SAFEGROWTH® BLOG
regular contributors
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC
GREGORY SAVILLE · MATEJA MIHINJAC
No doubt considerable fear exists on the streets of London after this week's riots. Whole books are written on urban crime and fear. What about rural places far from urban mayhem? The Gabriola Island murders from last blog suggest rural crimes too ferment fears of public places like nature trails. This is ironic. Parks and trails are statistically far safer than bars at closing time or inside homes when domestic strife turns violent. Study after study tell us public trails are safe, such as Tod Schneider's article on bike trails back in 2000. Yet those are urban studies. Research has yet to examine rural nature trails and crime. CPTED was born, after all, in the city. I was recently interviewed by a horticulture magazine about trees and crime asking these very questions. The article, Trees Thwart Shady Behavior, described a study on crime and residential trees by examining 2,813 single-family homes in Portland, Oregon. Controlling for visual appearance, presence of barriers, and street activity, the study showed "houses fronted with more street trees had lower crime rates". That was all crime rates, including vandalism and burglary. Read it HERE.
0 Comments
Small towns are safe. Big cities are not. That's the myth. Like many small communities in the Gulf Islands off the British Columbia coast, Gabriola Island is draped in lush rain-forests and magnificent beach scenery. It has miles of walking trails and hiking paths. Gabriola's 4,000 residents have the lowest crime ratesanywhere. Until now. With most myths, facts intrude. This week one shattered Gabriola's calm. A knife attack left a mother dead and her son in hospital. Residents were ordered indoors and to stay off the trails. Today police apprehend a suspect hiding in some bushes near the scene of the crime. This is Gabriola's second murder in 6 years. Two murders, of course, does not a trend make. Low numbers tell volumes about low crime risks. Still, small towns do not necessarily produce low crime. Counting the current murder, Gabriola's murder rate is 25 per 100,000 (16 times higher than the rest of the country). What can be done? I've blogged before about the catch-and-release courts in British Columbia. After sentencing, the murderer in Gabriola's last homicideserved 2 years in prison (he beat his roommate to death with a hatchet). Courts are clearly not in the safety or prevention business. Walking outdoors next week may seem different on Gabriola. More frightening than last week. Lockdowns and wandering killers can have that effect. True, these murders were indoors. Yet fear is insidious and civic places need a public space. How can small towns project confidence onto public spaces like paths and parks? Can we design out this problem? Do we really want cameras on hiking paths? Is this the price we must pay for vigilance? Bureaucratic banality or Mayoral chutzpah? I recently learned about a remarkable urban experiment in Brazil.
Prior blogs discuss beautification and the CPTED strategy called image ("management and maintenance"). While image cannot stop crime, it can trigger positive change. The town of Celebration illustrates how new urbanists and their form-based zoning take that one step beyond. Sao Paulo has another. In 2007, Sao Paulo, one of the world's largest cities, instituted a radical experiment in beautification: a ban on unsanctioned, outdoor advertising. No billboards, no posters on buildings, and no brand advertising on busses. It is called the Clean City Law (Lei Cidade Limpa). Unlikely instigator of the law was conservative mayor Gilberto Kassab. Four years later, in spite of plans to reintroduce a few isolated advertising zones (and unsuccessful legal challenges by the advertising industry), the law is deemed successful. They have removed 15,000 billboards and levied fines of $8 million for companies violating the new law. In a modern, free-market democracy a city without public advertising is an anathema. Yet, the law remains. The difference between pointless and consequential in law is whether it works. True, they are still working to clean up unsightly blank billboards. Sao Paulo remains poor and gang infested. None of that, of course, is what the Clean City Law was about. It was about visual pollution and civic pride in the public realm. Survey's indicate over 70% of Sao Paulo's population love the new law. Beautification can make a place seem like someone cares. It's a small, consequential step to help residents feel pride in their city. And as we know, a sense of place and pride is the first step in the long journey to neighborhood engagement. A number of years ago I was asked to write-up a government study on CPTED strategies in US cities. The results were asymmetric. Lacking political gravitas, most cities did little to implement CPTED. Arguably, it seemed like one of the greatest failures of any prevention policy in recent history (three-strikes laws notwithstanding). I say arguably because failure is a generalization and generalizations can be a cagey thing. For example, the study also revealed some municipalities had taken major steps forward, now described in Atlas's book 21st Century Security and CPTED in a chapter titled "Implementing CPTED". Interestingly, the government study did show one CPTED strategy proliferated - management and maintenance, what Newman called Image. That was probably because Image emulates planning trends like beautification, streetscaping, and the form-based zoning of new urbanism (a trend now at risk in places like Winter Park, Florida). Though it cannot stop crime, it can trigger positive change. Beautification is not to be ignored. I recently took photos in San Diego and San Francisco showing how simple beautification can be. Then a Canadian CPTED colleague (and International CPTED Association board member), Steve Woolerich, sent me this fascinating clip of a street piano in his Alberta city. Check it out HERE. What happens when you build low income residential units upwards and not outwards? Those familiar with CPTED will recall Oscar Newman's Defensible Space work in the 1970s and 1960s describing how this is usually a bad idea. In places that do just that sort of thing like New York, Chicago and Toronto, you end up with vertical poverty. The United Way in Toronto has just released a fascinating study called Vertical Poverty documenting disparity in 3-D urban space. Toronto has for decades tried to make the sprawling and cost inefficient suburbs more efficient with high rise residential. Vertical Poverty tells one chapter in that sad tale. It also describes the San Romanoway apartments solution that led to some of the earliest breakthroughs in SafeGrowth. Check it out HERE. Why do people toss shoes over power and telephone lines? Urban legend (and one of my own former blogs...oops!) suggests it's to mark illegal drug sale locations or gang activity. Really? I have dangling shoes in my community and yet we have no gang activity and practically no street drug sales. A terrific new BBC documentary, New York's Hanging Sneakers, aired recently and discovered no clear answer. Drug deal locations are only one of many possible reasons. A recent article in the Toronto Star followed four cases of dangling shoes and found four different stories - none conclusive. Cops typically describe dangling shoes and drug sales as urban myth. In the Toronto Star article one Toronto drug cop says, in his experience, the drug explanation is bunk. That's neither scientific nor surprising. Obviously drug dealers would spend only a very short time near their dangling shoe marker and probably depart long before cops figure it out. To complicate matters, dangling shoes can mean anything from a local fad, a prank, drug activity or the death of a gang member. Snopes.com confirms the multiple explanation theory, a theory that started in 1996 when one writer described 14 different possibilities. Truth is, it depends. It depends on street culture. It depends on the prevalence of gangs. It depends on bored local youth. Truth is, without