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GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC
It's humbling to walk in a city with the population of Australia and a million more than New York City's metro. In North America it is The Giant! At over 21 million people Mexico City, where I am this week, is by some counts the world's 3rd largest and the most densely populated. It is impossible to define. For lovers of cities, it is irresistible. Consider this: Insane traffic chaos, easy winner of the Graffiti-City-of-the-Year award, a profusion of public statues of every artistic bent, evocative architecture and buses with women-only safe seats. There are thousands of street vendors clustering around subway entrances and they create lively, unplanned street markets that are both pickpocketing bonanzas and part of Mexico City's financial boom. Speaking of crime... Mexico city is considerably safer than cities like Houston, Washington DC and New Orleans. True, there are thugs mugging folks, especially in poorly regulated taxis and in nasty neighborhoods (Note to self: Crime Prevention 101 - Don't get drunk and wander aimlessly at night in nasty neighborhoods!) However, as elsewhere, staying safe boils down to simple street smarts. NARCO CRIME? What about the epidemic narco-violence we hear about? Crime maps show it is clustered elsewhere, like in the north of the country. Maybe Mexico City is a neutral zone? Maybe the pervasive police, security and military help? Or maybe the government is cooking the stat books, just like the NYPD during the Compstat Caper? Difficult to say. Ironically even the intellectually vapid press lauds Mexico City's success. USA Today and CNN suggest perceptions about crime are worse than the truth. I don't know the truth. What I do know is this: walking the streets of a few neighborhoods has been safe and fascinating. People are incredibly warm and easy-going. A CPTED CONFERENCE IN MEXICO I also know there are impressive ground-up, practical crime solutions underway, like CPTED. Last week I attended a conference of the Latin American chapter of the International CPTED Association at Mexico City's IberoAmerican University. There were 500 delegates from around the world, over 60 different sessions on dozens of new approaches. I saw some remarkable Mexican (and Latin American) creativity for building safer communities. Then there was the children representing youth programs throughout the country, many whom participated in the conference. My favorite was young musicians who entertained conference delegates. Pretty inspiring stuff. As for Mexico, I'll be back.
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GUEST BLOG - A previous blog on LED lighting introduced the concept of blue street lights and emerging research about crime. Ivana Dankova is a designer from Slovakia currently studying for her MSc in Medialogy in Denmark. In 2011 she completed graduate design research in Scotland on Glasgow’s blue light project. Here Ivana offers this blog on her research. A longer version will appear in the upcoming issue of CPTED Perspective, the ICA newsletter. **** A new innovation in street lighting has appeared in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1999 blue streetlights were installed in order to improve the overall aesthetics of the area as a part of a city enhancement program. During my design research for a graduate dissertation I investigated whether blue lights have any effect on people and if so, how they affect them. As with prior research in CPTED, my hypothesis is that the environment in which we live can influence our behavior. It can inspire us to act in certain ways. My Glasgow case study offered the chance to experience the unique atmosphere of a blue-lit street. Some sources mentioned that the crime surprisingly dropped after blue lights were installed. However, since I could not find further statistics on blue lights in Glasgow, I decided to explore it on my own. Even though crime reduction was not the initial purpose behind the installation, the street appeared to have a much calmer effect than surrounding streets with traditional sodium yellow/orange lighting. One possible theory explaining this effect is that since short wavelength blue light produces serotonin in the human brain (which is a calming hormone) it is possible this creates a calming impact on pedestrians. My observation is that people react positively to the lighting. The overall atmosphere is unique and feels more peaceful, calm, as if time moved slower.
