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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: RGS-IBG Book Series
- Sprache: Englisch
Both theoretically informed and empirically rich, Defensible Space makes an important conceptual contribution to policy mobilities thinking, to policy and practice, and also to practitioners handling of complex spatial concepts. * Critically examines the geographical concept Defensible Space, which has been influential in designing out crime to date, and has been applied to housing estates in the UK, North America, Europe and beyond * Evaluates the movement/mobility/mobilisation of defensible space from the US to the UK and into English housing policy and practice * Explores the multiple ways the concept of defensible space was interpreted and implemented, as it circulated from national to local level and within particular English housing estates * Critiquing and pushing forwards work on policy mobilities, the authors illustrate for the first time how transfer mechanisms worked at both a policy and practitioner level * Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories and in-depth interviews, this important book reveals defensible space to be ambiguous, uncertain in nature, neither proven or disproven scientifically
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Defensible Space on the Move
Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice
Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick
This edition first published 2022
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lees, Loretta, author. | Warwick, Elanor, author. | John Wiley & Sons, publisher. Title: Defensible space on the move : mobilisation in English housing policy and practice / Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick. Description: Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: Defensible space: an introduction -- Defensible space is mobilised in the UK -- Defensible space goes on trial but attracts those in power -- Operationalising defensible space -- Evaluations of defensible space -- The uptake and resilience of defensible space ideas -- Defensible space: a common sense, middle-range theory. Identifiers: LCCN 2021044849 (print) | LCCN 2021044850 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119500445 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119500438 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119500414 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119500407 (epub) | ISBN 9781119500421 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Housing policy--England. | Crime prevention and architectural design--England. | Residential mobility--England. | City planning--England. Classification: LCC HD7334.E53 L33 2022 (print) | LCC HD7334.E53 (ebook) | DDC 363.5/5610942--dc23/eng/20211208 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044849LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021044850
Cover image: Balfron Tower/Brownfield Estate 2014 © Michael Mulcahy
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The information, practices and views in this book are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
Contents
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
List of Figures
List of Figures
Glossary of Acronyms
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Preface
1 Defensible Space: An Introduction
2 Defensible Space Is Mobilised in England
3 Defensible Space Goes on Trial but Attracts Those in Power
4 Operationalising Defensible Space
Case Study ‘ The Mozart Estate: A Laboratory for Defensible Space’
5 Evaluations of Defensible Space
6 The Uptake and Resilience of Defensible Space Ideas
7 Defensible Space: A Common Sense, Middle-range Theory
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Figures
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Newman’s typology of space.
Figure 1.2 Newman’s sketch of Van Dyke (L) and Brownsville...
Figure 1.3 Loretta Lees’ and Jane Jacobs’ interview...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Defensible Space
, US and UK editions.
Figure 2.2 Still of Oscar Newman on the 1974 BBC ...
Figure 2.3 Alice Coleman and her maps.
Figure 2.4 Coleman’s trend lines for social malaise and crime.
Figure 2.5
Utopia on Trial
1985 edition and revised 1990 edition.
Figure 2.6 Anne Power.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Media coverage of Alice Coleman.
Figure 3.2 Alice Coleman’s Libertarian Alliance book signing.
Figure 3.3 Letter from Jane Jacobs to Alice Coleman.
Figure 3.4 Coleman vs. community architects.
Figure 3.5 Prince Charles visits the Lea View House estate...
Figure 3.6 Advert for the book
Rehumanizing Housing
.
Figure 3.7 Episteme, techne, phronesis.
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Key English regeneration and housing programmes...
Figure 4.2 First national survey of all Local Authority...
Figure 4.3 Safe Neighbourhoods Unit logo.
Figure 4.4 Top-slicing of EAP to fund DICE.
Figure 4.5 Priority Estates Project crime model.
Figure 4.6 Coleman’s surveyed estates.
Figure 4.7 Cartoon of DICE as scientific.
Figure 4.8 Cartoon of Alice Coleman’s DICE...
Figure 4.9 Sam McCarthy on the Rogers Estate.
Figure 4.10 Rogers Estate site plans pre- and post-DICE.
Figure 4.11 Ranwell East Estate pre-DICE.
Figure 4.12 Ranwell East Estate site plan pre-DICE.
Figure 4.13 The walkways, Ranwell East Estate.
Figure 4.14 Ranwell East Estate post-DICE.
Figure 4.15 The construction of Alice Lane, named after...
Chapter 4a
Figure M.1 Rapid decline of an award-winning design: Mozart Estate 1982.
Figure M.2 Demolishing the walkways on the Mozart Estate.
Figure M.3 Rolling out ‘Colemanisation’.
Figure M.4 Devising a gradual community-led solution.
Figure M.5 Architects combined ‘defensible space’...
Figure M.6 The laboratory/policy mobility lessons from the Mozart Estate.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 The most successful crime-prevention projects have...
Figure 5.2 Comparing the simplistic circuit of social scientific...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 The Secured by Design logo.
Figure 6.2 Aylesbury Estate tenants disagree with Alice...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Our initial and revised conceptual interrelationship...
Figure 7.2 Balfron Tower, Tower Hamlets.
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1 Newman’s and Coleman’s negative design variables
Chapter 3
Table 3.1 Newman’s and Coleman’s design...
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 Research and evaluation.
Guide
Cover
Series page
Title page
Copyright
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Glossary of Acronyms
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Preface
Begin Reading
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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List of Figures
Figure 1.1 Newman’s typology of space.
Figure 1.2 Newman’s sketch of Van Dyke (L) and Brownsville (R), New York City.
