The return of the Community Marketplace

The Stanley Marketplace in Aurora, east of Denver - adaptive reuse of commercial malls

By Gregory Saville

Adaptive-Reuse Community Marketplace:
A retail and cultural hub created by repurposing a former industrial, commercial, or civic structure into a multi-vendor market space. It functions as the modern Third-Places within revitalized buildings. 

It was the 1990s and we were sitting in an architect’s drafting room in Vancouver, pointing to some of our CPTED recommendations on a new suburban shopping mall south of the city. My business partner, Paul Wong, and I had spent weeks examining designs for the walkways, parking lots, store location placement, and other opportune crime areas. 

We believed this sprawling regional shopping mall might be redesigned with CPTED principles to make it safer. Paul had already co-published some of the first environmental criminology research with Pat and Paul Brantingham on the crime-causing character of shopping malls.

We had done our homework. Our recommendations were solid. We had the data to prove it. We were confident!

Then the figurative bomb exploded. 

“Nope,” said the architect hired to redevelop the property. 

He continued: “The property owners are going another direction. The suburban shopping mall concept is dying. There is a new kid in town. The Big Box store!”

“What?” I exclaimed. “What the hell is a Big Box store? That is a stupid idea. It will never take hold!”

Famous last words!

The Stanley Marketplace signals a traditional kind of community experience making a comeback

The emergence of the Big Box store changed everything. The saturation and decline destiny of the suburban shopping mall was set. By the 1990s shopping malls began to fade. Some have termed the decline of malls as the retail apocalypse.

From a crime perspective, Big Boxes were not much better. They triggered more sprawl, monoculture and homogenization of land uses. They reduced public space walkability and drained life from local downtowns. Many small neighborhood stores closed. 

Twenty years later, especially following the 2008 recession, the pattern changed again. E-commerce expanded and consumer demand for large format buildings weakened. Today it is the Big Box apocalypse. Vacancies are rising and many appear to be following the same downward path of their suburban cousins. 

SHARED SPACES AND PUBLIC LIFE

Consumer behavior and retail land uses are changing demand. People still visit Box Stores for bargains, but many now shop online with home delivery. More people stay home and work digitally, yet many still want places where they can gather in safe, enjoyable communal settings.

Last week I visited the latest reincarnation of the mall. The Stanley Marketplace in Aurora, just east of Denver. It is one of a growing list of mixed use, indoor/outdoor market-places called adaptive-reuse community marketplaces. 

The Stanley Marketplace opened in 2016 inside a former 1954 aircraft-parts factory. The building was repurposed into a 140,000 square foot (13,006.4 m² ) mixed-use marketplace that now hosts over fifty independent businesses.

Adaptive-reuse is an architectural strategy to repurpose older buildings, cut development waste, reduce carbon levels, and retain local history. It appears in residential buildings, office blocks, and increasingly in commercial markets.

Adaptive-reuse community marketplaces are a form of walkable, community-centered retail. They are human-scale, lively, and shaped more by local entrepreneurs than national chains. They return to the kind of economic and social embeddedness that suburban malls once promised but rarely achieved. 

Seattle's Pike Place Market - a popular adaptive reuse market, repurposed and saved from demolition - photo AlexReynolds at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wiki Commons

Early versions have existed for a long time, such as Pike Place Market in Seattle (1907) and the Fremantle Markets south of Perth, Australia (1897). Modern examples are appearing across many cities, including the Anaheim Packing House in California (2014), the Broadway Market in Baltimore near the harbor (2019), and Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market in its revitalized nineteenth-century warehouse district (mid-2000s).

The Stanley Marketplace feels like an old-style enclosed market. It avoids the sterile, marble and glass aesthetic in favor of wood, plants, smaller commercial units, and comfortable seating.  It has plentiful seating and it encourages people to linger, but in such a way that provides natural surveillance and territorial reinforcement to discourage anti-social behavior. It has abundant spaces for larger families to sit and play.

Metro Denver has numerous other adaptive-reuse markets across the city. It is gathering steam. 

Toronto's St. Lawrence market - reuse of a Victorian era industrial building - photo Canmenwalker, CC BY 4.0 via Wiki Commons

WHAT COMES NEXT?

Walking through the Stanley Marketplace felt like entering a place that remembered something essential about city life. People stayed longer, families wandered, and strangers shared tables. The building felt alive in a way many modern commercial districts do not. It brought activity to the street and created comfortable, visible spaces for local entrepreneurs. 