I also learned following the Glasgow example, similar blue lights were installed in Japanese train stations. The number of suicides at Japanese train stations was high and increasing, but after the blue lights were installed the number dropped noticeably. This reduction in suicides due to blue lights is spreading to other locations due to its positive results. Blue lights definitely provide a new tactic for designers looking to calm outdoor locations. I just attended the International Problem Oriented Policing conference in Providence, Rhode Island, the showcase for exceptional police work. Over 500 cops from all over the world gathered to share innovations for cutting crime. This year's winner of the Herman Goldstein problem solving award was the property crime squad from New South Wales, the first-ever win by police in Australia. They tackled an epidemic of ATM "ram raids" in shopping malls. All over Sydney criminals are using vehicles to smash through mall doorways at night. They'd then ram ATM machines and drag them off to a safe location for looting. This unique brand of theft and burglary is now world-wide. In Sydney it resulted in millions of dollars in theft and damage. Their analysis showed access control bollards outside the mall doors were ineffective, yet no ram raids occurred where bollards were inside the mall at ATMs. That led to installing internal bollards across the city. They added enhanced reporting, crime prevention education, and other CPTED target hardening to improve their response. Within two years this cut the yearly number of incidents from 68 to zero. A year later when offenders by-passed bollards and used sophisticated gas explosions to break into ATMs, police employed their analytical approach. In this case the private sector installed gas detection and disabling equipment. Again they cut the attacks to zero from a peak of 54. Except they did it in half the time. We may not always be able to predict new crime methods. But when they arise, old solutions won't work. Analysis does. That’s why we insist CPTED practitioners spend more time in problem diagnosis and not waste time in guesswork. 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. Who is Nick Holonyak Jr.? You probably don't even know. But nowadays it is impossible to ignore his invention. In 1963 Holonyak invented the Light Emitting Diode (LED). A few years ago Randy Atlas blogged here on LEDs in CPTED. Today LEDs are flooding our street scenes. Those eerie, brilliant and glaring LEDs are showing up everywhere from Manilla to Sydney to Las Vegas. Oakland California, for example, is replacing 241 sodium street lights for LEDs in high crime locations (chosen by police). Cutting crime with LEDs? Do LEDs cut crime any better than other types of street lights. Or at all? What do we actually know? We know LED color rendition is excellent and it tends to spread light more evenly. LEDs can create glare in rainy or snowy conditions. Because LEDs give off very little heat, I am told they tend to ice over in ice storms, something heat-generating sodium lights seldom do. I can also personally report you'll burn your retinas if you look directly at them (not one of my Einstein moments). The brighter-is-better crowd loves LEDs. Power authorities are thrilled due to 60% energy savings. LED companies are drooling at booming sales.
Yet, there is a conundrum. On one hand we promote an evidence-based, scientific approach to crime prevention. On the other we adopt LEDs without specific evidence about the effect of LEDs on crime or perceptions of safety. The best existing research does show positive effects in somesituations for lighting in general. That refers only to lighting quantity, not quality. There is also research showing the reverse. It's okay to adopt energy-saving lights. It's delusional to think they'll automatically cut crime. They might. Or they might make things worse. There is a great article in the latest issue of The Atlantic, Brasilia - A Vision of Concrete. It reminded me of a story years ago from my planning classes on modernism. At 3pm, March 16, 1972, CPTED was born in the death of architectural modernism. That's the date of the first explosion to demolish the Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects in St. Louis. Built in the finest traditions of modernist theory, Pruitt-Igoe soon decayed into a crime-ridden ghetto and festered for years with low vacancy. Demolition was the final epitath for a concept ill-suited to social housing. Those explosions began less than a year after C. Ray Jeffery's book CPTED and the same year of Oscar Newman's book, Defensible Space. It was Newman who described the social damage to livability from Pruitt-Igoe’s bleak modernist buildings, acres of no-man's land and blight. It’s a story of how not-to-do planning. Except not everyone listened. Almost decade after Pruitt-Igoe started, another modernist architect planned the city