Figure 1.3 Loretta Lees’ and Jane Jacobs’ interview with Alice Coleman in her archives.
Figure 2.1 Defensible Space, US and UK editions.
Figure 2.2 Still of Oscar Newman on the 1974 BBC Horizon program ‘The Writing on the Wall’.
Figure 2.3 Alice Coleman and her maps.
Figure 2.4 Coleman’s trend lines for social malaise and crime.
Figure 2.5 Utopia on Trial 1985 edition and revised 1990 edition.
Figure 2.6 Anne Power.
Figure 3.1 Media coverage of Alice Coleman.
Figure 3.2 Alice Coleman’s Libertarian Alliance book signing.
Figure 3.3 Letter from Jane Jacobs to Alice Coleman.
Figure 3.4 Coleman vs. community architects.
Figure 3.5 Prince Charles visits the Lea View House estate in Hackney in 1986 with geographer Alice Coleman, architects John Thompson and Richard MacCormac, and urban planner Nicholas Falk.
Figure 3.6 Advert for the book Rehumanizing Housing.
Figure 3.7 Episteme, techne, phronesis.
Figure 4.1 Key English regeneration and housing programmes 1979–2019.
Figure 4.2 First national survey of all Local Authority high-rises in the United Kingdom.
Figure 4.3 Safe Neighbourhoods Unit logo.
Figure 4.4 Top-slicing of EAP to fund DICE.
Figure 4.5 Priority Estates Project crime model.
Figure 4.6 Coleman’s surveyed estates.
Figure 4.7 Cartoon of DICE as scientific.
Figure 4.8 Cartoon of Alice Coleman’s DICE and the treatment of tenants.
Figure 4.9 Sam McCarthy on the Rogers Estate.
Figure 4.10 Rogers Estate site plans pre- and post-DICE.
Figure 4.11 Ranwell East Estate pre-DICE.
Figure 4.12 Ranwell East Estate site plan pre-DICE.
Figure 4.13 The walkways, Ranwell East Estate.
Figure 4.14 Ranwell East Estate post-DICE.
Figure 4.15 The construction of Alice Lane, named after geographer Alice Coleman.
Figure M.1 Rapid decline of an award-winning design: Mozart Estate 1982.
Figure M.2 Demolishing the walkways on the Mozart Estate.
Figure M.3 Rolling out ‘Colemanisation’.
Figure M.4 Devising a gradual community-led solution.
Figure M.5 Architects combined ‘defensible space’ and ‘secured by design’ on the Mozart Estate.
Figure M.6 The laboratory/policy mobility lessons from the Mozart Estate.
Figure 5.1 The most successful crime-prevention projects have involved some or all of these key measures as part of coordinated packages.
Figure 5.2 Comparing the simplistic circuit of social scientific knowledge to the complex realist model of evaluation.
Figure 6.1 The Secured by Design logo.
Figure 6.2 Aylesbury Estate tenants disagree with Alice Coleman’s views.
Figure 7.1 Our initial and revised conceptual interrelationship between research, policy and practice.
Figure 7.2 Balfron Tower, Tower Hamlets.
List of Tables
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Newman’s and Coleman’s negative design variables
Table 3.1 Newman’s and Coleman’s design variables, Hillier’s rules of thumb and Power’s design and construction issues that make living conditions for residents difficult.
Table 5.1 Research and evaluation.
Glossary of Acronyms
ACPO
Association of Chief Police Officers
AEDAS
An international architecture and design practice
ALO
Architecture Liaison Officer (now DOCO)
BSI
British Standards Institute
BS
British Standard
CABE
Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment
CPDA
Crime Prevention Design Advisor (now DOCO)
CPTED
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design
DICE
Design Improvement Controlled Experiment
DCLG
Department for Communities and Local Government
DfT
Department for Transport (now DTLR)
DETR
Department for Environment Transport and the Regions
DLUHC
Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
DoE
Department of the Environment
DOCO
Designing-Out Crime Officer
EAP
Estates Action Programme
GLA
Greater London Authority
GLC
Greater London Council
HAT
Housing Action Trust
HCA
Homes and Community Agency (now Homes England)
HDD
Housing Development Directorate
HIP
Housing Investment Programme
HO
Home Office
HTA
Hunt Thompson Associates Architects
HUD
United States Department of Housing and Urban Development
KCL
King’s College London
LSE
London School of Economics
LSVT
Large-Scale Voluntary Transfer
MHCLG
Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (now DLUHC)
MORI
UK market research company – now Ipsos MORI
NACRO
National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders
NDC
New Deal for Communities
NPPF
National Planning Policy Framework
ODPM
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister
PEP
Priority Estates Project
RIBA
Royal Institute of British Architects
SBD
Secured by Design
SNU
Safe Neighbourhoods Unit
SRB
Single Regeneration Budget
SRD
Social Research Division
UCL
University College London
UHRU
Urban Housing Renewal Unit
Series Editors’ Preface
Series Editors’ PrefaceThe RGS-IBG Book Series only publishes work of the highest international standing. Its emphasis is on distinctive new developments in human and physical geography, although it is also open to contributions from cognate disciplines whose interests overlap with those of geographers. The Series places strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically strong texts. Reflecting the vibrant and diverse theoretical and empirical agendas that characterise the contemporary discipline, contributions are expected to inform, challenge and stimulate the reader. Overall, the RGS-IBG Book Series seeks to promote scholarly publications that leave an intellectual mark and change the way readers think about particular issues, methods or theories.
