of it under city supervision mentioned in an earlier blog, Eyes Wide Open, Magnificent Melbourne. Now, according to this news clip, a graff war has broken out between the street artists commissioned by the city to create the murals and some culture jamming taggers who are not. Says one street artist: "The council is commissioning the work to stop tagging and not including the guys who have come from the graffiti background, so they're alienating the scene." Check it out here.  Montgomery's new book - Happy City - provides an antidote to dispersed cities During a hectic month of business travel with little time for blogging I read the recent book by Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. Montgomery says: "If we are to escape the effects of dispersal, then dense places have got to meet our psychological needs better than sprawl." That idea resonated during an afternoon walk in the prairie city of Brandon, Manitoba where I worked this week. Brandon is one of those mid-western cities with wide streets and sprawl suburbs. Yet even here I found an interesting (and dense) lower income multi-family townhouse project that Montgomery would appreciate.  Play areas inside the lower income multi-family housing. Good visibility, easy access There is a tendency to think of low income, multi-family housing as crime-ridden. Yet this attractive, well designed multi-family complex had plenty of social mojo. Kids enjoyed a playground in clear view of nearby windows, walkways and grounds were clean, and dozens of people enjoyed their small front yards, barbecues, and common garden areas.  Interior courtyard, green and clean Police told me there were few calls for service here even though it housed 300 residents in a hundred units, very high density compared to the nearby sprawl. Nearby, as Montgomery might predict, a traditional suburb was vacant, graffitied, and sparse. In my hour-long walk there I uncovered only a few people, mostly working on cars. Few streets had sidewalks and I saw no one on their front lawns.  A few blocks away in a traditional suburb - Millennial messages The New York Times says about Happy City, "It was only a matter of time before someone figured out that if there were new things to say about happiness and a new interest in the evolution of urban life, the two subjects could be linked together." Montgomery has chapters on How to be Closer, Convivialities, and Redesigning for Freedom. They fit what I saw here.  Adjacent streets - no sidewalks, fencing to isolate the road  Community mapping guru, Dr. Wansoo Im My High Line Park post a few weeks ago happened because of my fascinating new friend and community mapping guru, Wansoo Im. He showed us High Line with the energy of an excited tourist, even though he is an area resident, adjunct professor in urban planning at Rutgers University and founder of inventive initiatives in community mapping. I discovered he brings that energy to his work everywhere. Wansoo is a pretty cool fellow. He has mapped safe routes to school for kids and helped residents use crowdsourcing to map potholes. Huffington Post describes how he got high school students to crowdmap emergency gas stations to help residents stranded during Hurricane Sandy. The New Yorker featured him using crowdsource mapping to solve the problem of finding public washrooms in New York. And now he's turning to community mapping of crime and fear.  Mapping fear to diagnose community perceptions I met Wansoo at our New Jersey SafeGrowth training where he is testing his community mapping software called Mappler. It uses Google Earth and GPS and most importantly it doesn't rely on complex GIS mapping - the stuff crime analysts spend months mastering. And it's dead easy to use. Mappler technology works as a smart phone app. Our class was able to input Safety Audit fear data directly from their observations and view it in real-time on neighborhood maps. Pretty cool stuff. Community mapping may be the way to tap into engagement in a direct way. And for Millennials growing up as Internet natives it offers a new way they can use their considerable talents to solve community crime.  Achilles and the heel - photo Creative Commons by Tasoskessaris [SPOILER ALERT - This is a rather long theory blog on emerging research. Apologies. But every now and then, like bad tasting medicine, it's necessary to ingest!] Yesterday I was external examiner for an MA thesis defense on CPTED and the geography of youth gun violence. The candidate did a great job. She passed her defense and is now a new criminology scholar. Reading her literature review I was struck how difficult it is for new scholars to siphon out decent research. Crime and place studies range from sensible to silly. Not long ago I got to do some siphoning of my own – for better or worse - while reading two crime studies. The better version was titled “The reasoning criminal vs. Homer Simpson: conceptual challenges for crime science”. The worse version was torturous! A CPTED Framework Public Realm Scoping Paper was released two years ago. While it did an admirable job of covering CPTED history, particularly the Australian story, it read like exotic buffet where each tasty morsel was spread out without rhyme or reason. HAVING YOUR CAKE AND EATING IT TOO Framework tossed out ideas like "thermal comfort" and "empathic interaction" in willy nilly fashion. On one hand it slammed 2nd Generation CPTED theory as “superfluous second generation nomenclature” and then followed that up with this poster-child for superfluous: “Whole area image, in a Gestalt sense, is very different from the meaning embedded in individual site characteristics… Past psycho-social experiences, role-models, somatic and genetic tendencies and inheritance, introvert-extroversion personality-typing, psychological stressor thresholds, 'get even' desires, thrill seeking, peer pressures, and gang membership, inter alia...encourage individuals considering a delinquent, anti-social or criminal activity to take action (or not)." What? Ironically the author then claims social programming has been part of CPTED all along. It hasn't! That’s why we created 2nd Generation CPTED in the first place. Into this theoretical bucket the author scoops environmental, thermal, planning, and design cases as CPTED examples, all the while supporting bottom-up ideas similar to SafeGrowth ("local control is best practice"). But then we’re