of Brasilia, Brazil. Controversial from the beginning, Brasilia stands today an icon to modernist architecture and rational planning. While the Atlantic article caresses the architecture of Brasilia, it brutalizes it's planning. "The city is quite correctly regarded as a colossally wrong turn in urban planning." And now, in time for Brazil's World Cup in 2014 and the Rio Olympics in 2016, it's due for a make-over. It's hard to say whether crime in Brasilia arises from the modernist nightmare that infected Pruitt-Igoe, from Brazil's epidemic gang violence, from 9 million unregistered firearms, or something else. It was probably all the above. But if we've learned anything from Pruitt-Igoe surely we’ve learned SafeGrowth-style organic neighborhood design and collaborative planning is integral to safer streets! Rails to Trails Conservatory "Is It Safe" video on bike trail safety This past week I worked on a bike trail and crime project. Reflecting on my last blog, some old questions resurfaced: What is it about bike trails that trigger fears? Do bike trails suffer crime? Absolutely! Are they a necessary asset for cities? Absolutely! How can we build bike and walking trails to promote safety? I've blogged on trails before; Florida's famous Pinellas Trail, Eugene, Oregon's extensive urban bike trails, and BC's Gabriola Island. The Rails to Trails Conservancy/National Parks Service commissioned a study on bike trail safety in 1998. Unsurprisingly they offer a typical CPTED buffet: trim vegetation, minimizing hiding spaces, lighting, emergency phones, patrols, access for emergency vehicles, and maintenance. CPTED prescriptions like that are fine. But prescriptions without the diagnosis are like a buffet without vegetables - tasty but not terribly healthy. And none of it guarantees anything. Crime can and still does happen on bike trails. Seattle KOMO News 4 newsclip of bike trail through "the Jungle" What do we actually know? In 1987 one of the first-ever studies on bike trail crime reported a remarkably low crime rate near and on bike trails in Eugene, Oregon. It also shocked detractors by reporting increased property values for adjacent trail properties. A decade later the same results were reported in a study in Omaha, Nebraska and again in 2000 another Rails to Trails study confirmed those results. What all these studies show is less than 5% of all residents living adjacent to trails reported crime or burglary. In the Rails to Trails study only 3% of 373 trails surveyed reported major crimes. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. There are ways to design bike trails that simply displace troubles from one place to another. The Seattle news video above suggests exactly this problem in a new bike trail running through "the Jungle". Beelzebub, it seems, has made an appearance. The London 2012 Olympics are almost over. Aside from some unsympathetic rain (like Vancouver's 2010 winter Olympics), things seem successful. In spite of a major gaffe with a private security company (the military came to the rescue), the Games are fascinating and safe. Was CPTED involved? Back in 2000 myself and Australian social planner Wendy Sarkissian provided CPTED training for the Sydney 2000 Olympics design staff. To our knowledge it was the first (and last) time an Olympics specifically employed CPTED strategies. No longer. This year the largest transport system in Europe, Transport for London, is benefiting from CPTED training. The IRA years gave London a head start as authorities created anti-terrorist designs like see-through trash receptacles making it difficult to hide bombs. Now those lessons are expanded through the work of my old friend Dr. Tim Pascoe (an international director of the ICA) and his colleague Kate Broadhurst. They have presented a specialized training-for-trainers course to transport officials. Their training combines CPTED along with skills to identify potential targets that offenders might select. This allows transport officials to more efficiently deploy CPTED at high risk locations. Transport for London brings hundreds of thousands of Olympic fans safely to the games each day. The full story is in the latest CPTED Perspective newsletter. What to do about trees? You know, the CO2-sucking kind. Do they influence crime opportunity? I doubt they cause or solve it. Do they matter at all? I've written about the crime and tree theory before. New research calls for a revisit. Yesterday my Safe Cascadia colleague Tod Schneider found the latest evidence. It was a study called "The relationship between tree canopy and crime rates across and urban-rural gradient in the greater Baltimore region". First, what does CPTED have to say? CPTED guidelines generally mention trees only in passing. A typical example is the Tempe, Arizona CPTED guidelines on the Florida DOCA website. Those guidelines, as others like them, practically ignore canopy. They do suggest pruning