For details on how to submit a proposal please visit:
www.rgsbookseries.com
Ruth Craggs, King’s College London, UKChih Yuan Woon, National University of SingaporeRGS-IBG Book Series Editors
David FeatherstoneUniversity of Glasgow, UKRGS-IBG Book Series Editor (2015–2019)
Acknowledgements
We have so many people we would like to thank, not least of whom is Alice Coleman for opening up her archive to us and for answering our questions. To Wiley and the editors of the RGS-IBG book series for their patience as Loretta recovered from surgery on a torn rotator cuff and Elanor a torn calf muscle during the initial writing of this book – the craziness of us both working on the book on crutches and with an immobilised arm was a sight to behold! And then whilst undertaking revisions during Covid, both of us with children home doing online learning. To Jane Jacobs now working in Singapore who shared our initial interest in defensible space. To all the interviewees in the book who kindly shared their time, memories and thoughts. To the many professional colleagues from organisations known by acronyms (ACPO, EDGE, GLA, LBTH/THH, MHCLG [now DLUHC], Poplar HARCA, CABE) who opened doors and passed on contacts. To Simon Harding who gave Loretta the United Kingdom’s first (until Grenfell) national tower block survey from the late 1980s/early 1990s plus archival material. To Kopper Newman, Oscar Newman’s wife and estate executor, for permission to reprint his images as long as he is given due credit. To ESRC grant ES/N015053\1 on council estate renewal in London that Loretta was Principal Investigator on. And last but not least, to our families who have supported us through the research and writing of this book: Rob and Dora (Elanor); David, Meg and Alice (Loretta). Thank you all.
Preface
Defensible space was one of the first spatial debates Elanor was consciously aware of as a young architectural undergraduate at the Bartlett. The arguments following the publication of Utopia on Trial in 1985 (and Bill Hillier’s critical lectures on spatial analysis logically unpicking the dissonance between theory and application) stirred Elanor’s awareness of the extent that architectural design decisions really affect people’s lives and experiences. The notion of differentiated public and private spaces remained formative throughout Elanor’s architectural and urban-design practice, and later professional jobs researching housing design and policy. Directing a Home Office funded study into design and crime on housing estates, provoked a sense of déjà vu. Hadn’t Alice Coleman been asking similar questions about natural surveillance and symbolic ownership of public areas 20 years previously? Were the spaces around these award-winning high-density new homes at risk of becoming as unloved as the decrepit and run-down brutalist concrete estates Coleman had studied? Elanor’s PhD on defensible space (as a geographer not an urban designer) was motivated in part by this sense of long-unresolved questions and a fear of repeating past design mistakes. So, when Elanor finally met Alice Coleman, at her 90th birthday celebration at King’s College London, surrounded by ex-students and academics applauding her research successes and being King’s first female professor of geography, their conversation about the contradictory nature of defensible space was lively and questioning.
Loretta first came across the concept of ‘defensible space’, age 17, in her A-level History of Art module ‘Design for Living’, which looked at high-rise architecture. She went on to research her A-level Geography project on defensible space in high-rise blocks in the New Lodge area of Belfast in Northern Ireland, but had to hire (paid for with a box of chocolates) a school friend (who lived in one of the blocks) to do the survey work, as she could not go herself into the high-rises in what was a ‘no-go area’ of Catholic Belfast with an English accent. On taking up her first permanent academic position in Geography at King’s College London in 1997 she met Alice Coleman – then an emeritus professor – face to face for the first time, and found her to be most welcoming. She next encountered the concept of ‘defensible space’ when supervising an ESRC-ODPM funded project on high-rise living in London in which the evidence base on high-rise living was reviewed. Loretta later teamed up with Jane Jacobs who was then working at Edinburgh University on the Red Road high-rises in Glasgow, and they both interviewed and videoed Alice Coleman. Loretta also first supervised Elanor’s PhD, part funded by CABE, on defensible space. Defensible space reared its head yet again when Loretta started researching the demolition (and gentrification) of the Heygate and Aylesbury Estates in London, and, as mentioned in the book, the lack of defensible space was used by Southwark Council to argue that the Aylesbury Estate needed to be demolished at the 2018 public inquiry in which she was an expert witness.
It is clear that defensible space’s relevance remains. Responding recently to an evidence call from MHCLG on the impact of segregation of communal spaces on mixed tenure blocks, Elanor reiterated the negative impact of confused territoriality, blurred private space and divisive ‘poor doors’ that continue to be built into new housing schemes. For such a familiar and easily recognised concept, defensible space is still deeply misunderstood. This is why we wanted to write this book for academic researchers and practitioner colleagues across all geographic and built-environment disciplines, providing a practical example of how to apply this research learning in the future, as much as a historical record of the evolution of the concept of defensible space.
Chapter One Defensible Space: An Introduction
in the worst estates…you’re confronted by concrete slabs dropped from on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers. The police often talk about the importance of designing out crime, but these estates actually designed it in. (British ex-Prime Minister, David Cameron, The Sunday Times, 2016)1
Social scientific knowledge linking environment and behavior precipitated the British shift away from public housing and was used to promote several types of privatization. (Cupers 2016: 183)
‘Defensible space’ is a highly contested concept and approach to designing out crime, frequently applied to public housing estates in the United Kingdom, North America, Europe and beyond. It is both an urban idea and a policy concept, arguably the most influential concept in built environment crime prevention to date. In this book we use ‘defensible space’ as a vehicle to explore how movement/mobility/mobilisation (and we discuss how these three are related but different later in this chapter) changes ideas/concepts. In exploring the movement/mobility/mobilisation of defensible space from the United States to the United Kingdom and into English housing policy and practice2 we extend recent work in geography, and indeed urban studies and urban planning more widely, on policy mobilities in a number of critical ways.