a proper CPTED risk assessment, you can only guess. And as we know in prevention, guessing is never a good idea. Sometimes things come along that are...well, just plain cool. I've written before about the design against crime movement in the UK. They have shown us how to use inventive ergonomic design to curb bad behavior, reduce loitering on public benches and cut crime at bike racks. My friend and colleague, UK professor Lorraine Gamman, recently sent photos of her talented colleagues work at the Design Against Crime Research Centre in London. They have come up with a method to cut ID theft (shoulder surfing) and ATM crime through a privacy mat. It's simple enough. Stick a 3M mat to demarcate territory around ATM machines. Says one article, the mats can "be laid directly onto pavements or the floors of shopping centers. They take just 20 minutes to lay and no planning permission if they unbranded." People are "controlled" through subtle messaging to keep far enough away to protect your PIN and far enough to make it difficult to snatch and run with your cash. It won't stop everyone, but I'm told it seems to work. Why? The first thing you learn in CPTED is something called proxemics - how people use their own sense of personal space to ensure their privacy. That subtle messaging is precisely what privacy mats accomplish, albeit in a subtle and inexpensive fashion. I've said before territoriality doesn't happen without social capital. When it comes to small scale design, it seems I'm wrong. According to one European ATM security survey, over 85% of respondents indicate privacy spaces help reduce crime at ATMs. Loraine tells me more rigorous evaluation research is underway. Like I said - simple, cheap and effective. Cool! I just finished reading the 2004 book, Christian Parenti's The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror. It shows how public surveillance started with a trickle and turned into a torrent. While generally well-written, he lapses into some obtuse theory and heavy-handed politics. Still, the message is worth the torment. Parenti starts by echoing a common sentiment: "what harm is caused by the proliferation of everyday surveillance?" He ends by concluding: "There are risks in social anonymity, but the risks of an omniscient and omnipotent state and corporate power are far worse." The story travels the fascinating, historical journey of surveillance: metal slave tags during the antebellum years, the birth of the mug shot, biometrics and face-recognition technology, DNA fingerprinting, invasive Internet cookies and so forth. I was especially fascinated by the sections on CCTV. TV's NCIS will have us believe Big Brother can see all. Parenti's research suggests there is a reality gap the size of the Grand Canyon when it comes to the effectiveness of existing CCTV technology. Still, it proliferates. Over 30% of American high schools have CCTV. Like a growing number of other cities, Washington DC Police use cameras for surveillance of public streets. Then there is the UK! I've reported in previous blogs about millions of CCTV in British cities, London's Ring of Steel, and the role of CCTV in the crime triangle. Parenti claims those millions of cameras scanning for decades haven't caught a single terrorist and are still a threat to civil liberties. Findings like this make Soft Cage a worthy read. Conceptually, Parenti draws on the unintelligible, circular theories of French historian Michael Foucault. One painful sample: the fetishism of home security, while clearly being about actual security and target-hardening, is also a cargo cult of individual defense against social disintegration of the sort described by Katz [where] imaginary, or magical, forms of agency are acted out in the face of massive and nebulous threats. Apparently Parenti has never been victim of a home invasion or burglary. He also makes some fundamental errors such as misidentifying Oscar Newman as a promoter of target hardening and completely missing the entire crime prevention through environmental design movement. It would seem fiscal cost cutting at Soft Cage publisher Basic Books ran too deep in their editing and fact-checking departments. The book could also use updating. I'm thinking of Joseph Morales and his presentation Not Quite Amish at last year's ICA CPTED conference. Joseph described how his community organization democratized public CCTV and became an effective crime prevention tool. Overall, Soft Cage is worth the read. Surveillance has its place. We just have to make sure we choose the right place. Books like this help us choose. This week I'm at the University of Sydney, Australia for a Crime and SafeGrowth workshop. It gives me a chance to wander the streets of this beautiful city and compare it to my experience last year and a decade ago. In 1998 Sydney was a city of graffiti. Last year, not so much. Much has happened in Sydney, and in the world of graffiti, in the past year. Some of the trends appeared in blogs I've written on train graffiti,murals, and the ICA Graffiti Guidebook. Graffiti is called graff by practitioners of this underground über-chic, street artists, wanna-be street artists, and just plain sweaty vandals. Graff is pandemic in both virtual and real space all over the world. Take for example the stencil graffiti trend started by Britain's anarchist Robin Hood, Banksy. Stencil graffiti now makes appearances in art galleries and in art books. Graff-folk gather on websites to advertise their wares or simply look for cities to "practice". Says a graff-writer in one post: I'm from Los Anzgeles and will be out in Sydney next week. Although I'm not traveling for graff I would DEFINITELY like to paint while I'm there (as well as stickers)... If anyone can give any info on ANY cool spots to paint as well as GET paint I would greatly appreciate this... Police and prevention specialists tinker at the edge of graff, sending in the enforcers, writing new laws and installing CCTV. Police map it along with other crimes. But it seems they simply don't get what is going on. In Sydney, like elsewhere, traditional enforcement tactics hold back the tide: anti-graffiti teams, resistant sprays, CPTED lighting, and so forth (probably why graffiti has somewhat declined in Sydney). The truth is, like most large cities, in Sydney resistant pockets flourish - some interesting and inventive, most just blight. Example: Around Sydney's central train station where CCTV watched everywhere, I counted 31 public murals, every one graffitied. Most public murals are not graffitied. Then again, these were not "community-based" murals painted by local artists. They looked corporate, perhaps designed by city or train station officials. Banksy's documentary film, Exit Through The Gift Shop premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year. It is well done, glorifies the good, bad and ugly, but more importantly it provides insight; insight we need to better understand the future of the public realm. It also suggests to some degree, like it or not, the once-maligned is now going mainstream. When viewed from space, cities look beautiful, exciting and filled with energy. It's easy to forget they even have crime. Those who focus too much on that big picture look for big city solutions with a wide-angle lens. Close-up, the picture of the city looks very different. Turns out it's the close-up picture with the zoom lens that provides the best opportunities for creating safe places. One example was provided at the ICA CPTED conference by Jim Diers, Seattle's neighborhood guru. His presentation is on-line at the ICA website. Dead spaces, such as deserted nooks beneath overpasses, are isolated, not maintained, and ideal for drug dealing, robberies, and nefarious crimes. The neighborhood folks in Seattle decided to turn this one into something more interesting and fun. After a long public dialogue one favorite design was chosen - the underpass troll. It is today among one of the choice tourist spots to view. It is also far safer than it was. Fine tuned design with collaborative public input can produce beautiful results. Another ingredient for success.