offered up cases such as a Viennese coffeehouse that "employs people suffering from mental handicaps…aiming to stabilize the personality of the participants." What? Framework is a frustrating read. There is a rich historical review in this paper. The author is clearly knowledgeable (in the 1990s he led pioneering research into fear mapping). Sadly this is not his best work. It is in dire need of a disciplined copy editor. As luck would have it my next read was about Homer Simpson in an article about the emerging field of crime science! CRIME SCIENCE GETS A FACELIFT Last October Frontiers in Human Neuroscience published Naemie Bouhana's article, The reasoning criminal vs. Homer Simpson: Conceptual challenges for crime science. It was concise, non-pretentious and penetrating. It described a new branch of criminology – crime science – as the study of crime prevention "chiefly concerned with the design of social and technological systems…an engineering discipline, with a self-confessed preference for short-term problem-solving." I suspect crime science researchers see their role a bit broader. Last year their inaugural journal said crime science is about cutting crime opportunities. “In blocking opportunities for crime and terrorism we are not simply reducing the incidence, we are also removing one of the causes.” Obviously CPTED is a practical piece that fits neatly into the center of that puzzle. Yet crime science has an Achilles Heel: "It is not possible to leave the offender out of crime prevention altogether. In order to “increase effort” and “reduce rewards”, a model of criminal decision-making is needed. For this purpose, the fathers of situational crime prevention adopted the Rational Choice Perspective (RCP).” Bouhana claims that RCP "has fallen short as a model of offender decision-making." He explains why with a razor. OCCAM - THE CAUSE-KILLING RAZOR Occam's Razor says theories with the fewest assumptions are preferable to those more complex. Aristole said it first: all things being equal, theories that explain the world with fewer hypotheses are better. Science calls it parsimony. The parsimony razor helps shave away the complex to arrive at the simplest solution. RCP is the perfect theory for crime reduction and opportunity the perfect tool cut it; cut the opportunity and you cut the crime. It is Occam’s Razor incarnate. Bouhana says there are three arrows through the heel of RCP in crime science:
In criminal behavior people don’t always act like Mr. Spock - logical and rational. Bouhana says crime science must expand to include new theories in neuroscience and behavioral geography. Those theories suggest people often behave irrationally, more like Homer Simpson, sometimes responding to the environment, sometimes not. Consider the well-known "By-stander Effect"; natural surveillance did nothing to stop the Kitty Genovese murder in New York. "This state of affairs has had the consequence of stifling theoretical development in crime science, so much so that RCP has remained essentially static since the 1980s." This is exactly what many of us have said about 1st Generation CPTED for years. In addition to neuroscience and behavioral geography, I’ve mentioned other theories in this blog that crime science might consider like emotional intelligence, the civilizing effect, and the public health concept. These new theories are not parsimony. Like the criminal behavior they study, they are complex. Occam would not approve, though Einstein might.  A half century after an infamous New York murder: Have we learned anything? It was 3AM and the short walk from the train station to her front door was lit by a few streetlights. There may have been music from radios escaping partly opened apartment windows. Some neighbors were still awake. She'd walked home from work on this route before and it probably seemed familiar and safe. It wasn't. Suddenly a stranger walking down the street chased and accosted her. Over the next half hour, newspapers later wrote, 38 people saw or heard her cry out as the murderer repeatedly stabbed, raped and then killed 28-year-old Kitty Genovese. This happened in 1964 only 3 years after, and 12 miles east, of where Jane Jacobs wrote about street safety in Death and Life of Great American Cities. This month two books commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tragedy: Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences and Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, and the Crime That Changed America. Few cases have spawned so many theories and books. I've blogged on this, particularly in relation to the CPTED concept, natural surveillance. Environmental psychology now calls it the bystander effect or the Genovese Syndrome. In short, if people can surveil an area but do nothing about crime, eyes on the street mean nothing. True, some offenders may still desist if they think they are being watched. But even this surveillance deterrence has limits. It won't apply to psychopaths, drug addicts, or the inebriated, a big list in the possible offender category. The latest research by Timothy Hart and Ternace Miethe examined the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and discovered a bystander was present in 65 percent of the violent victimizations reported in the survey. Environmental psychology research produces replicable results showing the by-stander effect. The fact is this: If most people do nothing, natural surveillance means nothing. Politicians look for the simple answer. Good Samaritan laws - forcing by-standers to act under penalty of law! Legal thinking often boggles the mind! In emergencies people don't think of penalty for inaction. They think of escape. Fortunately, there are better solutions. Since the 1980s we've known social cohesiveness increases the power of people-caring. Social cohesiveness, research confirms, increases the power of natural surveillance. Eyes that care take action. When people know each other, know their area, have a sense of connectedness and can clearly watch their neighborhood, natural surveillance works. In recent SafeGrowth classes we saw firsthand why pairing social cohesion strategies with natural surveillance is crucial. Students tell me that some 1st Generation CPTED instructors still fail to properly teach 2nd Generation CPTED. There is no excuse for ignoring these essential lessons. Read about the Kitty Genovese tragedy. Let’s not repeat history!  