The idea of defensible space was introduced to the United Kingdom through a book by North American architect/planner Oscar Newman and a 1974 BBC Horizon television programme on his ideas. Our book traces in detail the dispersal/embedding of the concept of ‘defensible space’ in England from the 1980s onwards from the point where geographer Alice Coleman reintroduced and popularised it in the English context. For this we revisit Coleman’s critique of modernist council high-rises in England in her 1985 book Utopia on Trial, in which she outlines her conceptual (which she hoped to operationalise) account of defensible space. We look in detail at her research and the sometimes quite vicious criticisms of it from other geographers, architects and planners. We use in-depth interviews and oral histories with Coleman herself, and other housing researchers and practitioners from the time, to piece together the story of how this geographer took Prince Charles on a field trip to look at the problem of defensible space on a public housing estate in London, and how she managed to get a one-to-one meeting with Margaret Thatcher, persuading the then Prime Minister to give her £50 million to pilot her ideas for retrofitting council estates with defensible space principles.
We discuss the pilot projects themselves, moving on from Coleman’s conceptual treatise to an operational account of defensible space as demonstrated through her Design Improvement Controlled Experiment (DICE), and how this influenced the wider context of English housing policy and practice at the time. The book explores the multiple ways the concept of defensible space was interpreted and implemented, as it circulated from national to local level and within particular English, especially London, housing estates; illustrating how the transfer mechanisms worked at both a policy and practitioner level. Despite being a concept whose principles continue to underpin design guidance (such as Secured by Design [SBD]), defensible space failed to coalesce into a single formal policy, remaining a cluster of associated disputed elements. How these conceptual elements aided or hindered transfer and take-up of the concept is noted by tracking routes to acceptance, the roles of formal transfer mechanisms, informal information sharing by transfer agents traversing networks, or practitioners’ local contextualisation of generic guidance. Our research demonstrates the ongoing resilience and acceptance of ‘defensible space’ from the 1970s into the 2000s, despite multiple criticisms of architectural/environmental determinism, of being unproven scientifically, and the vague and inchoate nature of the concept. More recently, though, there is evidence that defensible space is beginning to be erased, and expunged, from planning and urban regeneration policy. Nevertheless, we argue for greater trust in practitioner experience and on the basis of its continued usage, that defensible space is positively ambiguous, it has neither been proven nor disproven, and as such is a middle-range theory: ‘between the minor hypotheses of day to day research and unified theory’ (Merton 1967: 39).
Following Flyvbjerg (2001) we show how the simplified dualisms of theory in academia are helpful for polemic thinking and writing but they ‘inhibit understanding by implying a certain neatness that is rarely found in real life’ (p. 49). Flyvbjerg notes that policy makers get around this messiness by pragmatically asking: ‘will this solution work here?’ Leaping to a solution is different from understanding a theory, and McCann (2008) is disappointed by the ‘paucity of detailed critical geography knowledge of how policy making works’ (p. 4). Our book provides much needed insight into this, and in doing so expels some of the myths that good social science will follow a straightforward route into policy. We develop Jacobs and Lees’ (2013) earlier account of defensible space on the move based on three further insights: a) that policy does not move as an homogeneous, fully formed piece, but as disaggregated elements (of pre-policy, sub-policy epistemes or practices); b) these fragments of knowledge are translated into policy only in context (in situ); c) that the relationship between academic research and practice is not a simple linear progression of policy appropriating and utilising university created research. The interplay between academic knowledge and policy we describe is complex, contingent and often controversial.
Peck and Theodore (2010a) recognise that policy transfer is often disrupted by the messy realities of policy making at the ground level, yet little reference is made in the existing policy mobilities literature to the messy realities of practice. Although recent reviews, like those discussed later in this chapter, provide a very useful overview of (conceptual) evolution in the field of policy transfer/mobilities, ‘they do not provide an overall explanation of policy transfer processes and outcomes’ (Minkman et al. 2018: 224). This book fills that gap by looking at how defensible space was put into practice in England, addressing McGuirk’s (2016: 94) request for research on ‘the “how” questions of practice’. Much of the policy mobilities literature also only follows one or two mechanisms of transfer; in this book we follow a dozen or so mechanisms, showing a far messier and more interconnected reality than the literature suggests. In doing so we elaborate on the challenges of tracing power and the role evidence plays within the policy making process. This has lessons for the utilitarian turn in social research that happened in the 1990s. We argue that to some degree it does not matter if defensible space is a fundamentally poor idea/concept (which we discuss in terms of both its strengths and weaknesses); what is more important is its mis/match with policy contexts or success/failure due to the personalities involved. That defensible space has moved into the mainstream, without definitive proof or consistent government support, is due in no small part to Coleman’s geographical work. Despite the uncertainty surrounding it, defensible space continues to be promoted as a powerful and influential way of salvaging so called ‘sink’ estates, as the former Prime Minister David Cameron, like other Prime Ministers before him, called them. The ideology of contemporary estate demolition in the United Kingdom has drawn heavily on the US Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI programme of public housing demolition and renewal which itself draws on defensible space principles to rectify the problems of past failed projects (see Popkin et al. 2004).