In SafeGrowth we see places like this as emerging community anchors. They grow from the way people use them and they show how neighborhood life strengthens when residents have shared places near their homes. These early projects suggest how future neighborhood hubs might form. They remind us that community centers can return when we design spaces that support connection and belonging.

 

No pooping in my back yard - Canine NIMBYism?

The excluded species from our planning

by Mateja Mihinjac

In our SafeGrowth work, we are constantly defining the most real and human moments of neighbourhood life. Jane Jacobs once advised that we should carefully watch the sidewalk ballet that is the street and watch the natural rhythms that make neighbourhoods work. In today’s world, in the best cities, that world involves our dogs! 

We live in an age obsessed with dogs – they star in adverts, fill social media feeds, and have their own cafés and birthday parties. Yet, in real life, restrictions are often imposed on dogs that communicate they are unwelcome or severely restrict their instinctual behaviour.

On my dog walks, I often observe tiny squares of grass, empty traffic islands, and unused patches of green in urban environments that are full of signs “No Dogs”, “Keep Dogs on Leash”, or the ever-polite “Dog-Free Zone.” The message is: dogs are welcome… but not here. Occasionally, during my walks, I also experience judgmental stares when my dog just sniffs the grass. 

Signs of restriction, not permission

Is this curious paradox a form of modern NIMBYism – canine NIMBYism? This paradox is particularly curious when you notice the signs appear in places where no one else seems to go. The grass stays immaculate and unused. 

While many of those patches of grass invite birds, hedgehogs and cats with intentional food leftovers, the grass is not necessarily reserved for another group. The “no dogs” signs are therefore not necessarily about cleanliness but about defining who it is for. It’s about place politics: ownership and subtle exclusion, even when the space might not be private. 

NEW CANINE RESTRICTIONS

With an increasing density of canine companions, new dog parks now appear as a selling point in neighbourhood (re)developments. Dog parks are ideal for bringing legitimate eyes onto the street — especially in places that might otherwise have no one around to watch. This happens all over the world.

Calgary's East Village development with children's playground, community gardens, dog park, public hiking trails - planning for inclusion and safety

In Calgary, our SafeGrowth planner Anna Brassard worked on the East Village redevelopment years ago, and today that neighbourhood places dog parks beside children’s play areas and community gardens, creating safer, more animated public spaces.

In Slovenia, many cafés and shops now allow smaller dogs inside, letting them accompany their handlers and adding to the natural rhythms of street life.

While dogs are valued in theory, their presence is often controlled or restricted. This has been especially evident over the past years due to increasing numbers of dog ownership. According to one source, 39% of Slovene households have at least one dog, the fifth highest in Europe and above the European average of 25%.

With these numbers, new tensions have also emerged. 

Dog park in Gan Meir, Israel
- photo David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As more canines populate urban areas and green space is becoming increasingly scarce, Slovenia has recently toughened penalties for dogs off-leash and for neglecting to clean after a dog, aiming to promote “responsible dog ownership”. 

Similar stricter punishments have been introduced in the UK, where restrictions on dogs and their dog handlers are enforced through public spaces protection orders.

Such legislative changes reflect the growing impatience with dogs in public space and the anticipated disruption of public disorder, whether real or not.

RECONCILING PUBLIC ORDER & MESSINESS 

Most people prefer order and feel at unease when it gets disrupted. Yet, dogs sniff, run, bark, chase, pee, poop, which brings a "mess" into otherwise tidy urban space - which is not always so tidy! 

Lovas Kiss describes how dog walkers move through space differently than other users who go about their activities. That sometimes creates feelings of unpredictability and discomfort.

Signs of exclusion, not inclusion

This messiness is also what makes streets and neighbourhoods feel alive. A dog changes the rhythm of a neighbourhood. It draws people out, encourages social contact, creates friendly chaos and animates otherwise dead corners. In a Polish city park study, Bogacka also showed that people with dogs are perceived as more trustworthy and they reduce the perception of unsafety compared to other park visitors.

Some studies suggest that public space should therefore reflect the messiness of life, including noise, smells, joy, and occasionally, inconvenience. Public space need not always feel bare and sterile.