Sightlines into the underground Metrotown parking from upper mall levels Beneath the behemoth Metrotown mall lies the second largest covered mall in Canada, a vast underground lot with 4,000 spaces. That might seem small compared to the world’s largest at the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton (20,000), the world’s largest covered lot at Seattle’s airport (13,000) or the largest downtown underground lot in Chicago (9000). Yet Metrotown is big. And it joins thousands like it around the world, some massive. Dubai is planning 40,000. You might assume the existence of widely used design safety standards in such places. You know what they say about assumptions! DESIGN STANDARDS? Some municipalities do have design snippets (CCTV, lighting, security patrols), and the National Institute of Building Sciences also posts a few. But, realistically, those are a pittance in such massive expanses. I’ve written about some great designs like lifestyle malls and creative wayfinding. As well, Randall Atlas’s book 21st Century Security and CPTED (2nd edition) has over 40 pages about parking lot security. Walking through Metrotown I remembered teaching CPTED for the RCMP in the 1990s. We often used the Metrotown parking lot as our lighting test-bed, auditing the entranceways, examining the lighting and marveling at the vast expanses. I was impressed last week that Metrotown owners have instituted significant design upgrades over the past decade. The photos tell the story.  Dedicated pedestrian walkways. White painted ceilings.  Window glazed atrium safe areas adjacent to security office.
The best feature had been enhanced from early years. It was the glazed atriums on each stairway level. Pedestrians walking down the stairs first entered enclosed safe atrium areas on each floor. These areas had tempered glass and were often next to the security office. This gave a clear view into the parking lot from within the safe areas. If we are going to do more covered parking in the 21st Century, here's a starting point for minimum standards.  Clear sight-lines from atrium. Prevention education signs.  Our community center last night at the end of the street Since 1970 the light source of choice in most cities has been sodium vapor, those yellowish streetlights you see glowing everywhere. Sodiums are an efficient light source but many lighting engineers despise their color. According to one New York lighting designer "There is this negative subliminal response…the connotation is crime." Says another: "Yellow light muddies the colors of surrounding neighborhoods and makes people feel less secure because the colors around them are not true." In fact there is very little actual research showing any of that. Most research says nothing about light color, only light quantity. Regardless, it was only a matter time before a new lighting kid showed up on the block. In this case it was the LED - light emitting diode. For example Seattle, like most North American cities, is converting to more cost efficient LEDs. They might be more efficient but they they produce a harsh, sharp image on everything. A decade ago I was guest editor of a publication on lighting and CCTV. My thoughts then: If street lighting enhances architecture where pedestrians can appreciate the facades and details of downtown buildings, there may be problems lighting a downtown so bright it detracts from the aesthetics. Whenever I see downtown LEDs they remind me I was probably right. The photos in this blog demonstrate downtown sodium lighting. They show how well-placed sodiums provide adequate lighting and highlight the beautiful textures in downtown architecture.  High risk facilities like automated bank machines can be well lit with sodium In none of these photos did sodium lighting detract from prevention or turn people off. There are no people in the photos because, at least in the photos I took, I had to wait for them to move aside in order to show the effect. Obviously, sodium lighting did not make them feel less secure. In fact, the opposite. We know very little about the impact of color on night time behavior, especially crime. And since no one is apparently paying attention to the crime and social impact of LEDs, I hope we don't learn, too late, that brighter isn't always better.  185 seats, 185 dead - an earthquake memorial in Christchurch (note the small seats for children who perished) Date: Tues, Feb 22, 2011 Location: Christchurch, New Zealand's second largest city Time: 12:51 pm Event: 6.3 magnitude earthquake Result: 185 dead, thousands injured, $40 billion damage, 80% downtown destroyed Three years later Christchurch is still rebuilding and recharging. Emerging from the collapsed buildings, destroyed roads, ruined homes and considerable personal loss, the city is making some discoveries. I spent the past week introducing SafeGrowth in this beautiful country with its magnificent countryside and easygoing people. Four teams from the Phillipstown neighborhood of Christchurch are the first to try it. Yesterday Christchurch TV covered the training in a newsclip. Turns out they have a few cards up their sleeve. Three aces First, police use Neighborhood Policing Teams throughout the city with experience in CPTED. Clearly there are some progressive police leaders who see their value. Second they are experimenting with innovations. One is hundreds of temporary shipping containers to house everything from banks and stores to offices and coffee shops. The containers are painted bright colors and positioned in interesting configurations. They are rarely vandalized.  Coffee shop showing storage containers with multiple temporary uses - photo Mateja Mihinjac Their ace in hand is an outstanding CPTED planning team. Led by experienced CPTED practitioner Sue Ramsey, they are advised by renowned CPTED architect Frank Stoks. It was from Stoks' doctoral dissertation on rape in Seattle 30 years ago where the Toronto METRAC organization drew many of their survey questions for the famous Women's Safety Audit. Sue described the work in Christchurch at the 2013 International CPTED Association conference. Christchurch is well positioned to start a whole new SafeGrowth transformation up from the rubble of disaster.  Shopping in the container village - color and innovation downtown - photo Sue Ramsay  Out of the Christchurch rubble emerges an new urban form - photo Mateja Mihinjac  Santiago city lights by photographer extraordinaire Roberto Contreras 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.  