for better sight lines and street lighting. But mostly trees are invisible in guidelines, unlike in the real world where they are not. When urban planner Elisabeth Miller and I wrote Saskatoon's CPTED guidelines we spent a bit more time on trees. We drew on research showing the positive effects of trees, particularly a recent Portland, Oregon study. Our conclusion: "Tall trees, especially those older trees with large trunks, are often associated with beauty and should be retained." And what does this latest research say? In the June issue of the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, US Forest Service researchers concluded "a 10% increase in tree canopy was associated with a roughly 12% decrease in crime." It's not the definitive word, of course. Yet their tree/crime relationship held statistically for public and private areas. It also held for different socioeconomic neighborhoods. It didn't matter if low crime rich areas had more tree canopies and poorer areas didn't. They controlled for other factors like public versus private land. Same result. One exception - a patch of industrial, abandoned areas where canopies made things worse. Yet they were the exception not the rule. Mostly the study results suggest tree canopies contribute to safety. What to do about trees? Plant, prune and leave them alone. Much to my surprise, I just realized this SafeGrowth blog is now three years old. I have spent little time on philosophy. But If I did, this is how it would go… Some tell me homelessness has no place in CPTED. Some say you can design out crime and ignore politics, policing, or broken communities. Others want details on CCTV, graffiti-removal and lighting but nothing on privacy, street art and a beautiful starry night. I disagree. I just watched Tom Shadyac's documentary, I AM. It's a personal story about the science of connection and unity. Shadyac is the most unlikely storyteller having directed The Nutty Professor and Ace Ventura. Then a bike crash left him for dead. He didn't die. Instead he had one of those awakening moments and I AM was born. I AM's mission is a global trek to discover what is wrong in the world and what we can do about it. It is named after philosopher G.K. Chesterton's idea. When asked to write an essay to summarize what was wrong with the world, Chesterton wrote: I am. Other films of this ilk turn flakey and saccharine. Not Shadyac. He interviews luminaries like business guru Margaret Wheatley, archbishop Desmond Tutu, philosopher Noam Chomsky, environmentalist David Suzuki, historian Howard Zinn. With game-changing elections now underway in the US, France, and Mexico, I AM is timely. As Zinn says, in times of rapid change, homelessness, environmental crisis and violence you cannot stay neutral on a moving train. COLLABORATION IS IN OUR DNA I AM shone brightest in the science on connection and unity, particularly how the new biology reveals collaboration as the rule of nature. Nature, it was once thought, is a process of competition and conflict. The early ecology of crime theories suggested that too (gangs fighting for turf). But modern ecology has moved beyond. I AM shows while competition happens, it isn't inevitable and it certainly isn't natural. Connection and collaboration is in our DNA. Mixed land uses and social spaces do that. Well designed communal places like Portland's Intersection Repair does that too. Gated communities and target hardening does not. Even if we must occasionally put up a fence or camera, I AM reminds us...starry nights matter. GUEST BLOG Steven Woolrich is an Alberta CPTED consultant and board member of the International CPTED Association. He is a frequent contributor to SafeGrowth. He currently authors the Target Crime blog linked on LIKEMINDED. This is an excerpt from his upcoming 2012 article for the ICA newsletter CPTED Perspective. **** Activity support helps generate more buzz on our streets and can create more interaction between all types of people. Music is certainly a way of generating interest on the street and for me the piano is the ultimate instrument for delivering a great melody. After hearing about street pianos being placed around New York City, I figured why not Red Deer, Alberta. After speaking with serveral business owners in the area it was decided. The piano would rest in a small alcove outside a local restaurant on Ross Street, the main drag through downtown Red Deer. It was named the Ross Street piano. Interest in the project grew quickly with several carpenters offering to build a new deck for the piano with building materials being provided by the local Co-op at no cost. The piano was installed on July 28th, 2010 and remained in place until the first part of October. Several City officials played a tune or two, including the Mayor. In the weeks that followed many local people dropped by to tickle the ivory keys and sing along with others. The piano was there for anyone