TRANS-SPECIES PLANNING - ANTIDOTE TO CANINE NIMBYism

For this reason, urban studies scholars Phil Hubbard and Andrew Brooks talk about the importance of considering how urban planning practices affect all species. For example, gentrification, often considered undesirable, affects animals as well. They may get displaced, excluded, or their behaviour severely restricted because it’s considered “too messy” in the upscaled environment. 

Calgary's East Village - people, dogs, parks, playground, gardens

Urban geographers Julie Urbanik and Mary Morgan similarly note that planning needs to think about how non-human uses and users fit into urban space and consider aspects like fences, off-leash zones, proximity to residences, conflict management, and other aspects.

Thus, to be inclusive and to reduce the potential for conflicting uses, trans-species urban planning practices need to acknowledge the interactions between human and non-human animals. 

In crime prevention, I often criticise when the focus is exclusively on communicating what is prohibited or penalised or not permitted, rather than informing users about the desirable behaviours. If we want to curb canine NIMBYism, we should stop policing dogs and start planning for them by designing spaces that support the behaviours we want and respecting their nature.

AI and crime prevention: Drawing the ethical line

Transmitted electrons, processed signals, algorithmic pattern recognition
- the quiet machinery of our new AI reality

by Gregory Saville

Over the past two years, I’ve written in this space about the risks and promises of artificial intelligence in community safety. In The Pros and Cons of Using AI to Prevent Crime and Stop, Dave, I’m Afraid: The Latest on AI and CPTED, I explored the tension between innovation and oversight. And in Gambling with the Future, I warned that without guardrails, predictive systems could amplify bias faster than any police algorithm before them.

This month, that conversation moves from theory to substance. I am about to release what may be the first field-ready ethical framework for artificial intelligence in CPTED/crime prevention for the International CPTED Association. 

This new AI and CPTED White Paper is the product of research, discussions and interviews as part of the Praxis/Theory CPTED Committee of the ICA. I solicited feedback from CPTED and artificial intelligence specialists from around the world. The result sets out principles for transparency, accountability, and human-centered design in the age of intelligent machines.

The literature review included reading the latest writers on AI, among those
historian Yuval Noah Harari's exceptional book Nexus

Why now? Because AI technology has already arrived: 

• City cameras now run on neural networks that detect “anomalies” using predictive AI. 
• Drone patrols and risk dashboards mine enormous datasets for facial recognition. 
• Planners and urban designers are using generative AI to digitally simulate community planning scenarios, what is called digital twins. 
• Some futurists are envisioning “smart cities” using a concept developed by Mateja and myself called 3rd Generation CPTED   
• The concept of “smart cities”, a city driven by AI algorithms, already poses enormous challenges for crime and CPTED, a point I made at a 2021 Smart City conference presentation in Sweden  

What has not arrived are the ethical guidelines to match that power.

GENERATIVE AND PREDICTIVE AI

During my research I spoke to Professor Emma Pierson, a brilliant AI ethics scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, who reminds us that public debate around AI often drifts into abstraction. She urges policymakers to start with two foundational forms—predictive and generative AI—because nearly every current application stems from one or both. 

Predictive models infer patterns from data; generative models create new content from learned representations. Everything else including robotic, agentive, or hybrid models of AI builds on those foundations.

Drones are not  AI, but there are many crime prevention and policing 

applications where they lend themselves to AI 

That insight shapes this white paper. We focus first on how predictive systems are reshaping surveillance and resource allocation, and how generative tools could soon influence public messaging, architectural design, or even neighborhood storytelling. Each domain carries profound implications for privacy, accountability, and equity.

In crime prevention, ethical AI isn’t about the gadgets. It’s about governance. A predictive dashboard that flags “high-risk” behavior might block or respond to actions of people without community consent. That violates the very democratic principles of CPTED. A generative model that drafts neighborhood improvement plans without residents’ input is just as misguided. The new framework calls for three essential commitments:

• Transparency: every AI-driven decision in urban safety must be explainable to the public it affects.
• Oversight: humans remain accountable for outcomes; algorithms can advise but never decide.
• Co-creation: residents are partners in design, not passive data points in someone else’s experiment.

This isn’t theoretical. The purpose of a white paper is to generate discussion within the ICA and elsewhere. It forms some of the factual background to launch deliberations. ICA members from Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, Australasia, and North America will have an AI framework to examine real-world cases where technology overstepped its reach.

 

The UN is now publishing ethical guidelines of AI usage

The paper describes some case studies, such as an intelligent lighting system that quietly profiled behavior by race and age. In another example, predictive policing software displaced trust in neighborhood problem-solving teams. These examples remind us that the ethics of AI are not a luxury. They are a public-safety necessity.