Security fencing is everywhere in residential neighborhoods 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.  Macarena Rau delivering the first-ever CPTED presentation at TED Talks 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  Activating neighborhood streets with movable flower shops 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.  Milwaukee - photo by Dori at Creative Commons In Clint Eastwood's film Gran Torino, a widowed and bitter Walt Kowalski, Korean War veteran, watches street life from his Detroit porch as his Hmong immigrant neighbors become the victims of gang persecution. Confounded by the fearful Hmong's unwillingness to help police, Kowalski confronts the baddies, unites the Hmong against the gangs and ends up dead. It's the classic story of a declining hero who fights injustice, in this case from that very American security blanket - the porch. Our fading hero might be a worn metaphor, but how can you not love the odd pairing of ancient Greek tragedy with Clint's stellar film direction? This week, during my Milwaukee SafeGrowth class, I saw Gran Torino come to life (sort of) only in reverse. Embedded within the remarkable and successful projects from team members there was a story of young men hanging out on neighborhood porches, drinking beer and smoking dope. Nothing strange in that except these porches did not belong to those young men. They just picked a porch somewhere on the street (where they may or may not live) and then just took it over. MILWAUKEE EXPERIENCE Sometimes those homes were abandoned, sometimes not. As in Gran Torino, residents often don't ask the squatters to leave, presumably due to fear! Residents seldom call the police. Police have made arrests and cracked down but the problem continues. I'm told it has been ongoing for years. It is Gran Torino in reverse. SafeGrowth team members didn't think the squatters were gang members or drug dealers (my first thought), but they were not sure. Squatters didn't move into those abandoned homes nor ask residents to join them on the porch. They simply picked a porch and hung out. I know of dealers who launch open air drug markets and take over abandoned buildings. I know gang members intimidate neighbors by claiming porch turf. But SafeGrowth team members didn't think any of that was the case here. Why don't squatters stay on their own porches (they were not homeless)? No one knew. A few team members thought this was common across Milwaukee. Others disagreed. Another thought this was common in all low income, troubled neighborhoods. I could not think of any other community with such random, and obnoxious, porch squatting. In CPTED this is what Randy Atlas calls offensible space. We will never reclaim neighborhoods and prevent crime unless we can mobilize legitimate behavior. Porch squatting is not legitimate behavior! And there is no Clint Eastwood coming to the rescue. The good news? Based on the high quality SafeGrowth projects and the exceptional team-work I saw this week in Milwaukee, we won't need him.  Walking and texting late at night in a Calgary alleyway - photo Randall Atlas Strolling downtown late at night after Calgary's ICA CPTED conference we came across this young woman walking by herself in an alleyway. What struck us was not how she was dressed or that she was alone or that the alley was well lit. What amazed us was that she texted the entire time as she walked down an isolated alley quite oblivious to her environment. It seemed risky. Then I thought about the Slutwalk phenomenon launched after the victim-blaming remarks by Toronto police constable during a 2011 crime prevention presentation. "I've been told I'm not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized," the constable commented to a group of women at York University. He later apologized for his remarks but they led to city-wide (and later world-wide) annual Slutwalks. The phenomenon has been both lauded and criticized by others, including feminists. One motive for Slutwalks is the persistent and idiotic views on the topic. According to Huffington Post one Manitoba judge "condemned a rape survivor for wearing a tube top, no bra, high heels and makeup which he implied led her to sexual assault." The judge also implied "the assailant had succumbed to inviting circumstances." That thinking is absurd. It is also still alive and well. None of which changes the fact that mindless oblivion while texting late at night in an isolated alleyway is just not a good idea.
This blog often ponders a future with eco-friendly, green technologies to create safer communities. Consider anti-graffiti moss, Saint Paul's transit-oriented development, last year's Rio + 20 environment conference and last week's blog on 3rd Generation CPTED. Given catastrophe's from global warming these past few years, it's remarkable doubters still deny human-created climate change. I suppose some will always bypass science and spin alternate histories of a wishful and more stable past. Even those riding the wayback machine cannot spin recent weather tragedies like the terrible Calgary floods last week. Like it or not, climate change is here to stay and every profession and community is affected. (Prior to 1990 only 3 disasters in Canadian history topped a half billion dollars in damages. In the past decade alone there have been 9). It is ironic, yet sad, that next week's International CPTED Association conference will follow the 2013 Alberta Floods. That tragedy saw 100,000 residents evacuated, 4 deaths and $3 billion in damages. Thankfully the floods have subsided and the 2013 ICA conference is proceeding. Calgary residents have done a remarkable job of recovery. The YouTube below tells their story. The ICA conference carries the title: Creating Safer Communities - More Than Design. Nowhere is there a better time and place to consider the reality of that title and rethink our urban design and safety options in the years ahead.  