In the round, this book makes an important conceptual contribution to policy mobilities thinking, but also to policy and practice, explaining practitioners’ handling of complex spatial concepts, through the practical application of an idea that is, as we show, a middle-range theory. We also use a primary transfer agent (a geographer – Alice Coleman) and a concept (defensible space) to reflect on the role and contribution of British geography in English housing/planning policy. Our conceptual framework looks at positionality, context, multiple perspectives, ambiguity and mutability. The irony being that Coleman’s positivist, non-negotiable view would totally reject this interpretation as too complex. Although Coleman is the primary transfer agent, we also discuss attendant ones, including one influential individual who acts as a foil to Coleman’s views. Nonetheless, Coleman is a useful prompt through which to explore the conflated cluster of sometimes contradictory concepts that are gathered together under the umbrella of defensible space. As an unusual geographer and scholar, known not only for her eclecticism – in Maddrell’s (2009) view ‘a polymath generalist’– but also for her outspoken views and right wing politics, it is remarkable the extent to which her radical view was applied consistently and rigorously. Like herself, Coleman’s take on defensible space was uncompromising, rather than fluid and negotiated. Coleman’s values were outliers in the wider discipline of geography at the time (and remain so today), yet they impacted the canon of planning and urban design from another perspective, and continue to do so in recent debates over the demolition and refurbishment of council estates in the United Kingdom.
The Origins of Defensible Space
At its simplest, defensible space can be defined as ‘space over which the occupiers of adjacent buildings can exercise effective supervision and control’ (Cowan 2005: 102). Given it is about control over space it is an inherently geographical concept. The notion of defensible space demonstrates the interrelationship between the physical design of spaces, social interaction and crime. Yet the concept of defensible space is contradictory, tentative and ill defined. Indeed, the concept has proved ambiguous and malleable enough to support diverse interdisciplinary interpretations; it is a ubiquitous, familiar idea, not only to built environment professionals but also to academic geographers, criminologists, architects, and so on. Defensible space remains a ‘common-sense concept’ recognised even by the general public in its most basic form.
Architect-planner Oscar Newman (1935–2004) is often said to have coined the term ‘defensible space’, although it was first used by the sociologist William Yancey. In 1972 Newman published Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design, based on his research on New York City public housing. He later refined his thesis in his, 1976 Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space. But the emergence of the notion of defensible space has a longer history and is far richer and more complex than Newman’s method of (re)designing spaces to inhibit criminal activity. Urbanist Jane Jacobs (1961) had famously talked about the importance of ‘eyes on the street’ sometime before, and we can trace the origins of the concept under different names within Lewis Mumford’s (1938) The Culture of Cities, or in William Whyte (1956) and Kevin Lynch’s (1960) observations. Concepts rarely, if ever, have a singular origin and defensible space is no different. The basis of defensible space emerges from notions of social interaction and encounter in modern city streets. Mumford, who at one level was very confident about the link between civility and the city, was also concerned that the emergence of the ‘megalopolis’ was leading to ‘anonymity’ and ‘impersonality’, which he saw as ‘positive encouragement to asocial or anti-social actions’ (Mumford 1938: 266; see also Fyfe et al. 2006). The idea of defensible space also builds on the historical work of Louis Wirth and George Simmel and other urban sociologists exploring the influence of the form and character of the modern city (see Lees 2004), or the interconnectedness of common space on the experiences of its inhabitants. Whyte’s (1956) study of urban public spaces demonstrated the complex positioning of privately owned public spaces; he studied the behaviour of people within small New York places, and started to catalogue the successful and unsuccessful elements of such spaces. His observations on ‘people moving’ and ‘people watching’ in plazas, fed through to Jacobs’ (1961) descriptions of ‘ballet on the street’ and ‘eyes on the street’.
Most commentators agree that defensible space is not solely about crime, nor is it limited to the design of spaces and fences, the physical location of windows, or the layout of streets and neighbourhoods. Obviously spatial perspectives on the relationship between crime and housing have existed since Booth’s nineteenth century maps of poverty and social class in London, Beames’ studies of British rookeries or Burgess’ pre-First World War concentric zone model of Chicago. These neighbourhood analyses established purely spatial patterns of crime, lacking behavioural differentiation. Basic, area-based approaches evolved into the ecological analysis of the impact of poor housing, poverty and transient populations during the 1950s. These more nuanced methods maintained that a particular behavioural setting had the power to elicit similar responses from diverse occupants; yet remained at an aggregate inter-urban scale of investigation. Crucially, by relating image, meaning and legibility to perceptions of place, Lynch (1960) transformed how designers and social scientists alike perceived urban form. Jones and Evans (2008: 115) point out that ‘the anti-modernist stance’ of defensible space ideas emerged from Lynch’s (1960) notion of legibility, and his criticism of urban spaces where movement and function was not clear. Later, Lynch’s (1981) articulation of notions around spatial rights – ‘right of presence’, ‘use and action’, ‘appropriation’ and ‘modification’ (p. 205) – introduced designers to concepts integral to ownership and control of spaces, fostering freedom to engage with others or being free to retreat from threat.
Jacobs articulated a planning view of defensible space as it is experienced on city streets. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) her combination of social science and planning theories presented a positive vision of urban living, where active street life and numerous social interactions were identified as indicators of successful, well-designed places. She noted that more crimes occurred in the often-deserted public spaces found in (modernist) public-housing projects, than in traditional, crowded streets. Poyner (1983), amongst others, identified Jacobs’ influence on Newman’s idea of defensible space; her other critical legacy was a taxonomy of space that shaped social interaction. Jacobs (1961) succinct definition of the three attributes of safe spaces included a plea for clear delineation of public from private space:
First there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.
Second, there must be eyes on the street: eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to ensure the safety of both residents and strangers must be orientated to the street.