In a recent podcast with ICA President Macarena Rau Vargas, we discussed how ethical AI could strengthen community resilience.  

When designed within CPTED’s 1st Gen principles of territorial ownership, 2nd Gen principles of community cohesion, and 3rd Gen principles of sustainability and participation, we discover a version of AI that can illuminate, not dominate, public space.

The white paper concludes with a call to action. It challenges practitioners, researchers, and civic leaders to adopt a human-in-the-loop standard. AI can process information, but it cannot define meaning. That responsibility belongs to us. As Professor Pierson reminds us, the goal is not to slow innovation but to anchor it in accountability.

Next year, we will release our new SafeGrowth® book, co-authored by Mateja Mihinjac, Jason Tudor, Carl Bray, and myself. It offers detailed examples of success, candid lessons from failure, and a full chapter on a smart city initiative in Sweden that points toward the future.

After years of urging that crime prevention needs an ethical compass, we finally have both the foundation and the language to chart one. The next step belongs to everyone — planners, designers, police, community members, and policymakers — to draw the ethical line and keep it visible.

The Beacon - a light in Madison's community safety story

Downtown Madison, Wisconsin - a beautiful city surrounded by lakes.
Site of the 2025 Problem-Oriented Policing conference

 by Greg Saville

In every city, there are places that test the limits of our problem-solving. In Madison, Wisconsin, one of those places in the past was The Beacon — a “daytime drop-in shelter and resource center operated by Catholic Charities”. It provides daily services to more than 200 men, women, and children experiencing homelessness, with the goal of supporting their transition toward stability and greater well-being.

Last week, following our SafeGrowth/CPTED presentation at the annual Problem-Oriented Policing Conference, I had the honor to tour through The Beacon with some SafeGrowth students in a recent course, along with my long-time colleague, retired RCMP Sgt. John Lyons, and meet the new center manager, Chris Watson and program director, Nici Hawkins. 

 

Inside the Beacon property - access control to ensure safety and comfort
for those experiencing homelessness

What we saw was more than a resource center. It was the outcome of a collaborative journey — one that began in a SafeGrowth training class and has since grown into a community success story.  

FROM TRAINING TO REAL-WORLD RESULTS

Last year, when we first introduced SafeGrowth and CPTED in Madison, we used case studies from other cities to show what happens when residents, police, and community partners design solutions together. Class participants used those case studies to form teams and select a Madison project to work on over a few months.

Garden and vegetable/flower growing area inside the Beacon 

One of the SafeGrowth teams picked The Beacon as their project site, knowing the center was experiencing serious challenges: high calls for service, frayed staff–police relationships, and public disorder spilling into the streets. Prior attempts to collaborate had been less than successful and the problems were not improving.

The SafeGrowth team didn’t drop in a pre-packaged answer, like simple CPTED checklists. They started with site visits, interviews, and safety audits. They listened to Beacon staff and clients and eventually, they partnered with them. They mapped the problems: loitering and drug dealing at the rear entrance, unsafe outdoor areas, poor access control, and strained police–staff relationships

Children's safe play area for families suffering homelessness

Common sitting area, lockers for storing property and restrooms

EARLY BREAKTHROUGHS 

Several strategies emerged quickly:

• Closing the rear entrance and welcoming everyone through the front doors for proper check-in, reducing anonymity and disorder.
• Parking changes on the adjacent block to disrupt drug dealing and loitering.
• Weekly walkthroughs and de-escalation training for Beacon staff, helping rebuild trust with police

What made the difference was not just the fixes, but the teamwork: police, Beacon staff, neighbors, and city officials working side by side in a SafeGrowth team. When the Beacon staff attended presentations at the conclusion of the SafeGrowth training, they were able to develop a new kind of partnership that still exists – indeed, it has expanded.

Computer facilities helping people find jobs, resources, and skills training

Laundry facilities along with many social services available

RESULTS THAT MATTER 

The results were dramatic. After SafeGrowth strategies were implemented in August 2024, calls for service dropped by nearly 40% the following year. This means that, not only were those in and around The Beacon safer in their daily lives, but there were financial savings in police resources. 

For Beacon staff and clients, the changes meant safer spaces, clearer boundaries, and stronger trust with the officers who walked their halls. And now, The Beacon is taking further steps: introducing some redesigns to the property, adding staff roles, upgrading security, coordinating with new outreach teams, and even launching volunteer cleanup programs.