A new design for wiring public transit stops to the net - New Energy report At an ICA CPTED conference last year in Mexico City I introduced a paper from the SENSEable City Lab at the famed MIT sent to me just before the conference. It was fascinating. Published through the UN, it is titled; New Energy for Urban Security: Improving Urban Security Through Green Environmental Design. As both a thought piece and a white paper, New Energy is a curious read, especially their ideas for a 3rd Generation CPTED. To some CPTED traditionalists 3rd Generation CPTED will be heresy! When Gerry Cleveland and I introduced 2nd Generation CPTED in 1997, with its focus on neighborhood social dynamics, we too were met by gasps or yawns. "No, no…" gasped those incredulous with what they saw as the imponderable, "That's not CPTED! CPTED is only about physical modifications for reducing crime opportunity." Yawned others, "We've been doing that all along," (in spite of a lack of data recording where and no published training details whatsoever on how). REMEMBERING THE TITANS Ever so gently (okay, maybe not so gently at times) we reminded them of the original writings of CPTED, laden with concepts like communities of interest and neighborliness and written by pioneers like Jacobs, Newman, Jeffery, Angel, Wood, and Gardiner. The naysayers parked their gasps and yawns and retreated to the comfort of their target hardened forts to snipe from the ramparts (I admit some bias in this affair). Dare I say that 2nd Generation CPTED nowadays is a staple in training and practice? (Even if some trainers still mistakenly believe it's just a fancy name for activity support.) Thus is the nature of theory growth! Now we approach another watershed. The MIT folks propose integrating eco-sensibilities into CPTED with what they call 3rd Generation CPTED. The gist of their aim is to activate public dead spaces so they are more defensible, but doing so using green technology. "A green and digitally enhanced environmental design that addresses the concerns of cities." Can't argue with that. But is that really CPTED (gasp)? Aren't advanced designers already doing that (yawn)? Consider the eco-designs of Portland's City Repair program, founded by the keynote speaker at next week's ICA CPTED conference in Calgary. Fearful of becoming my own nemesis, I read New Energy with gusto and discovered it was refreshing and exciting. Perhaps having a name for all this work isn't such a bad thing. ECO HIGH TECH SOLUTIONS The coolest parts in the report are the eco-high-tech solutions: multi-functional and eco-friendly urban furniture that is crime safe; interactive urban art in public spaces to improve perceptions of safety (recall examples from Milan and Minneapolis I posted a few months ago). Pretty cool stuff. My favorite? Wireless networks across the city made available on street furniture. Imagine video-based, touch screens on transit stops (see photo above) with real-time information on alternate routes during delays or Google Earth safe alternate routes home. A bit Bladerunner-like…but still, pretty cool.  Interactive public art to activate public spaces - New Energy report  Winnipeg building mural and frontage - missed opportunity I get great ideas from friends. Here are two. Walking around Winnipeg Manitoba this past weekend a friend pointed out the irony of this building mural. The beauty of the former building front on the mural; the sad reality of failed expectations on the actual building front. The idea of placemaking has made regular appearances on this blog. Placemaking is about creating positive social life in public places. How does one do that? The fellow who pointed out the irony of the Winnipeg mural was Gerry Cleveland, my colleague and co-creator of 2nd Generation CPTED. Second Generation CPTED promotes placemaking by activating residents, getting them involved, helping them learn how to take action and teaching basic organizing skills. That's the future. In the file under pathetic behavior, a video came to my attention this week. CPTED creates defensible space by dividing space into semi-private and private zones. Occasionally this is done with fencing. I've blogged on fences before. Some think fences are signs of mutual respect. Robert Frost's famous poem "Mending Wall" re-popularizes Plato's and later Ben Franklin's phrase "good fences make good neighbors". At the end of his poem Frost asks, "Why do they make good neighbors?" One blogger I've read believes good fences represent the equality of neighbors while protecting the independence of each. For him keeping fences in repair is good citizenship. Another contends fences "maintain the fabric of community." Absurd. It's true the fabric of a community is maintained by mutual respect with minimal ambiguities. But if only a fence can do that then how much "mutual respect" really exists? Can't neighbors reach a respectful, reasonable agreement to balance privacy with communal sharing? The bulldozer-caper in the video above suggests the answer: No! (At least for the ill-tempered or the insane). Fences, apparently, don't make good neighbors. Good neighbors make good neighbors. GUEST BLOG Novices to CPTED sometimes see things with a clarity others lack. Jennica Collette is a planning student at the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. She and fellow students recently completed their first CPTED study. In this guest blog she summarizes their findings and comes to similar conclusions as reported by Harvard University design students in March. **** As part of a University of Waterloo social planning class, a group of fellow students and myself wanted to know how urban form influenced safety, both actual and perceived. We chose university campuses, a context that was relevant and familiar, and compared our suburban campus at University of Waterloo to the urban campus at University of Toronto. It was our first CPTED experience. We started by familiarizing ourselves with CPTED lingo including Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space Theory and Jane Jacob’s "eyes on the street". We looked at reported statistics and charts as well as perceived safety through site visits and random interviews. The results weren’t what we expected. Initially we assumed the University of Toronto was less safe. Why? Perhaps the strong association between large urban centres and crime or the idea that people who don’t necessarily “belong” at the University can wander through the campus freely and easily. But during interviews we were told both campuses felt safe. Other than identifying some areas of concern, like poorly lit loading areas in Toronto or a woodlot trail in Waterloo, there were rarely moments where students felt like they were in any danger. When we crunched the numbers we discovered, on a per student basis, there were more crimes at the University of Waterloo than the University of Toronto. Granted, both of these campuses experienced very few serious crimes, mostly petty theft and mischief, but there were simply more of them in Waterloo. WHY? One of the most significant differences between the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo was the presence of people. Even during reading week Toronto’s campus was bustling with activity. In Waterloo, during the weekends and evenings, you could count the people on one hand. Toronto’s safe environment can be attributed to a combination of multiple uses, permeable grid form and high densities. The Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario Legislative building, and Queen’s Park all lie within the campus boundary and the grid form makes the campus as much a waypoint as a destination.  