Gregory Saville, Carl Bray, Mateja Mihinjac, Jason Tudor:
Hope Rises: SafeGrowth for Neighborhood Livability and Safety
ANNOTATED TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Introduction
The twenty-four-hour news cycle drowns viewers in the social, environmental, and economic turbulence around the world. Citizens’ sense of fear for their safety and helplessness to make change grows every day. The urban structure of the modern city offers one of the most important places to address the problem of social calamities and urban crime. Criminologists, urban planners, and community developers have come together to present a perspective and solution: SafeGrowth. The tried and proven success of this new planning method brings high crime communities back from the brink of total decline and social disorder. Instructive narrative combined with case studies from different cities show how SafeGrowth works. Chapter 1: What is SafeGrowth?
The SafeGrowth method evolved from its inception in 2009, learning from and building on a successful crime prevention strategy called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, (CPTED). CPTED and SafeGrowth propose resident-led, neighborhood planning as the best way to create healthy, sustainable, and crime-resistant neighborhoods. As a resident-led process, SafeGrowth is considerably different from other forms of crime prevention and community-building. The foundation of SafeGrowth places neighborhoods and their residents at the core of neighborhood transformation but often neighborhoods are ill-equipped to transform on their own, as shown in the next chapter. Chapter 2: The Police-Free Zone in Seattle--Organized Community Action and Self-Governance
The Seattle CHOP experiment in the summer of 2020 during which a six-block area of the Capitol Hill neighborhood was occupied and taken over by protesters ended in disaster. In this case the process was instigated through the actions of protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement, ANTIFA, self-described anarchists, and others involved in street protests. With close analysis, the difficulty in building a functioning, safe, and livable community without the requisite skills and experience becomes evident. The CHOP experiment failed following increasing violence, three shootings, and two deaths. The diagnosis of the problem reveals the primary ingredients of successful community-building. Chapter 3: Planning Cities--Urban Ecosystems
The history of city planning leads us to the structure of our cities today. History offers insights explaining why city residents share less of their time in community affairs and with others in the neighborhood, and how that affects community health. Urban design impacts mental health and wellbeing, factors that influence crime, satisfaction, and a sense of safety. The urban planning movements, both in US cities and other similar developed countries, have become suburbanized, sprawling, and decentralized. These are part of the urban DNA that contributes to alienation and isolation, and thereby makes it difficult for cities to respond to problems like crime. Early planning trends, such as art deco and modernism were followed by the urban and architectural writers in the 1960s and 1970s who began the movement to rethink these trends. In particular the architect Oscar Newman and urban journalist Jane Jacobs set the stage for what has now become SafeGrowth. Chapter 4: Building Neighborhoods of the Future
There is a renewed interest in neighborhoods, some of it arising from recent trends in planning and urban design such as Smart Growth and Transit Oriented Development, some of which revive elements of the Garden City movement from the early twentieth century. Using traditional villages as a model, new neighborhoods are being designed to include the key components of a complete community, with homes, institutions and shops centered around neighborhood hubs. As adapted to the SafeGrowth method, these places are being planned and designed collaboratively, with the active involvement of their residents. Beginning with a locally-created neighborhood vision, residents receive capacity-building training that provides the tools they need to create an increasingly self-reliant community. Neighborhood design evolves in response to locally-created monitoring of behavior patterns, improving local safety and empowering residents. What emerges is a place planned and designed for the long term, one that is adaptable, integrated within its setting, connected to other neighborhoods yet clustered around a central hub and, not least of all, is beautiful. Chapter 5: Crime and the Philadelphia Story--Livability Academies