to use, day or night. Business owners and those playing the instrument would cover it up at night before going home. The Ross Street Piano will be available again this summer from June through August and will now highlight some local artwork as well. The piano will allow artists to showcase their talents with a new theme each year. Last week was a very good week for SafeGrowth. Fort McMurray, a city of over 100,000 is hub of the world-famous Alberta oil sands project. Established in 1870 as a Hudson's Bay trading post, today's Ft. Mac (officially the Municipality of Wood Buffalo) is ground zero for the world's biggest modern Gold Rush (...oil rush)! As in times of old, Rushes lead to incredible population growth, crime and disorder. (Projected growth is over 230,000 in 15 years). Unlike times of old, Ft. Mac is taking steps to deal with it. For the past year, myself and urban design specialist Megan Carr have been working with senior planner Tracey Tester and her talented crime prevention team to institute a new development plan. Our goal: create a neighborhood-based, collaborative plan based on crime prevention science. In other words, SafeGrowth. This past week the city council voted that crime prevention and reduction plan into life. Even the media, it seems, has caught the excitement. News reports describe the plan. Congratulations to Tracey and her team. I met Petra Warman from the Berlin Police at the International CPTED Association conference year before last. She is a talented CPTED specialist and police officer who heads up CPTED initiatives in her city. This is an excerpt from Petra’s article in the forthcoming issue of CPTED PERSPECTIVE the ICA newsletter.
**** "One of the most fascinating aspects about Berlin is the inner city parks, which range from 970 square feet to over 700 acres. Obviously public space and parkland in Berlin has a major role in the participation of social life. Well-used public parks and recreation areas are key to ensuring they are successful. This depends firstly on the whether the intended user group adopts the offered layout. It also depends on the proper use of surveillance and safety including natural access control, natural surveillance and territorial reinforcement. Berliners want to be part of the design of their environment. They demand participation and are also prepared to give us a hand when it comes to the work. In all this work, accessibility is the key word. Berlins’ parks are not fenced and therefore open to everybody all the time. This demands a strong identification of the space. Resident’s identification with their public parks is the ideal way to encourage their participation. Their engagement makes it possible to keep it that way." This past week I indulged an old pastime: riding Toronto's subway system. It looked similar to 25 years ago (albeit more worn). Similar, that is except for security provisions.
Back in 1988 I rode the system with transit, police and a victim's group called METRAC. As part of my grad work in environmental criminology, I researched a new technique for collecting fear and CPTED data - the Safety Audit. Today that technique is in practically every Canadian city and now even the United Nations promotes it worldwide. Yet still today many CPTED practitioners confuse the Safety Audit with CPTED surveys or checklists. Safety Audits are about finding out what local people feel and fear about a location. Before then site-specific fear data was neither collected nor targeted for fixing. Some CPTED folk still don’t. I was pleased to see dozens of Safety Audit innovations still in place. One of them was the Designated Waiting Area on every subway platform where passengers wait for trains in a marked and specially lit area. Each DWA has an emergency phone to security and is monitored by cameras. In 1988 there were few areas like this in subways anywhere in the world. A subway (or any public transit) where people feel safer means more people take it at night. That reduces isolation and increases ridership - a win/win. Along with the Washington DC subway (also with extensive CPTED innovations) Toronto's subway today is among the safest in the world. How useful is natural surveillance for crime prevention if people see, but don't care? If crooks know people don't care, or are too afraid to act, why bother with street lighting and eyes on the street? The video above shows by-standers in New York having fun with a free mega-phone. True, there's no crime in-progress. Still, it does sound like they care. The cynically-inclined might predict mega-phone abuse, or theft. Maybe, but not here. On this day altruism rules. It wasn't always so. On another New York day, actually the evening of March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was stabbed to death on the street near her home. Her murder was the random act of a predator. The New York Times reported 38 people watched out their windows and