Street vendors activating the street at the University of Toronto In Waterloo a ring road topped off with berms surrounds the campus. We were told buildings were oriented with crowd control in mind rather than legibility. All this makes the campus particularly unappealing for a visitor. Does built form influence actual and perceived safety? Our first CPTED experience confirmed it does. What we found mostly is that there is so much more to safety than movement predictors and improving lighting (though that is part of it). From a planning perspective a large part of making environments safe is activating spaces and activating communities. It turns out that is also the conclusion of Second-generation CPTED. Whether it a campus or residential neighbourhood, the key seems to be having people present who are engaged in their environments. If Boston proves anything it proves we need more CCTV, right? Yet police, CCTV, and the community working together caught the terrorists, not CCTV alone. We presume CCTV will cut crime and make things better. Crime might drop (which is good), but things don’t always get better. The CPTED 3-D method (I don't teach it) states the design of a place should reinforce its designated use so that "illegitimate" users are kept at bay. Yet Jane Jacobs wrote that, if given the chance, people make spaces work in their own unique ways. That is what makes them safe. Similar questions were posed a decade ago in Keith Hayward’s "Space, the final frontier: Criminology, the city and the spatial dynamics of exclusion." SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER Hayward threw down the gauntlet to the Criminology of Place crowd- situational crime prevention, environmental criminology and by association (not mine), CPTED. Unfortunately Hayward wrote in the gibberish of post-structural"Foucauldian" prose, an academic fad popular among a small group of academics in the UK and Canada. Tragically it delivers little to those preventing crime except unreadable text. That's a shame because Hayward has a brilliant mind with important things to say. He attacked theories of the then-emerging community of crime analysts and crime mappers. Today crime analysts populate every major police department. They desperately need this message.  Top down crime maps and CCTV can distract attention from what matters most One part of that message: Spatial patterns - robbery hotspots, burglary densities, crime displacements - miss the point. More accurately, they are such a small part of the point that they distract attention away from the keys to prevention - causes behind criminal behavior. SECOND GENERATION CPTED Hayward's corrective is theoretical: link the individual experience of victims, offenders, and other citizens with the urban, social and cultural facts that create conditions for crime. I think it is simpler. It’s the corrective Gerry Cleveland and I offered a decade earlier in Second Generation CPTED. Blogs on descriptive symbols and articles on Second Generation CPTED spell this out in detail.  Street life in Tijuana, Mexico - center of a narco-war? Here are some starting places:
A friend of mine likes to quote T.S. Eliot: "We had the experience but missed the meaning." Let’s not miss the meaning of Boston.  Downtown Boston Last week’s terror bombs in Boston were designed to cause fear. In this extended guest blog, social planner and ethicist Wendy Sarkissian describes recent walks in Boston and New Haven. Wendy discovers fear is not always what it seems. **** As we mourn for those killed and injured in the bombing at the Boston Marathon this week, it’s important to remember that good work is being done in Boston. Good crime-prevention work. As a woman, a CPTED practitioner and planner, I feel as though I have eyes in the back of my head. And what a contrast I experienced in the two universities of Harvard in Boston and Yale in New Haven, Connecticut - especially their urban contexts! In a month teaching at Harvard’s planning program I don't believe I saw police or security guards. They must have been there but I saw no obvious presence. I asked about the security of the projectors in the lobby of Gund Hall where I was teaching and was told that a security guard sits there at night.  Harvard's Gund Hall school of design I did not see that person or sense that they were required. I often walked the 15-minute walk alone to Harvard Square at night -- as late as midnight -- and did not feel nervous or at risk. I also noticed the brilliant intervention, at the edge of Harvard Yard by the Science Center -- of a skating rink open til 9 pm Tuesday to Sunday -- with free skating classes and skate rental for $5. Harvard Skate, surrounded by tables and chairs, is open and free to all members of the Harvard community, their family members and the general public. ACTIVATING STREETS WITH SKATING The custom-made, 40-by-60-foot Harvard Skate rink in front of the Science Center was built atop the newly paved Science Center plaza, which is undergoing renovations. The installation represents the beginning of the plaza's transformation into a vibrant space that joins campus and community. It reminded me of the idea of putting a carwash in a parking garage. A brilliant Second-Generation CPTED intervention.  