Today we celebrate Halloween, that ancient Celtic harvest festival marking summer's end. Today it's signalled by masks and scary costumes hiding the faces of kids looking for goodies. Last week I ran a SafeGrowth training in Milwaukee with the Community Safety Initiatives folks at LISC. (Students: Assignments will be posted in the Toolkit section below on Wednesday)! During the training I had interesting chats about the difficulty implementing tactics in an environment with poor resources and even poorer political support. Then I thought of the scariest ghoul of them all when it comes to safer places: malaise. Malaise is a feeling that things are just not going right. It's the social disease which President Jimmy Carter once called a fundamental threat to democracy. Malaise is similar to anomie, the social pathology described a century ago by famous sociologist Emile Durkheim. It's the alienation felt by people from by an inability to reach legitimate goals, in this case caused by resources or politics. I see malaise occasionally in the faces of practitioners who confront significant challenges. Perhaps they've been beaten back by setbacks. They get to a point where they lose faith that their work matters, but still they put on a brave mask. They may think to themselves; there are no treats from prevention work, only political tricks. That is malaise at its worst! No doubt this is a real feeling. But is it a real thing? Can someone not suffering malaise accomplish what others cannot? Is it like the spooks on Halloween - more contrived than real? There is no doubt obstacles exist. In fact, there is probably truth to the idea that some regions are more (or less) likely to solve problems creatively, what Richard Florida calls The Creative Class. Yet, like Halloween, we can choose belief in one thing or we can choose belief in another. There is just as much to be gained from persisting and seeking more creative options. That is the exact opposite of malaise. It is called vigor. Vigor is the magic I see in successful practitioners. Vigorous practitioners exist in all regions. I've posted many examples over the past year. Here are a few: 1. Seattle's neighborhood governance described by Jim Diers. 2. The Westville neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. 3. The Oregon District neighborhood in Dayton, Ohio. 4. The Hollygrove neighborhood story in New Orleans. 5. The San Romanoway apartments in Jane/Finch, Toronto. Interestingly, Milwaukee has a great example as well. The SOHI District, a main street program in Milwaukee sponsored by the city and the Local Initiative Support Corporation of Milwaukee. Some of the SOHI folks attended the SafeGrowth training a few years ago. Their work has been remarkable. There are websites of SOHI as well as a SOHI YouTube channel of their successes. There is even a crime review article published in the April, 2009 CPTED Perspective newsletter Perhaps the very best person to exemplify vigor was a young woman in a Cincinnati SafeGrowth training 6 years ago. Her name was Sarah and I titled that blog An Ode to the Sarah's. For the sake of tackling malaise, and the sake of our neighborhoods, it's worth a look. This week I attended the International CPTED Association's international conference in Calgary, Alberta. Typical CPTED conferences, like other prevention conferences, can be pretty droll affairs rehashing tired old ideas. Old wine in new bottles. The worst? My vote goes to academic conferences where obtuse PowerPoint slides fill sessions like hieroglyphics on an Egyptian Third Dynasty tomb - a theory-bound academese intended more for the academically-heeled than for those who actually prevent crime. Not this time. As a regular ICA attendee I was struck by the richness and passion in this year's offerings. We heard presenters from Germany, Chile, the Netherlands, Brazil, South Africa, Australia and North America. We heard police officers from Berlin and Toronto, planners from Washington and Saskatoon, scholars from Seattle and criminologists from Florida. We learned about behavioral based design in Ontario, community-led CCTV in Pennsylvania, safer schools in Holland and how to use public art to tackle domestic terrorism. My own sessions were gifted by incredibly talented practitioners with whom I co-presented. In one, Saskatoon planner Elisabeth Miller and I coaxed conference participants into an interactive dialogue about overcoming obstacles. In another session I co-presented with computer scientist Nick Bereza from ATRiM Group and Michael Huggett from Australia. We presented the CPTED Continuum - a new way to understand CPTED from target hardening to traditional CPTED and situational prevention to neighborhood planning. There were too many great presenters to mention them all (forgive me for not). But there was one speaker who had the right stuff. He captured our imagination. Jim Diers is a visionary and powerful speaker. Currently with the University of Washington, he is former director of Seattle's Office of Neighborhoods. He is also author of Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way. Jim spoke on participatory democracy and how to strengthen social capital. He is one of those people who finds ways to get people involved creating more livable places. If you are interested in vital and safe places, and you haven't heard Jim's story you must. If you haven't read Jim's book, you should! Chris Landauer, MIT aerospace scientist, challenges the story of five blind men who touch an elephant in five different places and then describe it in five different ways. It all depends, says Landauer, on our assumption there is an elephant. There might not be. Our traditional criminal justice system (CJS) also assumes things, for example we must punish offenders or find guilt in court. Does this kind of thinking limit creative solutions to crime? Maybe there is no elephant? This week I was in Dallas at the American Society for Industrial Security convention, the largest security trade show of its kind. Security technology isn’t always new, creative, or the best solution. But competitive high tech can be a breeding ground for creative solutions. Case in point: TecGarde Mobile Solutions, a firm I worked with at the show. They are an innovative, tech start-up and Blackberry alliance partner with the Blackberry folks. I enjoy working with cool outfits like TecGarde. They sport some of the most creative smart-phone devices in the world. Creativity, it seems to me, is the foundation upon which a safer future rests. It reminds me that truly creative cultures rarely flourish in rigid hierarchies, especially CJS organizations that ooze chain-of-command thinking. Nowhere is this message truer than with Ideo, the industrial design firm featured in the ABC documentary, The Deep Dive. By deep diving, Ideo comes up with fantastically innovative ideas. Deep diving is inherently non-heirarchical. That’s what outfits like TecGarde are all about. THE ELEPHANT Which brings me back to the elephant. True, creativity can occasionally seep through the CJS chain-of-command. Successful problem-oriented policing projects prove it is possible (check out motel crime in California or homelessness in Colorado). But these are not the rule, they are the exception. It's hard to be creative when trapped in hierarchies. After all, elephant assumptions may not be real. Where do we find truly innovative strategies? How do successful organizations become creative? I think we need to peek at the technology world more closely, especially how technology firms docreativity. Postscript: On the final day a number of laptops were stolen from display exhibits. Remember - this was a security tradeshow with CCTV firms operating thousands of security cameras in plain sight at their exhibits. Unsurprisingly, the crooks were apprehended the next day and their loot was recovered quickly. For these brash, Mensa-challenged crooks it seems the security elephant was real. In this case it sat on them. There were interesting comments to my last blog about CPTED, design guidelines and the incomplete equation. My view is that without social capital, territoriality doesn't work well. Offenders usually want to avoid detection when they steal, burgle or rob which is why natural surveillance helps prevent crime. But that is only true when offenders fear someone will apprehend them (or get the police). In other words, someone must care enough about their neighborhood to do something. That's social capital. To cultivate social capital we must re-learn how to