And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. (Jacobs 1961: 35)
Newman’s version of defensible space (outlined in the section ‘Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space’) extended Jacobs’ two-part definition of public and private space into four parts: private, semi-private, public and semi-public space.3 Inevitably, defensive architecture for Jacobs, but especially Newman, was connected to post-Watergate and Vietnam progressive US ideals for personal, social and economic liberation; and the city was an emancipatory site for these beliefs. As Newman (1972: 203) said: ‘For our low-income population, security in their residential environment – security from the natural elements, from criminals and from authority – is the first essential step to liberation’. At that moment in time, in the early 1970s, there was a concern for the poor, welfarism and community commons; progressive design was linked to social emancipation. One political contraction was the rapid move from emancipatory concern into a strategy of control under the revanchist city and the shifting political climate in US cities like New York (see Smith 1996, on zero tolerance and the revanchist city).
Similarly, in the early 1970s criminological research moved from mapping the location of offenders or offences to proposing models of the local environment as a framework for individual behaviour. Yancey (1971) suggested a hyper-local explanation for residents’ actions. His influential paper on the Pruitt-Igoe public-housing project in St Louis, Missouri (which had become infamous internationally for its crime, poverty and racial segregation) critiqued the project’s design, particularly its lack of semi-public space which housing management professionals considered to be unnecessary ‘wasted space’ (Yancey 1971: 11). But far from being wasteful, Yancey argued that lacking this shared space resulted in residents retreating into private internal spaces. Yancey termed these semi-private areas ‘defensible space’ (1971: 17) using the term several years before Newman. He found that residents easily recognised the difference between private apartment space and public shared amenities. Similar to residents socialising on their front steps (or stoops) in the North End of Boston, as described by Jacobs (1961), Yancey (1971) noticed that the semi-public space outside family homes ‘provides the ecological basis around which informal networks of friends and relatives may develop’ (p. 17). These spatial relationships shaped the social networks of residents, with the constrained physical design limiting occupants’ interactions beyond the confines of their individual homes. The design of our surroundings then came to be seen as a fundamental method of demarcating private territory physically or symbolically (Ley 1977; Lynch 1960; Sennett 1986).
More recently, research into the geography of the fear of crime describes a subtle and complex sequence of interactions that link the design of the physical environment to individuals’ perceived potential for crime, and hence to an individual’s sense of wellbeing (Smith 1986a, 1987, 2003). Rudlin (2015), for example, considering the proliferation of gates onto courtyards and walls forming inward-facing gated communities, points out that the creation of defensible urban forms should not only be able to make residents feel safer, but contribute to making the surrounding city safer. He is concerned that gates and barriers result in occupants ‘only mixing with like people, losing their ability to live within a diverse society and increasing their level of fear, thus fuelling a vicious circle in which they feel the need for more protection and control’ (Rudlin 2015: 37–39). Blandy (2007: 47) is especially critical:
gated communities are not an effective response to current issues of crime and disorder in terms of physical security and collective efficacy; nor do they assist in regenerating deprived areas, or tackling problems of disorder on large social rented estates. Indeed, any further growth in the collective fortification of affluent homes and retro-gating of social rented estates is likely to contribute to increased social divisiveness.
So – too few people on the street, not enough movement or activity and public space, were seen as pathological. Modernist planning and social housing projects that lacked activity engendered failed public space, their segregation from active street networks explaining their abnormality – all prompting calls for ‘defensible space’.
Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space
Newman’s own career in housing research, like Yancey, also started in St Louis where he taught architecture and city planning at Washington University from 1965. He wrote about watching the decline of Pruitt-Igoe, triggering his recognition of Yancey’s novel concept and prompting his development of the idea of defensible space (Newman 1995). Newman conceptualised defensible space as a combination of spatial and social mechanisms, with the capacity to create physical zones of territorial influence, to provide natural surveillance opportunities for residents and to positively affect the (often negative) perception of a public housing scheme’s distinctiveness and resultant social or economic stigma (see Figure 1.1). Newman refined this definition in his Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space as:
a residential environment whose physical characteristics—building layout and site plan—function to allow inhabitants themselves to become key agents in ensuring their security. (Newman 1976: 4)
Figure 1.1 Newman’s typology of space. (Permission: Kopper Newman)
Newman’s own research was undertaken in New York City where he studied two housing projects, drawing on New York Housing Authority Police crime statistics, as well as his own data generated through resident interviews and building analysis. One housing project with high-rise blocks, Van Dyke, had a 50% higher crime rate than the other, Brownsville, which consisted of mid-rise walk-ups (see Figure 1.2). Finding higher crime rates in the lifts, stairways and landings of the high-rise apartment buildings, Newman argued that the Van Dyke residents felt no personal responsibility for the communal areas shared by many occupants. Good design and certain physical characteristics, he argued, allowed Brownsville residents to monitor and occupy semi-private spaces, ensuring their security. Although intended as practical, applied research, Newman’s assertions about verifiable scientific methods enhanced the reputation of his work (he maintained the study compared identical communities, with constant social characteristics, only the building forms varied). However, these positivist methodological assertions legitimised later scientifically based criticisms of Newman’s research.