Free hot chocolate at skate rink In Cambridge and Boston, the buses, the trains and the stations were clean but did not seem to have a great amount of security. I felt safe and comfortable at all times, day and night, weekdays and weekends, travelling to and from the Harvard campus by public transit. By contrast, a day in New Haven had me powerfully frightened. I took the train from Boston and arrived mid-morning after a gorgeous trip through snow-covered New England countryside. I had not lived in New Haven since the mid-sixties, so it was a nostalgic journey. DRUGS AND FEAR? I was met - at the train station and throughout the downtown - by a strong odour of grass. As one might expect, there were a lot of unsavoury-looking characters hanging around the train station. They were also hanging around the downtown on a weekday (which I did not expect). They did not seem to be doing anything and, from what I could tell, were not dealing drugs.  New Haven's Union Station The whole place smelled of grass and I felt uncomfortable. That is funny to say for a person who lives in the drug capital of Australia! I spent the day walking though residential areas where I had lived in the sixties and then working in the Yale Archives. I emerged from the library as it was getting dark and by 6:30 pm I was seeking a taxi to go to the best pizza parlour in the United States: New Haven’s Frank Pepe's Pizzeria, where I had enjoyed their signature pizzas in the sixties. I'd come 17,000 miles for my pizza and I wanted lots of time to savour it.  Pepe's Pizzaria, New Haven CT As I stood waiting for a taxi I found myself hailing vehicles with lights on the top, only to discover that they were either Yale University security vehicles or New Haven police cars. On every corner in the centre of the campus there seemed to be at least one, often two or more police and security personnel on foot or in vehicles. They were everywhere. That did not make me feel safe. Failing to find a taxi, I thought about walking (it was cold but not unbearably so) to a nearby urban neighbourhood with a few more restaurants, as I was on the edge of the Yale campus. But I thought better of taking a back route, fearing that perhaps all this security and police presence meant that the back streets (with fewer eyes on the street) might be dangerous.  Increased police numbers in New Haven - photo NBC News What was happening? Why so much security and police? Had there been a violent incident recently? A rape? As an older woman, I began to wonder. Would I find a taxi? Am I in danger in the middle of the city - in the middle of the campus? The pizza faded from my mind and fear crept in. At 6 pm on a week night in the centre of the city. What was going on? POLICE PRESENCE AND FEAR? These two experiences made me think about the messages that a strong police and security presence sends to a non-native. In New Haven, I knew the geography and could remember where things were. I identified landmarks and felt I had a reasonable cognitive map of the central area. In Cambridge, I had none of those advantages but was able to navigate the streets because the main routes were well-lit and well trafficked. Even late at night, there is lots of activity in Harvard Square.  Night at Harvard Square A TALE OF TWO CAMPUSES Reflecting on my short visit to New Haven I feel that such an intense security and police presence sends a message that a place is unsafe. It did not make me feel safer; it heightened my sense of vulnerability. On the other hand, on the Harvard campus, aware of the inherent dangers of campuses generally for pedestrian safety, I was careful. I stayed on the beaten track and I kept my wits about me. I felt safe. Whatever is happening at Yale and in New Haven, it's not working! Not for me. Not for me as a non-native pedestrian. And at Harvard, whatever they are doing - subtle interventions and careful management - it is working well. Frank Pepe’s pizza – when a taxi finally materialized -- defied description. My pizza-loving self will never forget it. But it’s not just about the pizza My CPTED practitioner self will never forget the brilliant CPTED intervention of Harvard Skate on the plaza outside the Science Center. A tale of two campuses and two cities. And I can tell you which one I'd like to visit, alone at night, again.  Snow and CPTED. Examining LED streetlights and staying warm (photo by Jason Tudor) CPTED pioneers never imagined how crime works in a winter city. Local practitioners figure that out themselves. Case in point: Our SafeGrowth training last week in Saskatoon, Canada, about 250 miles north of the US border. Saskatoon now leads the municipal pack for CPTED implementation. I've blogged before about Saskatoon, especially regarding bus terminals. Like many forward thinking communities it has online design guidelines and CPTED policy. Like other places Saskatoon reviews new developments for CPTED. Unlike other places Saskatoon is the first-ever city to incorporate 1st Generation CPTED, 2nd Generation CPTED, and SafeGrowth into their design guidelines. Many CPTED practitioners still don't know the difference between the concepts (explained in the guidelines). Saskatoon does this by embedding SafeGrowth into Local Area Plans in dozens of neighborhoods across the city, each with their own plans and steps for moving forward  Saskatoon students audit underground parking lots We've now trained over a hundred city staff, police and community members. Last week city planner Elisabeth Miller and myself continued the training with outdoor safety audits and CPTED reviews of parking lots. Newman, Jacobs, Jeffery, Angel, and Gardiner wrote nothing about CPTED and streetlights in snowbanks at -20 Celsius. We'll see how the project teams from class figure it out.  Evening CPTED audits - the city at night - photo by snowycactus A few weeks ago a colleague of mine teaching at Harvard University asked if I would do a webinar with some planning and design students embarking on their first night-time CPTED field project. I talked with Benjamin Scheerbarth, Elise Baudon and Susan Nguyen about the myth and reality of CPTED and the difference between fear and risk; what residents' perceive versus what they actually experience. That's exactly what their research uncovered. On one hand their observations suggested the area had "strong environmental design to prevent crime". Police on the audit confirmed "an overall safe downtown atmosphere with scattered incidents of [disorder]". On the other hand community members described fears of unsafe pockets and a sketchy area. Crime data suggested problems with theft and assault. What to think? Who to believe? (I love conundrums like this for students!) FEAR VS RISK To the practitioner this is unsurprising. Crime geographers have been saying for some time that risk and fear are very different animals. One has a dangerous bite; the other frightens with a snarl. Yet it's impressive the students uncovered this so quickly. To their credit the students dove deeper and discovered how events cluster around certain places and times (like bars at closing) and how to target solutions. Their recommendations spanned basic 1st Generation CPTED (better lighting, signage and cameras) and 2nd Generation CPTED (diversified land uses, evening farmers markets, night-time community walks). For a first time CPTED project, that's not bad. Not bad at all!  