Beacon manager Chris Watson describing the many resources and
services to help people transition off the street 

LIGHTING THE PATH FORWARD 

The Beacon’s success isn’t the end of the story. It’s a work in progress — a living example of how SafeGrowth works when ideas move from paper to practice. The center has been providing services for a long time and the SafeGrowth project helped support that tremendous work by establishing partnerships with police and ensuring safety in and around the property. They are still refining operations and building partnerships. But the transformation so far shows the power of collaborative problem-solving.

Our visit to the Beacon, coincided with the annual problem-oriented policing conference, honoring the concept founded by University of Wisconsin/Madison Professor Herman Goldstein. In a time when cities around the world struggle to confront homelessness, this example shines a light on how it can become a collaborative strategy.

As Goldstein warned decades ago, “police have been particularly susceptible to the ‘means over ends’ syndrome” — focusing more on internal systems than on whether they actually reduce harm. 

Our SafeGrowth presentation took place at the 2025 POP conference, just down the street from The Beacon

What the Madison SafeGrowth team showed at The Beacon is that when community, police, and service providers shift focus together on outcomes, real change happens.

A beacon is not the destination. It’s the light that guides the way. In Madison, thanks to the police department, the SafeGrowth team, along with Beacon staff, and their partners, that light is shining a little brighter.

Children and the future of CPTED

Children have a role to play in their own future

by Larry Leach 

“We’re Not Raising Children… We are Raising Adults” was advice I once received as a young parent. In essence, if your children act in ways you wouldn’t accept from an adult, then you need to help correct that behavior.

Whitney Houston captured this beautifully in The Greatest Love of All: “I believe that children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.”

After reading recent blogs by Greg and Mateja speaking about children and the roots of crime, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the role of learned behavior and the power of youth to guide us toward safer, healthier communities in both physical and behavioral terms.

Greg’s blog outlined an entire line of crime and learning research in social control theory and blocked opportunity theory. Mateja described how children serve as a catalyst for neighbourhood connections. 

Since 2010, we have featured blogs on youth violence prevention, such as the work of 2nd Gen CPTED co-creator Gerry Cleveland.

THERE IS SOMETHING TO THIS 

When we hear from reformed offenders, their stories often trace back to childhood trauma. Unresolved pain led to alcohol or drug use later in life, used as a mask. Therefore, if many pathways to crime begin in youth, and children lack the tools to process trauma alone, prevention must start there.

School learning at all levels is important for preventing crime - photo woodleywonderworks,
CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

My experience in school politics showed me first-hand how the system tends to measure success. We hear plenty about graduation rates and year-to-year statistics, but not a lot about how the school affects those rates? Were outcomes positive or negative? And what about mental health—rarely measured, though it profoundly shapes students’ lives?

It’s hard to put into numbers the value of mentorship, of a caring adult relationship, or of a community that steps in to support young people. Yet these are the very things that can make a struggling student feel seen and guided.

Research underscores the point. In a paper titled The Impact of Education on Crime: International Evidence, the authors note:

Reductions in crimes leading to an arrest realized from offering better school options to high-risk youth would conservatively produce USD $16,000 in social savings to victims over the next seven years. Because better schools also likely reduce crimes that never lead to an arrest, savings are likely to be substantially higher—especially when factoring in reduced prison and prevention costs.

 

YOUTH CENTRES AND OUTSIDE ACTIVITIES

Add to all of this, the lack of focus on the "whole child" in modern school systems, and we now need outside activities like Youth Centres and sport organizations to help develop a healthy mentality as they move towards adulthood. 

Children from youth centre  

Filling youth tool belts with the necessary life tools - when some families are dealing with their own personal trauma - is another key to prevention that many municipalities are missing. This isn’t a statistic for policymakers, but a hands-on community intervention that’s harder to secure buy-in for.

Graduation rates, while important, don’t tell the whole story. A diploma does not guarantee that a young person has the tools to thrive as an adult. Communities need to fill those gaps intentionally, with adults willing to step in as mentors and guides. This takes effort and buy-in, but it can transform lives.

When we consider Third Generation CPTED and building a healthy community, youth should be at the forefront on building plans to prevent crime. Building healthy, connected communities means placing young people at the center of prevention. 

Teach them well. And then, let them lead the way.