did nothing. For decades, "we don't want to get involved"became the motto for urban decay and alienation. It laid the foundation for a whole new social psychology - proxemics. Oscar Newman built defensible space out of it. Today we call it CPTED. Now the by-stander effect is understood. In a twist of irony it turns out the 38 witness theory is probably false. Reinvestigation revealed only 3 people saw small portions of Kitty's murder, some called police immediately and, due to poor lighting, most misunderstood what was happening. I wonder...with better lighting and territorial control of semi-public space on that street, would Kitty Genovese be alive today to play with street megaphones? A few years ago, when Richard Florida suggested whole new urban forms will grow out of the Recession, it seemed far away. A half century ago, when Jane Jacobs suggested active and diverse streets can cut crime, who knew it would take so long to catch on. Bike corrals are among the first bits of evidence suggesting both are well underway. Bike corrals are on-street parking strips with parking for up to 20 bikes in parking spaces normally used for one or two cars. They bring more customers to their street than car parking provides. They pollute less and cut gas costs. For CPTED, corrals provide better natural surveillance and less opportunity for theft. Brooklyn, NY has just opened its first bike corral (sometimes called parking swaps). Portland Oregon has over 70. My urban design friend Megan Carr has just put me on to Streetfilms. It's a fantastic organization with over 400 free educational films about inspired transportation like bike corrals. Check them out HERE. A few days in Disneyland proves a welcoming distraction. Disney is an example of fantasy story-telling and juvenile adventure from a company that practically invented the concept.
Most interesting was seeing Disneyland streets at night. Many are quite dark. Except for Main Street it is the surrounding buildings that show up in neon splendor. The point is to make streets predictable to allow easy walking without stumbling (I did anyway). Then it's a simple matter to highlight surrounding features with spectacular lighting and beautiful reflections. This has the subtle effect of drawing you in to have a closer look. The ambient spillover light is more than adequate to navigate the streets. For anyone obsessed on lighting streets, Disney shows how you can do safety and not light streets at all. True, this is easy when people arrive in families seeking cartoon fantasies. How angry can you get in the company of Goofy, Tinker Bell and Mickey? It's a self-selection that breeds natural surveillance. If you're up for some high-falutin Foucauldian theory about this read Shearing and Stenning's 1984 article - From the Panopticon to Disney World: The Development of Discipline. When reading this it helps to resist the duh reflex. "Disney is an exemplar of modern private corporate policing". Translation: Walk for days through hundreds of exhibits, restaurants, and recreational areas without fear of crime by following Disney's rules. Duh. Disney does this, they say, by embedding social control into the physical and management systems so that control becomes consensual. Like lighting the buildings and not the streets. For my money, spent on a holiday in Disneyland, the corporate order of Mickey and Minnie is a fun reprieve. And if I tire of Disney's subtle corporate order, I just leave. Happy Holidays. CPTED is 40 this year.
Professor C. Ray Jeffery's book "CPTED" was published in 1971. Oscar Newman's "Defensible Space" in 1972. That's four decades of preventing crime. In an age before prevention was situational, crime was designed out, policing was intelligent or activities routine, CPTED led the way. Of course Newman and Jeffery stood on the shoulders of giants. A decade earlier there was Jane Jacobs, Elizabeth Wood and Schlomo Angel. By 1971 Jacobs had already invented territoriality and eyes on the street. Wood had already written on the merits of lively diverse neighborhoods (and flower-growing contests to brighten them up). All this...decades before the broken windows theory reinvented that wheel. CPTED wasn't the first kid on the prevention block. Police have always done prevention (still do), most of it unevaluated, superficial and generic. None of it place-based or specific. Scholars made contributions to prevention, especially 1930s sociologists like Robert Shaw at the University of Chicago who created the Chicago Area Project. (Still running, still successful.) Giants also came from geography. From 1968 geographers began writing books on place-based crime. Led by Harries in the US, Scott in Australia, and Herbert in the UK, the geography of crime later became environmental criminology. It probably didn't prevent much crime. But it added to our understanding and moved the place-is-important debate squarely into CPTED turf. Which