In the midst of everyday challenges that threaten the wellbeing of neighborhood residents, crime remains at the forefront of people’s concerns. El Centro de Oro—the Latino commercial district in Northeast Philadelphia—under the leadership of HACE organization exemplifies how dedicated local residents in collaboration with non-profits and other relevant agencies can improve their neighborhood for the better. This area, once fraught with open drug markets, violence, and street crime is transforming based on a ten-year collaborative neighborhood plan. The plan focuses on increasing people’s sense of belonging and willingness to collectively solve neighborhood problems and create collective efficacy. The neighborhood has adopted the principles of SafeGrowth and implemented a Livability Academy to train local residents to become local leaders equipped with skills in local civics, local investment, and problem solving strategies while linking with other neighborhoods to pool resources and exchange knowledge. Theoretical and practical experience teach us the importance of developing neighborhood planning strategies that dig at the roots of social causes of crime. Thus, a sustained crime prevention effect can only be achieved when the residents become co-creators of safety and livability in their neighborhood and take a critical role in urban governance. Chapter 6: Community Organizing and Connectors--The San Romanoway Story
The transformation of the San Romanoway high-rise apartment complex in Toronto exemplifies the power of community organizing. With the help of a dedicated team and community leader Stephnie Payne, the San Romanoway Revitalization Association (SRRA) implemented programs that significantly reduced crime and improved the quality of life for residents. Rigorous, independent evaluations confirmed the effectiveness of these efforts, showing dramatic reductions in both violent and property crimes and increased neighbor interactions. This success demonstrates how a well-crafted neighborhood plan and inclusive community leadership can revitalize even the most troubled areas. San Romanoway’s story offers valuable lessons for the development of Networked Urban Villages (NUVs) and the broader concept of Walden 3. It highlights the importance of addressing crime through neighborhood revitalization, community involvement, and strategic planning. The example underscores the need for a new approach to urban planning that focuses on fixing neighborhoods and making them function effectively. By understanding and applying these principles, other cities can replicate San Romanoway’s success, creating more livable, sustainable, and empowered urban environments. As we continue to explore these ideas, the experiences from places like San Romanoway and Philadelphia offer a roadmap for transforming high-crime neighborhoods into thriving communities. Chapter 7: Hollygrove and the Railroad--Funding and Organizing
Struggling to recover from the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, the residents of the Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana, faced seemingly insurmountable challenges when they asked to work with the Safegrowth team. After decades of neglect from city government, the Hollygrove neighborhood, birthplace to famed rapper Lil Wayne, faced losing its only school, senior center, and park, as city leaders worked to divert funding from their neighborhood to other pet projects. Losing their few community assets wasn’t the only crisis the residents faced in their recovery; gun violence and street crime had returned to the neighborhood forcing residents to hide in their homes at night and businesses to close. Safegrowth practitioners worked with the Hollygrove residents to reduce crime in the neighborhood by 87 percent over two years and built community capacity that lasted well after Hurricane Katrina that led to the rebuilding of their Senior Center, elementary school, and restoration of their park. Chapter 8: Early Steps in Helsingborg--The Emergency of a New Kind of City?