Figure 1.2 Newman’s sketch of Van Dyke (L) and Brownsville (R), New York City. (Permission: Kopper Newman)
Newman’s concept of defensible space as derived from these studies elaborated on Jacobs’ attributes of safe public spaces. Safe spaces required: ‘visibility to witnesses, community spirit and being prepared to guard neutral territory, a stream of potential witnesses and demarcation of private territory physically and symbolically’ (Mawby 1977: 171). The ‘dimensions’ that underpinned Newman’s defensible space concept were:
the capacity of the physical environment to create physical zones of territorial influence,
the capacity of physical design to provide surveillance opportunities for residents and their agents,
the capacity of physical design to influence the perception of a project’s uniqueness, isolation and stigma, and
the influence of geographical juxtaposition with ‘safe zones’ on the security of adjacent areas (Newman 1972: 50).
Territoriality can be interpreted very broadly from the concept of place attachment or social commitment to location, to animal-like defending of ‘turf’, through to symbolic or physical acts. Similarly, territoriality can be applied at a range of scales, relating to specific sites or wider neighbourhoods. The positive and negative attributes of territoriality have been explored across the social science disciplines; a contradictory interpretation of territoriality arises from interconnected mechanisms that establish control over space. This control can be communicated in a multitude of ways: physical (a person’s presence reducing and inhibiting criminal activity or a physical barrier such as fences or walls); symbolic (plants and/or other symbolising ownership of the space); visual (graffiti tags); or physiological (encouraging a sense of safety through well-lit, well-looked-after places). Control mechanisms applied to the same space that communicates possession can result in alternative readings from a range of users. To Newman, territoriality consisted of several interconnected effects: it was a process of establishing a sense of ownership for legitimate users of the space, which in turn provided a clear definition of areas controlled and influenced by inhabitants, and was encouraged through familiarity with neighbours or passers-by.
Territoriality is often characterised as ‘the absence of anonymity’ for legitimate inhabitants. Ley (1974a), for example, emphasised opportunities for casual contact, leading to joint ownership of space and to the exclusion of non-inhabitants. For Newman, territoriality was directed at strangers by controlling their access and movement through a housing estate or a neighbourhood. Yet, territoriality might influence factors that jeopardise as well as improve security. The number or frequency of passers-by has contradictory interpretations, providing a spectrum of explanations; many strangers might provide greater anonymity for criminals, but the same number of familiar passers-by might act as potential witnesses or provide positive opportunities for social interaction.
Surveillance is especially emphasised in the concept of defensible space, which favours the use of natural or informal surveillance (windows overlooking public spaces, or active street frontages) over mechanical (CCTV) or formal forms of supervision (security guards). Natural surveillance can increase a sense of security, which will encourage the greater use of a space and positively reinforce ownership. However, even the apparently simple tactic of natural surveillance can have contradictory consequences on design decisions – ground floor windows, which may improve visibility over adjacent spaces, might also advertise opportunities for burglary.
Image is the least well-defined, but in some ways the most tangible of Newman’s dimensions; he includes the use of distinctive built forms, materials, finishes or aesthetics, which are identified as having associations with a particular social class or lifestyle. Image and its resultant associations suffuse housing design from the urban scale to the detail, from the size and scale of the blocks themselves to the selection of particularly institutional or utilitarian materials. Image is, of course, affected by the physical condition of the buildings and spaces; by signs of decay, neglect or poor maintenance. The dominance of materials in the reading of spaces is widespread: cracked fluorescent lights cruelly exposing the flaws in cold damp concrete ceilings, speak of tight budgets, lack of care and neglected maintenance; the aesthetic of ‘cheap’n’drab’ has become synonymous with public housing stigmatised by its very appearance and design. Such images became encapsulated in the broken-windows theory discussed later.
Milieu is the positive influence of activities perceived as safe (such as police stations or well-used streets) adjacent to areas suffering from crime. Greater levels of activity contribute to a positive milieu through a potentially benevolent increase in passers-by. It encompasses the effects of neighbourhood context and reputation, and identifies urban design decisions for the location of amenities as an explanation for spatial concentrations of crime or the presence of unpopular areas. Certain activities or amenities (shops, clubs, bars or even neglected recreational areas) act as attractors for crime. Newman (1972: 108–109) explained that ‘certain sections and arteries of a city have come to be recognized as being safe – by the nature of the activities located there; by the quality of formal patrolling; by the number of users and extent of their felt responsibility; and by the responsibility assumed by employees of bordering institutions and establishments’. Here, Newman (1980) touched on the Chicago School ideas of Burgess, Shaw and McKay of crime hot spots through mapping high- and low-risk neighbourhoods. He ascribed a simplistic juxtaposition of high crime and low crime areas and proposed pepper-potting potentially difficult residents within quiet well-behaved neighbourhoods to reduce crime levels. To test his hypothesis, Newman analysed and redesigned Five Oaks in Dayton, Ohio, into mini-neighbourhoods by removing through traffic, changing the character of streets to enable children’s play, increase neighbours’ interactions and recognition of cars, and altering the layout so potential criminals had to enter and exit one way. Newman countered complaints that these changes had displaced crime by arguing that positive milieu, that is the residents of Five Oaks taking control of their streets, extended out into the bordering communities as well. Nevertheless, milieu is an ambiguous mechanism relating to spatial layout and land-use patterns that provides a context for routine4 activities (Reynald and Elffers 2009). Habraken’s (1998) tripartite ordering of the physical, territorial and cultural readings of spaces into a ‘common fabric’ reminds us of the interrelated nature of these characteristics. It is the interaction of image, milieu and natural surveillance, which strengthens or weakens territoriality or pride in a place.