Lead affects us at far lower levels than we thought and there might be a crime link Long ago on a hot Florida afternoon a new criminology faculty member sat down to lunch with Professor C. Ray Jeffery, ex-president of the American Society of Criminology and author of CPTED. “CPTED is not just the environment where we live,” he lectured, “it’s also the bio-chemical environment within our bodies. It’s in the brain!” That new faculty member was me. To those who knew and respected Jeffery (also me), this was old turf. Yet criminologists ignored Jeffery’s ideas. Bio-chemical theories were invisible in crime theory. Why? They had once been popular. In the 1800s phrenology measured head bumps to test for criminality. Strike one. Eugenics theories created compulsory sterilization programs well into the mid-20th Century? Strike two. The Nazi's nightmarish views on racial purity led to monsters like Joseph Mengele. Strike three. No wonder biology was ignored. No longer! Today I read an article called America's Real Criminal Element: Lead. Author Kevin Drum shows how adding lead to gas corresponded with crime increases and how removing it in the 1980s also corresponded with the Great Crime Decline starting in 1990. How? The article centers around Rick Nevin’s neurological research. From studies in 1999 to his 2007 paper about international crime trends and preschool lead exposure, Nevin shows the missing lead link over and over. He compares data from multiple countries. Same effect. Then last August new research confirmed Nevin’s hypothesis with correlations between neighborhood lead levels and violence in places like New Orleans, San Diego and Chicago.  Los Angeles Police HQ. Gardens to help with cleanup Scary stuff. Of course correlation doesn’t prove anything. But it suggests we’ve waited too long to start environmental soil clean-ups in neighborhoods, especially if crime is a result. Neurological studies do show that lead affects us at far lower levels than we thought and that childhood exposure at nearly any level can permanently reduce mental functioning. Drum and Nevin tell us lead is everywhere. It might be out of the gas pumps, but decades ago it settled in the soil from vehicle emissions. It still gets tracked indoors on our shoes. Perhaps I should have listened less to the mainstream and more to Jeffery so long ago? Today ends an AaaHaa year for scientific discovery. The pinnacle was the Higgs-Boson subatomic particle discovery - the so-called God Particle - at the LHC particle accelerator in Switzerland. What does it mean? I have no idea. But my science friends tell me the discovery is a very big deal; it confirms the standard model of physics. That will keep future theory on track so our descendants end up with better supercomputers, new kinds of energy, interstellar space flight…whatever. In any event, it does sound cool. Why does this matter in CPTED - crime prevention through environmental design? It matters because it shows how testing and staying true to a theory keeps practice pointed in the right direction. BALLISTIC GLASS The past few weeks I've been studying ballistic glazing and glass-clad polycarbonates for high-rise towers - to the non-engineers that's window target hardening for bombs and guns, the comfort food of security. Target hardening is important for my client. It keeps vulnerable assets safe and that's a good thing. Despite that we should never confuse target hardening with CPTED. To do so distorts the intention of the theory and we don't have social particle accelerators to get us back on track. The early CPTED literature has no reference to target hardening. Read Elisabeth Wood, Schlomo Angel, Jane Jacobs, Oscar Newman, and C. Ray Jeffery. It's not there. True, there were some government funders back then who insisted target hardening be included in grant proposals for some early evaluations. That's probably where the theory distortion began. Today that myth persists. I hear it described as a CPTED strategy for controlling access through mechanical means. I see it in calls for ballistic glass and guns to protect our schools or chain-link fences to protect front lawns. I see it in all kinds of bunker-building designs ascribed to CPTED. Target hardening is fine for security work and cutting crime opportunities. Also, there are some great websites with excellent advice. However it comes at a social and financial cost. CPTED guru Tom MacKay calls it the target hardening trap.  An early model of CPTED incorporating target hardening. The "myth" begins! If CPTED theory has morphed to include target hardening then obviously there has been too much wallowing in shallow thought pools. We need to get past these bunker-building distortions. TO THE SOURCE Howbeit we make the following New Year's Resolution: We reaffirm the original community-building intention of CPTED theory by those who created it. We go to the source: C. Ray Jeffery: "Loneliness and alienation need not characterize our urban life. Cities can also be designed so as to increase human contact of an intimate nature." (CPTED, 1971) Oscar Newman: "This book is an effort to formulate a new concept for geographic communities which reflect…the bringing together of separate communities to refashion urban environments [and] stabilize threatened neighborhoods." (Communities of Interest, 1980) Elisabeth Wood: "In the long run there is no substitute for the contributions that the tenants make to the welfare and economical management of a project…design can facilitate the social fabric out of which a tenant organization grows and by means of it can be effective." (Housing Design, 1961) Happy New Year. |