brings us back to CPTED and its birthday. It's worth learning what the pioneers actually said. Then I came across this rare, and oddly haunting, film of Oscar Newman speaking to the inaugural session of the United Nations Habitat conference in 1976 Vancouver. Sharing street lighting ideas on Facebook recently it occurred to me how often we forget that to be truly safe a place must not be lightened. It must be enlightened. Big difference. Example: the work sent to me recently by my friend Lorraine Gamman from London's St. Martin's College of Art and Design. Lorraine sent links to alleyway projects done by Doug Tomkin and Mark Titmarsh at the Design Out Crime centre at Sydney's University of Technology. Apparently they are hanging out on street corners. They call it Living Laneways. I call it Laneway Chic. Their rationale? (Graffiti and lighting people, Listen Up): "Too often measures against crime…can have almost as unpleasant an effect as the things they prevent. The Living Laneways project set out to deter graffiti without alienating those who were responsible for creating it (through) the involvement of respected artists in the street-art community…" Clearly, simple and chic laneway painting can enlighten a space. Elaborate murals are not always needed. Mark Titmarsh has a web document called Living Laneways - City Life.It explains some DOC work in Sydney. Check out his tagline - "respect, express, enlighten!" If street beautification and prevention means anything, it means that. Apologies for some overindulgence. No stories this week. No new observations. Just a rant about calling a thing for what it is. "Where does it hurt?" asks the doctor. "Stomach". "Let me see if I can feel where the pain is." "It started this morning after breakfast." "What did you eat?" "Eggs, Here, I brought leftovers." "I'll send them to the lab. When tests come back, we'll prescribe the right medicine." It's called allopathic medicine. Symptoms - Diagnosis - Prescription. It's based on symptoms. Same in crime prevention. Crime shows up. Cops or prevention folk do analysis. A strategy emerges and they try it out. Allopathic crime prevention. We all do it, me included: situational prevention, CPTED, problem-oriented policing, Design Out Crime. Symptoms first! Makes sense, right? Except for what's missing… ...prevention! Allopathic prevention prevents subsequent incidents and that's good. Just like going to the doctor. But it's not really "prevention" when it hasn't prevented it. Medicine is growing out of its allopathic adolescence. It is evolving into integrative medicine - nutrition, stress management, alternative therapies (good family medicine probably always did that). It teaches us how to live a healthy lifestyle to prevent illness. Meanwhile, far too much crime prevention still envisions safety as a product of strategies applied to a problem. Just like allopathic medicine. Here's the thing; most serious crime emerges from dysfunctional families, broken neighborhoods, and personal troubles like drugs. You prevent it by getting into those places to help neighborhoods help themselves. Let's call allopathic prevention what it is - crime repression. It represses what emerges and hacks at the branches. Prevention digs at the roots. Rant over. Pondering the Occupy Wall Street protests this week I re-read a fascinating book: Capitalism 3.0 - A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. Places are unsafe when no one cares about them. Or when people are too afraid to walk there. That's why graffiti writers target abandoned spaces. Implied territorial ownership of public places is a very big deal, which is why CPTED practitioners spend so much time reinforcing it. Capitalism 3.0 provides another way. Author Peter Barnes begins by updating Tragedy of the Commons, an old planning motif stolen from biology: "our current operating system gives too much power to profit-maximizing corporations that devour our commons and distribute their profit to a sliver of the population." In short, corporations pay little, if anything, for using our commons. Says Barnes, we pay for the commons. Corporations get a free ride. He then offers a fascinating idea; hold corporations accountable and return value to citizens in a market-based, citizen-owned, legal entity called a commons trust. An Alaskan trust called the Permanent Fund already does exactly that. Each citizen owns shares in the Permanent Fund which uses oil revenues to invest. Every year those investments pay dividends to each citizen of the state. How many governments give money back to their citizens? Barnes thinks the commons trust will work for all kinds of commons. Think of the possibilities: * 700 community gardens in New York alone. * 4,000 farmers markets across the US. * Large retail malls with acres of parking but no social or cultural value Read Capitalism 3.0. It's like putting on a new pair of glasses. 