better build and re-create neighborhoods from the ground up. Jane Jacobs champions this idea in her famous incantation when she says the public peace is kept by an intricate network of voluntary controls and standards among people themselves. That is why we created 2nd Generation CPTED. WHAT IS SOCIAL CAPITAL? Social capital is the idea that within healthy neighborhoods there is a subtle system of what anthropologist Edward Hall called social dos and don'ts. It's the idea that there is wide range of social activities, people, services, businesses and cultural events that encourage local folks to share, sell, play, and relax. Social capital helps them tackle their own neighborhood problems. Service providers (e.g. police) are still available, but the majority of issues are dealt with internally. There are plenty of neighborhoods where this happens. Westville in New Haven and the San Romanoway Apartments in Toronto are two. Last month I discussed Hollygrove, the New Orleans neighborhood where impressive improvements have been underway for a few years. Last year Louisiana AARP asked me to introduce CPTED in a SafeGrowth format. SUCCESS IN HOLLYGROVE This week, AARP posted an article and video about the residents and their work in Hollygrove. The video shows what in 2nd Generation CPTED we call "social stabilizers". My favorites are the "Hollygove Originals" and the walking club. Click here to watch the AARP video of social capital at work! CPTED-styled, urban design guidelines are a small step in that direction. But guidelines will not create Hollygrove, Westville or San Romanoway. Design guidelines fall short. How can we encourage local interest and ownership, community driven initiatives such as community gardens, artists moving into and reusing old areas, and locally improved public spaces? Can urban planning help? The world of land use planning (distinct from other forms of planning) is usually the world of zoning. Traditional zoning is done through setbacks, floor-space ratios, and restricted/permitted land use categories. It can be very restrictive and changes (variances) to it can be awkward, difficult and politically dangerous. From a CPTED perspective, traditional zoning says little about safety. Unlike traditional zoning, form-based zoning controls the physical look of a place through design guidelines. For example the shape of building facades, types and sizes of streets, and the scale of architecture prescribes the what the neighborhood will look like. For CPTED guidelines, form-based zoning is ideal. However, this does not lead to social capital. ZONING FOR PERFORMANCE - THE FUTURE OF CPTED? Performance zoning is another alternative. Where traditional zoning specifies the types of use, performance zoning specifies only the intensity and results of that land use. It deals not with the type of use, but the performance of that development and how it impacts surrounding areas. Performance zoning is already working in a few places. Early adopters include transport planners aiming to require roadway builders to adopt designs to cut traffic fatalities. Performance zoning is more flexible than traditional or form-based zoning. It better accommodates market principles, social activities, and environmental protection. It's not difficult to see both CPTED guidelines and social capital as performance measures in such a place. There are helpful websites to learn the pros and cons of performance based zoning and the international experience with performance based planning. Today's zoning denies certain uses or forms when developers submit their plans. Performance zoning evaluates the impacts of land uses directly. Property owners have the obligation, cost risk, and duty to fit the required performance to their land - and the freedom to use their own creativity in an innovative way. As Jacobs often noted, one of the first ingredients of social capital is local innovation. Richard Florida says the same thing when interviewed on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Perhaps that's how we solve the safety equation in the 21st Century city? I spoke to Elisabeth Miller, a planner friend from Saskatoon, this week who told me about the pending publication of some CPTED and Design Guidelines for developers and architects. She is a planner with the city of Saskatoon and last fall I researched and crafted these design guidelines, which Elisabeth and I then wrote into a Guideline document, from best practice around the world. Could a similar approach work at a larger scale, for example in urban zoning? If you study different types of zoning it is clear that most forms of zoning align with architectural design guidelines. Then I realized there is a problem with zoning. In Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs says, "No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, causal enforcement of it has broken down." Jacobs used the ideas of territoriality and social capital as part of her equation for safe streets. Unfortunately early CPTED used only half of that equation - urban design. As all new students of CPTED soon learn, basic 1st Generation CPTED involves urban design and architecture to reduce crime opportunities. There are three components: 1. We See You: Natural surveillance is lighting and landscaping that puts eyes on the street. The purpose is to see offenders or to signal to offenders they will be seen. 2. You Are In Our Place: Access control is gates, fences, roadway barriers, or walkway placement to limit the number of people into or out of an area. It allows people to see who is entering or to signal to visitors - we live/work here. 3. You Can't Get Away With That Here: Territorial reinforcement divides public space to semi-private or semi-public areas - for example, paving patterns and floral landscaping to demarcate a building entry. Clean-ups are another way to signal someone cares. These make it difficult for offenders to offend with impunity. All three components hinge on one simple (and debatable) idea: It's our turf and we care. Design guidelines fit perfectly into this part of the equation. Zoning – not so much. Here's the problem In the absence of social capital, territoriality doesn't just happen. It is not necessarily true that people care simply because their space encourages it. There are plenty of places where access control, good lighting, and natural surveillance provide a very poor sense of territory. Urban mega-projects like sports stadiums and casinos are notorious for plenty of crime (pick pocketing and robbery come to mind). Large box stores are another example where there may be many eyes on those streets, all sorts of branding, signs, and territorial markers and yet crime can flourish (auto theft comes to mind). Territoriality can help but it cannot ensure crime is absent. The intimate personal space of a residential living room or bedroom is already "owned" and controlled yet that is precisely where most domestic violence occurs. The fact is territoriality does not work without social capital. Next: How zoning can help. One of the four principles of Second Generation CPTED explains how neighborhood culture can create a common purpose. That can become the glue that binds people together to work against problems like crime. Attaching culture to neighborhood safety can be tricky as I discovered this week on a tour of South Dakota. Sociologists say culture is everything beyond genetics passed from one generation to the next. In their view language, religion, values, law, and fashion all fit. Yet in my experience, it is much more useful for each neighborhood to define its own sense of culture and then build on that common definition. That narrows the list considerably. When that happens music, art, sports, and historical events rise to the surface. One great example is the Intersection Repair programs in Portland. Another example emerged while I visited an unforgettable and deserted place on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. I'm referring to the haunting, windswept cemetery overlooking the valley when hundreds of Native Americans were slaughtered by 7th Cavalry Regiment in 1890. I stood looking at the run-down graveyard, where a single faded monument notes the inconceivable tragedy that was Wounded Knee, and I wondered how such a thing happened. What lesson can such a place tell us about community culture? How can good arise from such evil so long ago? Can a remote, rural place of such political furor offer anything helpful to urban dwellers seeking a cultural touchstone of