Before turning to criticisms of Newman’s defensible space theory, the racialised contexts of Newman’s writings should be noted. Notoriously Pruitt-Igoe, Newman’s trigger for developing his theory of defensible space, was a dumping ground for over 10,000 low-income African Americans. It is important to situate defensible space in relation to the way that discourses of crime in the United States were (and continue to be) profoundly racialised. Racial inequalities had prompted race riots from the late 1960s in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Newark and Detroit, leading to federal concerns about crimes against property and the pathological construction of black (male) (inner-city) bodies as criminal and dangerous (see Smith 1996). The photographs in the federal reports commissioned at the time, according to Knoblauch5 ‘put a face to the so-called pathology of the “personality factory” of black families in the “slums”’, and ‘displaced concern with structural economic issues onto residents themselves’. Newman saw this de facto segregation as negative, and in the face of waning political support in federal programmes to address such issues he saw defensible space as a physical solution, but he also stridently criticised welfare dependence. As Kinder (2016: ch. 3) points out:
Newman’s focus on physical design and social exclusions was problematic. His work undertheorized criminality and inequality. He explicitly discouraged city planners and policy makers from using social, economic, and welfare planning to revitalize cities, create jobs, or redistribute income.
The idea that Pruitt-Igoe’s design, and not structural inequality and racism, was to blame took hold, and Newman’s ideas about territoriality and defensible space became mainstream in assumptions about public housing redesign in the United States. Indeed, they heavily influenced The US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) HOPE VI program of demolition and renewal of public-housing projects across the United States (see Vale 2013).
Criticisms and Endorsements from Different Disciplines
Newman’s concept of ‘defensible space’ was mobilised from the United States to the United Kingdom (see Chapter 2) at the same time as vociferous cross-disciplinary critique of it emerged. Critics implied that Newman had manipulatively selected which housing projects to examine (Bottoms 1974; Hillier 1973; Mawby 1977; Merry 1981); for while he mentioned several positive and negative examples of neighbourhoods and projects, he only talked about a single pair of housing projects (Van Dyke and Brownsville) in any detail. Critics argued he failed to demonstrate the comparability of these two projects to other examples; of course, finding truly ‘paired’ public housing projects to compare may be impossible but the differences that Newman ignored were ones that influenced his arguments greatly. For example, Brownsville was completed over a decade earlier than Van Dyke, so it was perhaps further advanced along a cycle of popularity or decay (Bottoms 1974). Others pointed to Newman’s shallow ethnographic summary of resident interviews as methodologically weak (e.g. Ley 1974a). In addition, when characterising the projects as having similar resident populations in terms of income, race and family size, Newman ignored the less favourable reputation of one project that may have discouraged better-off residents; as such he was accused of omitting potentially conflicting or explanatory data on education or social class (Hillier 1973; Mawby 1977).
Researchers also identified statistical flaws in Newman’s data analysis, questioning both the selective use and underplaying of statistics (Bottoms 1974; Ley 1974a; Mawby 1977). Newman failed to separate out strength of correlation or causation for his proposed linkages between crime levels and built form. Newman (see also Coleman in Chapter 2) concentrated on measuring easily quantifiable effects (Moran and Dolphin 1986), relying on statistical analysis of numerical data (Coleman 1985a; Newman 1972). Subsequent defensible space research applied more rigorous and in-depth methods, for example, Merry’s (1981) detailed ethnographical victimisation studies that significantly improved on Newman’s anecdotal stories, or Cozens et al.’s (2001a) exploration of participants’ perceptions. Newman’s dimensions of defensible space relied on concepts drawn from across spatial and social fields. His book stated that his ambition was to draw together and incorporate material into an interdisciplinary perspective:
We have chosen to direct this work at a rather wide readership. It was initially intended primarily for housing developers, architects, city planners and police. But as the scope of the work grew and the significance of our findings became more apparent, it was felt that the manuscript should be reworked so as to make it more universally available. (Newman 1972: xiii)
His references were grouped into sections by discipline: environmental form, social policy, human territoriality, urban crime, housing and the sociology of the family. Reviews of Defensible Space showed that his concept provoked a strong response from an array of professions. Although each discipline/sector commended the overall idea, they tended to criticise it, perhaps not surprisingly, by emphasising the importance of, and seeking to protect/project, their own disciplines. The urban sociologist Mark Baldassare (1975) criticised Newman’s research as ‘the kind of sociologizing that is being done by other disciplines’ (p. 435). Baldassare (1975) considered Defensible Space a methodologically sound study, however, he found Newman’s interpretation of his findings ‘sociologically naïve, or at least unproven’ (Baldassare 1975: 435); particularly Newman’s assertions that a collective identity would emerge to take responsibility for residential spaces. Finding Newman’s architectural evaluation shallow, the urbanist Rayner Banham (1973) favoured the criminological over the urban design analysis: ‘the non-architectural part is probably the more fruitful and meaningful of the two’ (Banham 1973: 155). Planner John Friedmann (1973) emphasised the spatial limitations of Newman’s analysis, arguing the publication was more about people’s behaviour than spatial design. Friedmann’s review unjustifiably asserted society’s inherent impulses to crime and violence, and taking an unenthusiastic attitude to evidence gathering, asked: ‘Why do we need costly scientific studies to prove to us what should be self-evident?’ (Friedmann 1973: 49). Geographers and other planners said that defensible space was more likely to displace crime rather than eliminate it, questioning whether it could provide sustained and long-lasting improvements (Ley 1974a; Schneider and Kitchen 2002). Responding to this, the main governmental proponents of defensible space in the United States, HUD, argued that shifting crime away from areas of particular vulnerability made policing an easier task and that waves of defensible space strategies should be applied across a city, neighbourhood by neighbourhood (Cisneros 1996).