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. ...and the winner of Graffiti-Mess-of-the-Year award goes to (drum roll...) Victoria, British Columbia! I've spent the last few days visiting neighborhoods across this fascinating city. I wrote a similar graffiti story in this blog a few years back including research on curbing the problem. The best prevention resource available is probably the ICA guideline Graffiti: Local solutions to local problems - guide books for design professionals. None of that seems to have mattered. Victoria still reeks of graffiti tags like some biblical plague of locusts. True, there are much bigger cities with more tags. There are also more troubled cities where gangs tag their hood like medieval warlords claiming turf, what Atlas calls "offensive space". Victoria is none of that, which in my mind makes it so inexcusable. Victoria is a mid-sized, world-class city with booming tourism. It has high quality-of-life, good schools, and spectacular natural scenery. Victoria also suffers persistent and pervasive tagging far beyond what I've seen in other cities of similar size. I'm not speaking of street art that the BC Graffiti website calls "momentary pockets of expression". I'm not describing political graffiti that might make the odd alley risqué - even bohemian. I'm talking about butt-ugly paint-spray for no reason but vandalism. Case in point: the underground BC Graffiti website has 54 graf photos from cities across the province - 39 are from Victoria (to be fair, those pics show much higher quality graffiti than I saw the past few days). Obviously in graf-writer world, Victoria is still Queen. Why doesn't Victoria regulate the sale of paint-spray cans as elsewhere? Should we blame the catch-and-release British Columbia court system? The lack of restorative justice opportunities? Do we blame the decline of problem-oriented policing training there? Victoria cannot be blamed for a lack of trying. The national anti-graffiti "Tags" conference ran here in 2009 (sadly, and obviously, to no avail). Conference lessons either didn't work or fell on deaf ears. There are diligent paint-outs to clean the mess. Victoria also has an anti-graffiti program. Unfortunately, all this is for naught. Tags are everywhere. Has this city passed some graffiti tipping point after which preventive tactics fail? Does such a tipping point exist? It does for other types of crime (now THAT should be the topic of research). One bright spot: neighborhood pole painting projects. It's a neighborhood capacity-building initiative in which residents adopt hundreds of telephone and power poles and paint them with murals. Those poles were graffiti free and kind of cool. If only we could get that kind of creativity on post boxes, walls, benches, signs, windows… "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. Depressed from riot news, I silence static from clueless TV pundits by tuning down the volume. Just watching images it seems the worst violence and looting happens at night. Biased news reporting perhaps? I wonder how street lighting impacts the locations of violence and looting? Can we use that knowledge for prevention? There are online clues. There is a problem-oriented guide for police on improved street lighting. That guide is less about tactical design and more about analysis, evaluation, and public support (all valuable, especially for police). It lists 8 US studies in which half show no impact and 3 UK studies that show more promise. There are 2 examples of police-led lighting improvements, one of which cut thefts from cars from 27 to 4. For urban designers and developers looking for specifics you'll find more tactical designs in the ICA guidebook for professionals, CPTED and Lighting: reducing crime, improving security by Randy Atlas. In addition to diagrams, photometric maps, and site photos, Atlas provides details on perimeter lighting, new technologies like LEDs, lighting controls, and the IESNA lighting guidelines for minimum lighting levels. LEDs to the rescue According to The Atlantic magazine, the yellowish glare of sodium street lighting may be fading forever in favor of low-energy, white LEDs and crime had nothing to do with it. Energy saving and the recession did. There has been an explosion of LED (light emitting diode) technology. Cities like Seattle and Pittsburg have been racing to install LEDs. LA will replace 140,000 of the city’s 209,000 streetlights with LEDs. I have blogged on lighting and crime before, especially in Toronto,Oakland, and Los Angeles. Now Arlington, Virginia is replacing 4,200 high pressure sodium street lights with LEDs. Apparently they may switch out all 12,000 street lights to cut costs. According to the LA Times, LED technology still has glitches. No matter. The Great Recession is charting our future in ways we don't expect. For better or worse, street light LEDs are on our horizon. |
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