their own? Some will say no. Yet I cannot so easily dismiss the lesson of Wounded Knee. It is a lesson worth studying and remembering for its exhibition of human folly. I struggled to make out the fading inscription on the lone monument which recounts the words of Sioux Chief Big Foot "I will stand in peace till my last day comes." That, more than anything, makes the point of a shared, community culture. At least it should. Perhaps this is where the truly difficult work of building a community culture begins. Places like Wounded Knee are a warning for civil vigilance - we must not allow prejudice to infect our civility. As I watch the latest CNN "controversy" about locating a mosque near Ground Zero, I am again reminded this message - standing in peace - is relevant in rural and urban places alike. GUEST BLOG Megan Carr is a Livable Communities Specialist interested in SafeGrowth, particularly transportation’s role in shaping vibrant and safe communities. She runs her own consulting firm, Civitae, LLC. Megan recently participated in the AARP SafeGrowth programs in New Orleans and delivered a presentation to transportation authorities regarding safety and bus stops. A longer version of this article will appear in the upcoming ICA newsletter CPTED Perspectives. **** Why is it that some bus stops act as hot spots for crime while others can serve as building blocks for community? Two studies by Loukaitou-Sideris in 1999 and 2003 examined the physical attributes of high crime bus stops in Los Angeles. What’s interesting about the findings is that of the nearly 20,000 bus stops, 18 percent of the total incidents occurred at just ten stops. Findings at these ten stops indicated they were: • Located at intersections involving inactive land uses such as empty lots and surface parking lots • Lacked adequate lighting or nearby shops, public phones or police sub-stations • Located near dilapidated and/or vacant buildings (83%) Furthermore, movement predictors such as nearby alleys had an almost double crime incidence rate. Crime was also significantly higher at intersections near bars, liquor stores, check cashing establishments, and Single Room Occupancy hotels. The Other Side of the Coin In Los Angeles following the Rodney King riots in 1992, Mayor Riordan launched the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative designed to restore people’s sense of ownership in their communities. Recognizing that bus stops can function as focal points for communities, the organization developed community plans starting with placemaking improvements at bus stops. Project for Public Spaces was hired to assist neighborhood groups who were each given a grant to develop a bus stop area plan. Many positive outcomes followed as a result. From the initial $100,000 seed investment, a vacant lot in North Hollywood was transformed into a beautifully landscaped transit park with illuminated bus shelters, matching benches, information kiosks and kiosk art. Eight new businesses were attracted to the intersection filling formerly vacant facilities. An additional $500,000 was invested in property improvements and $60,000 in private funding was invested in the park. Consequently, 30 new jobs were created in the vicinity of the bus stop. The project employed a placemaking approach that encompassed what 2nd Generation CPTED calls Community Culture. It included façade improvements, pedestrian walkways, pedestrian-oriented lighting, public art and plentiful landscaping providing needed shade and defining pedestrian areas. By making improvements to the site, riders today benefit from natural surveillance and amenities from nearby businesses in addition to a more aesthetic and comfortable bus experience. These examples provide valuable lessons on the importance of site design at bus stops. From reducing the opportunity for crime to supporting local economic development, investing in quality public spaces at bus stops is a worthy focus for community redevelopment. I like the crime triangle. It is popular among crime analysts. It helps analyze crime hotspots. It is also part of problem-oriented policing. Sometimes too it is part of the prevention practitioner’s toolbox. It has elegant utility and simplicity. The crime triangle emerges from "routine activity theory" (RA) in the early 1980s. RA explained some behavior quite well, like predatory crime (stalking). It did so with a simple premise: crime converges at the intersection of likely offenders, suitable targets and an absence of guardianship (or, more recently, "handlers"). In lay terms, picture the three sides of a triangle with an offender, a victim, and a target/place. When those things come together, so the theory goes, crime goes up. The crime triangle is useful. Break the triangle and you prevent the crime. Want to increase guardianship? Get property managers to keep better control of their properties. Improve bar management in bars that over-serve. Simple. Elegant. So far, so good. Except for one thing; that is where it typically ends in the RA world. The crime triangle does not dig deeper into the causes of crime. Why? Because routine activity (and its crime triangle progeny) is one of those crime and place theories. RATIONAL CHOICE RA is less a causal theory explaining why and more a descriptive symbol predicting when, where or how. It ignores why someone becomes motivated in the first place. RA assumes an endless supply of motivated offenders. They are motivated for some reason; we just don't know why. The only "explanation" of motive falls back to rational choice theory. Rational choice assumes offenders are rational actors who weigh risks against rewards. From the window of RA (and the crime triangle), crime looks like a "normal" condition of life. True, some criminal behavior is “normal” in the sense that as events, products, and social affairs change, so too do crime opportunities. But as a causal theory, that’s rather trifling. It’s a bit like saying with enough water, sun and moderate temperature, certain environmental conditions will produce rain. Then again some criminal behavior is not normal at all and RA just doesn’t work. Consider the story of the Connecticut mass murder in the news today. As the NY Times says, this is “the latest in a series of American workplace tragedies”. It is a sad story about a workplace shooter who killed numerous workmates and then himself. He may have snapped from perceived workplace injustice. Perhaps he was clouded in a drug stupor. Maybe he was insane. Routine activity theory might suggest how to remove opportunity for future incidents like this. That is a good start. Baby steps. But RA theory will never actually know why because it will never ask. In cases such as this, the risk and reward assumptions of crime-and-place theories look rather silly. What does a suicidal shooter “risk”? What “reward” was this shooter gaining? Vengeance? (If so, we’re back to motive.) WHAT CAN THE TRIANGLE DO? What will the crime triangle tell us in cases like this? 1. Capable guardians - cameras, plentiful supervision, and so forth. Unfortunately this shooting occurred at shift change when there were lots of employees and supervisors about. As for CCTV, how often do we watch nighttime news clips of robbery/shootings on corner-store CCTV? Cameras don’t stop shootings. 2. The time/workplace environment – preventing guns in the workplace. Will metal detectors work? Perhaps, but how difficult is it for shooters to become bombers. What then? Bomb sniffing dogs? At some point Orwellian paranoia replaces civility. Where do we stop? Body cavity searches? 