The Smart City movement popularized worldwide aims to capitalize on technological advances to start the new urban revolution and address some of the challenges associated with urban population density and environmental sustainability, and the associated demands for increased availability and efficiency of services. In these times of “networked revolution” the Smart City movement represents a new way of thinking and planning cities to make them more user-friendly, efficient, and safer. The Smart City initiative was prominently featured at the H22 Urban Expo held in 2022 in the City of Helsingborg, Sweden, where the local SafeGrowth work was also featured under the City’s innovative practices. This event offered a test bed for the city to instigate a new way of thinking about its city and population with sustainability and technology at the forefront. SafeGrowth was introduced in the Drottninghög neighborhood of Helsingborg once the City leaders agreed that a smart and sustainable city cannot exist without educating and engaging its residents at the neighborhood level. The importance of the social aspects of a new thinking behind neighborhood development were especially prominent due to Drottninghög’s culturally-diverse composition and evident in the SafeGrowth teams’ focus on projects aimed at improving the relationships between the residents of various backgrounds and overall increasing the level of collective efficacy. Time will tell what the balance between bottom-up initiatives and technologically-driven solutions looks like in this unique city. Chapter 9: Connectors as Leaders of Neighborhood Transformation
Connectors play a central role in SafeGrowth’s Networked Urban Village (NUV), and they can emerge as implicit or explicit leaders. As the leading community organizer, the Connectors’ role encompasses instigating the process, identifying key people within the neighborhood, driving the story forward, supporting the whole initiative throughout the process, connecting and liaising with relevant individuals and organizations, securing resources, and others. This requires not only a collective vision for the future kind of a neighborhood but also an extensive set of leadership and technical skills they may learn during formal studies, at Livability Academy training and any additional personal and professional development sessions. Some of the skills include relationship building skills, emotional intelligence competencies including conflict resolution and navigating interpersonal relationships, grant writing and resource finding, problem-solving, and similar. The Connectors play an essential role in connecting and collaborating with other actors within and outside the neighborhood, and managing the initiatives on an ongoing basis. For this reason in SafeGrowth’s Walden 3 we envision a permanent professional position for a Connector in every NUV. The best Connectors inspire action and are not afraid to speak out and keep people accountable when needed, even if unpleasant. This is how change happens. Chapter 10: In the Years Ahead
Improving safety and liveability in neighborhoods requires recognition of their complex and organic character. Instead of reacting spontaneously to local crises, the case studies in this book show that local knowledge and comprehensive planning provide a coherent framework for success. This is not the usual top-down approach: instead, we promote collaborative planning. This entails participatory decision making, where local residents are actively involved and have genuine influence over decisions that affect their neighborhood. Local governance, as promoted in SafeGrowth Liveability Academies, involves residents first learning how their neighborhood works and, then, learning ways to leverage existing local, regional, and national institutions to provide the means to improve local conditions. This isn’t easy and requires maintaining a balance between residents’ voices and institutional interests. However, it does work, and the same collaborative process also applies to land use planning and urban design projects in neighborhoods. Local residents are involved from the start and throughout the process. As demonstrated in this book, the SafeGrowth problem-solving and training process has shown how to meld local knowledge with applied expertise and funding to produce effective results. And out of this process comes an added, and fundamental, benefit: neighbors learn about each other by working together towards a common good, moving from divisiveness and fear to trust and confidence. Chapter 11: Walden 3 in the Near Future
What would a neighborhood that incorporates all the ideas of SafeGrowth look like? Tying together the various threads of the book, the description of the fictional Walden 3 demonstrates the possible future of neighborhoods, bringing together the many players in the SafeGrowth story, particularly those who appear in the various chapters: police officers, connectors, urban planners, students, criminologists, business people, and especially residents. They were brought together by both a common cause to improve their neighborhoods and reduce crime and a common language they learned during the SafeGrowth process. The desire and obtained result is a neighborhood free from fear and crime built with their own capacity to solve their own problems. This is the future that SafeGrowth promises and the stories throughout show the roadmap towards that kind of a Walden 3 in the years ahead. Conclusion
Through the journey through a number of case studies and maturation of the SafeGrowth method, the book offered the key building blocks to reaching Walden 3. It outlined the key actors that the authors of the book learned through years of practice were essential to the success of neighborhood initiatives. It also recognized these actors may come from very different backgrounds, religious or political designation, and yet they had one goal in common—improving safety and livability in their neighborhood. SafeGrowth offered them actionable steps towards restoring order and quality of life and empowered them to regain a sense of control and see that change is possible even when that seems unlikely. The book also outlined the building blocks required for establishing and sustaining the effect of local initiatives, including Livability Academies, SafeGrowth plans, Connectors, Guardians, hubs, and the importance for local SafeGrowth teams to learn this same language of community building. While every initiative has a life span, with careful implementation of these building blocks the success and livability window of the initiatives strongly increases, we could say “hope rises.” Yet, it is important to keep in mind that ongoing effort is necessary as community safety is a generational process, not a one-time fix. |