3. The offender – modus operandi (not motive. Remember, RA is motive-neutered). The crime triangle asks if "handlers" like armed security might have intervened (that actually might have helped). Or maybe we could have prevented the shooter from getting guns in the first place? Others can argue 2nd Amendment rights. I won't bother here. Crime triangle questions just don't do it. Instead, we must also ask this: Why did the shooter shoot? What can we learn about motive to prevent such tragic events in future? The crime triangle is a useful and elegant baby step. I like it and I use it. But it is veneer. It is short term. It is not enough. Our analysis of neighborhood crime must include a more robust analytical dialogue. If our analysis does not encompass action to move social life forward, it is not robust. Ultimately, if our theory fails to include motive, we are cluttering our dialogue with junk and the analysis of junk. GUEST BLOG When it comes to safety on the street, we've talked about the role of walkability and lighting. Last week we talked about sustainabilityand green spaces in our civic DNA. Today guest blogger Randy Atlas introduces a new technology that combines natural surveillance with environmental sustainability. Randall Atlas is a nationally recognized criminologist and architect specializing in CPTED. He is author of numerous publications about CPTED including his most recent book 21st Century Security and Crime Prevention: Designing for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Crime Prevention. A similar version to this blog will appear in the upcoming CPTED Perspective newsletter. **** The LEED rating system has become the driving force behind the green building movement in America. This program is a voluntary, consensus-based national standard for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings. One of the most effective methods in CPTED is the use of natural surveillance. Natural surveillance limits the opportunity for crime by taking steps to increase the perception that people can be seen, thereby naturally reducing the risk of crime. Jane Jacobs formulated the natural surveillance strategy based on her work in New York’s Greenwich Village. Nighttime lighting helps promote natural surveillance. A well lit parking lot or outdoor area is an extremely important feature of public spaces for numerous reasons. Not only does it deter crime and vandalism, it can attract customers, facilitate traffic and pedestrian safety, and increase economic development. Proper lighting provides an individual with choices on movement: whether to go forward or back from a particular area. Lighting can also be energy draining and costly, harming the environment. The Light Emitting Diode - LED - is a new technology appearing in North American cities with superior energy efficiency and excellent lighting characteristics. LED also is more durable and has lower operating costs than traditional outdoor lighting. THE OAKLAND EXPERIMENT The Emerging Technologies Program of Pacific Gas and Electric Company in Oakland, California recently studied the applicability of LED luminaries in a street lighting application. After concluding from the first phase that “no significant concerns (were) so identified” of the likelihood of any negative safety impacts from the installation of the LED luminaries on a public street, the project moved into the second phase. This involved the replacement of fifteen 121 watt high pressure sodium lights in an Oakland, CA neighborhood with the same number of new ‘Beta’ LED 78 watt lights from Ruud Lighting. The results indicate that the LED lights drew an average 35% less power than the standard high pressure sodium lights used by most cities. Over the course of a year each LED light saves 178 kWh. Lighting that is poorly planned may waste energy, decrease vehicle and pedestrian safety, and may result in light pollution. It is important first to identify energy efficiency and safety goals and then explore all the options, such as LED lights. That is the key for finding a proper balance between LEED and CPTED. It is also how we will improve urban developments and our way of life in future. I walked around Toronto's city hall yesterday. It reminded me of the unnecessary conflict between environmental sustainability and safety. This is particularly curious given the greening of urban streetscapes in recent years. The emerging dialogue about security, safety, and sustainability is important. Last year the Built Environment journal published a series of articles on the topic. This year there will be presentations at the International CPTED Conference. Environmental sustainability rarely makes it into CPTED recommendations. Practitioners over-trim trees or over-light walkways like a floodlit night-time game at a stadium. Removing trees, paving land, and burning excessive energy are not sustainable. They are not the only options for safety. Being blind to this is not only unfortunate. As anyone who reads science knows (or has read any legitimate environmental story in the past decade) climate change is real. Ignoring it is unethical. It need not be so. There are plenty of safe options. Urban gardens humanize vacant land, for example in Boston and Philadelphia. Live walls prevent graffiti. All which brings me to Toronto's new city hall. More specifically, the recent opening of the massive green roof and public garden. Trees, shrubs and landscapes now cover once desolate slabs of cement sameness. Sitting areas offer respite and ample emergency phones provide access to security. The greenery enhances the iconic structure of the building. Why, I wonder, wasn't it done when the structure was built? The advantage of retrospect perhaps? Best of all I watched people taking respite from the busy streets below. Legitimate "eyes on this street" provides what Oscar Newman called defensible space. Safety and sustainability can become part of our civic DNA if we learn how to make it part of the CPTED and SafeGrowth message. GUEST BLOG Tod Schneider has been a fierce advocate for advanced CPTED on safe schools for many years. He has published articles and books on safe schools and violence. He is a safe school design inspector, speaker and consultant. Tod is editor of the Safe Cascadia newsletter (www.safecascadia.org) and has graciously submitted this blog entry. He can be reached at www.safeschooldesign.com. **** I look at schools for a living, frequently as a security consultant, but I try to go beyond basic 1st Generation CPTED. My broader perspective is usually well received, but not always. Lately I rubbed a Principal the wrong way. He had been doing a great job revitalizing a troubled school, and by all accounts was succeeding. The school was clean, and behavior and academics were on the upswing. There were security weaknesses, which I identified. But what struck me the most drew on 2nd Generation CPTED notions of community culture and cohesion, or in my terms, SHAPED (safe, healthy and positive environmental design.) This was not a bad school; it simply left room for improvement. Student-made posters celebrated an upcoming popularity contest, and sports trophies were prominently displayed. High on a wall hung a professionally printed banner with the school “fight” song, and I kept coming back to it, trying to figure out why it was bugging me. The sentence structure had been mangled to serve the rhyme scheme, and the punctuation needed work. To my mind, for an educational facility this should have been embarrassing. When I mentioned this to the Principal, he barked, “what does poetry have to do with school security?” He explained that the song had been around for a long while, and was meaningful to the alumni. I reassured him that my report would emphasize school security. But had he been more receptive, here’s what I would have pointed out: * If I came to this school hoping to compete in sports or a popularity contest, this place looked great. * If I came here hoping to learn essential writing skills, the literary arts, music, math, science or international relations, I might feel uneasy. Those topics did not seem to rate very high in the main public areas of the school. * If the banner so prominently displayed was there to please the alumni, I would wonder who the school was focused on – the students attending today, or the students who attended fifty years ago when the song was written? * If I was a socially awkward, non-athletic kid, likely to be pushed to the margins of school culture, I might anticipate being unappreciated or bullied – or invisible. And in the rarest of cases, if I also had serious behavioral or mental problems, I might even be pushed into exactly the kind of antisocial behavior that school nightmares are made of. That’s what poetry has to do with school security. One example of attention to detail is school displays cases, like the one pictured above. They are often stuffed with athletic tropes, while other accomplishments are rarely recognized. Notice the sign, half-hidden, behind the Coke machine? It's for the National Honor Society. WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN DONE? The banner didn’t need to be hidden – it just didn’t need to be the most prominent display in the entry hall. Students could be invited to write a new song, or at least post examples of other writing that inspires them. Keep the old song around for nostalgia’s sake, but don’t saddle the students with it for the sake of those who are long gone. When schools post signs with misspellings, it suggests that spelling isn’t really all that important. And when the best poetry the administration can come up with is mediocre, what message does that send? There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the school team, and building school spirit. But it’s the kids on the margins that I’m worried about, with different interests, quirks or cultures. The ones who will never win the popularity contest, or lead the team to victory. For these kids, I’d like to see a more balanced display celebrating a full range of interests. Sports plaques were widely displayed here, especially at all major entry points; other topics were harder to find mention of, although I did go searching. Some bulletin boards outside classrooms did reflect other subjects, I was pleased to see. But the only plaque outside the choral room was for athletes. Down a distant hallway, adjacent to a storage closet, I finally did find a modest display about music. At least, I thought, it was something. Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a new coal mine in northern British Columbia. How, the planners and developers asked, might one apply Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design to an entire, yet unconstructed, community of 5,000 residents? It had never been done before. At this point the nascent CPTED movement was barely a decade old. To complicate matters, developers decided to apply socially sensitive design ideas from famed planner Christopher Alexander. The town of Tumbler Ridge is now 30 years old and last month we visited the town for the first time. We spent time with the deputy mayor and town planner, both SafeGrowth graduates, who told me CPTED design seemed to work pretty well. Residents loved living there. Of course, that can be said of countless other towns. So is Tumbler Ridge all that different? As with all resource towns, the fortune of town life in Tumbler Ridge over the years has ebbed and flowed with the fortune of the economy. Nothing new there. That's pretty much what most towns and cities are going through today! Tumbler Ridge doesn't look all that different from other picturesque mountain towns. At least not on first blush! (Though it does have a nicely designed town center and abundant walkways winding here and there.) FIRST CPTED TOWN Strangely, though Tumbler Ridge can justly claim the mantle 'First CPTED Town in the World', I can find no published crime studies to tell us what happened. The only social scientific study I found is by social geographer Alison Gill who reported "high levels of satisfaction, however the degree to which design features contributed to this were difficult to ascertain. In particular the CPTED concept was not monitored and its appropriateness in the context of Tumbler Ridge seems questionable." There is nothing new about another social study concluding it's difficult to ascertain cause-and-effect. This may even be a case of the ROTO conundrum. And the not-so-subtle flip side of questioning appropriateness is the inference that applying CPTED was inappropriate - a polemical statement that on one hand is impossible to prove after-the-fact, and on the other hand seems to fly in the face of data showing "high levels of satisfaction". Nonetheless, the point is important to raise. Gill is correct; the lack of a before-after crime study leaves the question unanswered. Here's what I know: Years ago, one of my former CPTED co-instructors participated in the early Tumbler Ridge design charrettes. He told me of the common-sensical CPTED design changes they built; separating noise activity areas from housing where shift workers slept through the day; locating the tavern so drunken patrons could not damage store windows at night; designing walkways to facilitate movement and minimize burglary opportunities, and others. Years later that same co-instructor assumed command of the Tumbler Ridge RCMP detachment. He told me that over five years he observed first-hand how crime rates in the town were lower than surrounding towns per capita crime rates. He also said he saw first-hand the success of walkways and other designs to reduce crime opportunities. While in Tumbler Ridge we spoke to deputy mayor Jerrilyn Schembri and planner Ray Proux, both who mentioned high satisfaction with Tumbler Ridge residents. Both Jerilyn and Ray are graduates of SafeGrowth training classes and have been working to apply social and physical prevention strategies. DINOSAURS COME ALIVE One exciting example Jerrilyn showed us was a soon-to-open museum of paleontology, the first of its kind in the province. Apparently in recent years there have been remarkable finds of dinosaur fossils in never-before explored digs. If government funders follow through, Tumbler Ridge may well become the latest west coast Jurassic Park (I'm sure my description will mortify our gracious museum host and passionate curator of paleontology, Richard McCrea). This represents a 2nd Generation CPTED strategy in community culture that can put Tumbler Ridge on a whole new kind of map. For me Tumbler Ridge shows us that urban design matters. We may never know the precise specifics, but socially sensitive design with CPTED in place can positively affect community satisfaction. Tumbler Ridge also shows us that local economics matter a great deal when it comes to disorder and dissatisfaction. Mostly, Tumbler Ridge suggests to us the transformative potential of exciting cultural assets to help propel community interest and pride. And for this, we hardly need more studies. CPTED prevents crime by designing defensible space into places - what 1st Generation CPTED calls territoriality. It is a strategy that doesn't always happen with design. It needs help. Walkability was my theme this past week. A walkable street helps encourage neighborhood vitality, which in turn helps folks take ownership of their public domain. Walkability is the first step towards territoriality and defensible space. This week I was reminded of another by one of my Philadelphia students in a SafeGrowth course run by the Community Safety Initiatives folks at LISC; The revitalization of public space by citizens. Betsy Casanas sent me the following story regarding how to do what 2nd Generation CPTED calls culture-making: Our project is called "Reclaiming Vital Spaces" We have done so much already in the past couple of weeks. We've built 8 new beds with a few guys in an adjudicated program, We've done a workshop with one of the neighboring schools and created permanent art work for the fence with a 3rd grade class. We've just received 2 benches from a neighboring center who is interested in having their kids participate in the garden. We have organized a group of neighbors to take over several of the boxes and grow there own food. In the coming weeks we will build a steel sculptural fence because we can't afford to buy a real fence. I think this one will be much more amazing anyways. We did get a small grant that will help us buy a tool shed, tools, benches and picnic tables. How, one wonders, does such a SafeGrowth-like approach ever start in the first place? Betsy filled me in: As a reaction to the social conditions in North Philadelphia in 2007 artists Betsy Casanas and Pedro Ospina co-founded “Semilla (seed) Arts Initiative” a grassroots initiative that uses art as a catalyst for social change and artistic collaborations as a means of empowering individuals and communities. Semilla’s goal is to unite the community by actively involving them in the process of physically transforming their own neighborhood, exposing them to solutions and possibilities. I'm very impressed by some of the things I've seen in Philly during this SafeGrowth project. I can hardly wait to see what they come up with next month when we return. Most encouraging of all is Betsy's conclusion: The vitality of any community can be found in the strengths and stability of its members and their ability to overcome the complexity of today. Yes! In a nutshell, that's it! If walkability is the first step to safety, overcoming complexity is the second. Community vitality is found in the ability of it's members to overcome the complexity of today! Thank you to Betsy, Pedro, and their dedicated kin for reminding us where to find yet another key to open safe places. A funny thing happened to me in Las Vegas last week. No, it's not what you're thinking! It's not really about clear-headed thinking at all. It's about some fuzzy thinking that replaces coherent understanding about preventing crime.
I've said before the CPTED and Design Out Crime folks don't talk much about the theories behind their work. A few of those thorny theory issues showed up in my blogs last year, such as ROTO (Research-On-The-Obvious). There is another side to that coin. I'm referring to the fuzzy thinking of some academicians who study crime-and-place and their kin (crime mappers, police crime analysts). Let's remember the main purpose of theory, at least in the empirical sciences, is to provide a plausible and testable explanation of why something happens, in this case crime. Events surrounding that explanation - where and when crime occurs - are merely descriptive symbols of the main event, not the actual theory that explains "why" the event happens in the first place. From this point of view, CPTED and Design Out Crime have very few actual theories - only descriptive symbols. DOES IT MATTER? Descriptive symbols are useful. Describing where malaria starts killing people may help us isolate the outbreak and target treatment. Symbols may point us in the right direction toward explanation. But they do not explain the biology of malaria - and that is what kills us! Mosquito nets may help us and we need them. Ultimately, we need to be working toward a cure. We mustn't rest with nets. Same with crime. What about gambling, casinos, and sin-city? As I walked around Las Vegas last week I began thinking about all the casino's, the craziness, and all the activity. In Advanced CPTED there is something called "crime generators". These are locales in the city that tend to generate crime opportunities. Large casinos fit the crime generator tag. If mappers scoured the crime patterns, no doubt they'd find lots of hotspots with pick-pocketing, assaults, drug dealing, and fraud in and around the casinos. Or perhaps casino security displaces it to venues just outside the Strip? Either way, no doubt someone would come up with a "theory of casino crime locations", which isn't really a theory at all. This is exactly what happened with the Broken Windows "theory". Crime went down in New York. Unfortunately for Broken Window Theory, as Professor Zimring showed in his book, The Great American Crime Decline, crime went down in places with no Broken Window programs. That's because descriptive symbols won't really stop crime in the long run. Only prevention based on sound theories can do that. Yes, theories matter. Does that make casino's crime generators? Casinos no doubt "generate" direct and indirect crime. But if we could calculate per capita crime rates around casinos, would they be any more crime-prone than other high activity places? Do activity generators = crime generators? Probably not in the case of large political rallies (except if you find yourself in Thailand this week). How about in the case of large football games with thousands of drunken fans? Those probably do generate similar (or more) assaults, except if we limit alcohol sales and the home team wins. That's the problem with descriptive symbols versus real theory. They tell us something about where, and little about why. THE CASINO CRIME GENERATOR? It might be simple to conclude sin-city Vegas is also crime city. But FBI crime stats don't show that. We can argue all we want about unreported crime, gambling impact on family life, and so forth (those things are true and serious). Yet according to the 2008 FBI crime rates, Las Vegas wasn't even in the top 20 cities for total violent crime nor in the top 50 for total property crime cities. So much for crime generators. Personally, I'm no fan of the Strip in Las Vegas. There are no doubt many tragic realities that arise in that famous (infamous?) epicenter of self-absorption. Whatever those realities, we must not confuse descriptive symbols that plot when and where with actual theories explaining why crime happens. Descriptive symbols may help us target crime and temporarily reduce it with 1st Generation CPTED and Design Out Crime. But they won't help us prevent it in the long run. Nor will they replace proper and robust theories that help us build safer places - including entertainment meccas like Vegas - in the years to come. Macarena Rau is a board member with the International CPTED Association from Santiago, Chile and president of their chapter in Latin America. Here is a short excerpt from her article in the upcoming CPTED Perspective newsletter.
At 03:34 in the morning of February 27th, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit a vast area of Chile. Its epicenter was located 100 miles northwest of the city of Concepción. Later, a deadly tsunami impacted the Chilean coast, devastating a number of coastal towns. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs the quake and tsunami caused 495 deaths and a considerable number of displaced and homeless. News photos of the earthquake are online here. Under these circumstances recall what CPTED (crime prevention through environmental design) and architecture tells us about one particular public space – the Town Square. Public squares are a form of outdoor urban room. Jane Jacobs, in her visionary work “Death and Life of Great American Cities” already posed the importance of human contact to fight against urban insecurity. Jacobs, as the forerunner of CPTED, affirmed the need for building cities to foster human integration. She upheld that the sidewalks and public spaces like Town Squares need to stop being abstract areas and instead become meeting grounds for positive human contact. In Chile people...have had to organize themselves to face the risk of becoming victims of crimes and natural disasters. Public spaces like squares provide the ideal social gathering place for this too. Macarena's full article will appear in the January-April issue of CPTED Perspective. |
Details
|
CONTACTSafeGrowth.Office@gmail.com
|
SafeGrowth® 2007-2024
|
SafeGrowth® is a philosophy and theory of neighborhood safety planning for 21st Century.
|