 

An Odyssey - Searching for the cause of crime

Ancient Greek vase (480 BC) of legendary King Odysseus hearing the Sirens whose songs lure sailors to shipwreck - self-mastery and constraint led his ship to safety.
Similarily, in criminology, theories of social and situational control can lead us safely away from crime - photo Wiki Commons

By Gregory Saville

Note: To theory-averse readers – I apologize. We usually do not write long blogs. We offer real-life examples, stories of people doing great things, and ideas for change. We don’t delve deeply into theory. Now and then, however, I am reminded that theory is the foundation for good practice and that sometimes stories take time. This blog explains why.

Last year I re-read Homer’s Odyssey and thought: perfect blog arc. I drafted an outline—but life intervened. Last week, thumbing through notes from my first crime-theory classes in graduate school many moons ago, it hit me: these weren’t lecture summaries—they were maps of an odyssey —a long voyage across generations, full of rival schools, wrong turns, and breakthroughs. 

Like Odysseus, criminologists kept sailing from one island of ideas to the next, each promising an answer to why crime happens and how to prevent it. And, like Odysseus, each landfall changed the quest.

Class #1 Individual Pathology — “Look inside the person”

The theory voyage in criminology was launched inside the human brain in the 1800s. Italian physician-criminologist Cesare Lombroso hunted for the “born criminal”. Early-1900s eugenicists chased ‘feeblemindedness’ and eugenics boards forced sterilizations on the “unfit” — grim policy on flimsy claims.



Some tried to pin crime on IQ. Ultimately criminologist Edwin Sutherland wrote intelligence was not an important cause of delinquency, and more recent studies suggest any existing IQ/crime link reflects school struggles and social frustrations.

Today the spotlight has shifted again. Trauma, psychopathy, sociopathy, and malignant narcissism are the buzzwords. In our field, third-generation CPTED captures this emerging research. New studies by Indian psychologist Meenakshi Shukla
and Australian psychologist Natalija Djakovic
dig into the Dark Triad —narcissism/Machiavellianism/psychopathy—showing deficits in both cognitive and emotional empathy.

Socio-biology theories remain a viable explanation for at least some crimes, especially neurological research on aggression and the amygdala. Trauma-based prevention programs capture this research.

Other theory captains took new routes. German/British researcher Hans Eysenck’s Crime and Personality (1964) mapped “criminal personalities.” Neurological researchers explored aggression and the amygdala; endocrinologists tested chemical castration for sex offenders. And yet, research indicates that most people with risk factors don’t offend. None of these pathologies are silver bullets. 

The emerging field of sociobiology has rebooted with wiser tools—twin studies, behavioral genetics, brain imaging—pointing to a gene–environment duet. Biology matters; context decides. Whether biomarkers become crime depends on the social world where predispositions meet opportunity. Neighborhoods matter.

Class #2 Social Psychology — “We learn our way into crime”

By mid-century, the odyssey turned outward. Instead of asking what’s wrong in the brain, we asked how people learn morals and rules. Lawrence Kohlberg 
mapped moral development, and Albert Bandura showed we lean toward rewards and away from punishment—kids learn kindness or bravado from caregivers, from TV like Sesame Street, and from crime-glorifying media. 

In the 1970s, my old friend C. Ray Jeffery argued these learning “environments” should be woven into one integrated theory—a thread that fed CPTED thinking.

Much of that evolved from Chicago’s Edwin Sutherland who said it plainly: crime is learned from others—differential association. His students Sykes & Matza added techniques of neutralization, the justifications offenders use: “nobody really got hurt” or “the system is corrupt.” Culture-conflict and subcultural theories showed why immigrant and lower-status youth might reject mainstream rules: remove status and respect, and people build their own codes. In prison, a single “diss” can trigger violence.

Which begs the question: if crime is learned, why don’t more people do it? I once attended Professor Travis Hirschi's criminology class years ago where he answered that question: strong social bonds in families and school hold people back. Later, in A General Theory of Crime with Michael Gottfredson, he argued that low self-control—impulsivity and present-mindedness—explains much deviance across life.

A few decades earlier, in the1960s, radical criminology had flipped the script. Howard Becker
and labeling theorists asked who gets to define crime. Being from “across the tracks” or “the bad side of town” are labels we still see in SafeGrowth work. Stigma can create careers in deviance; diversion programs try to interrupt that path. Modern restorative justice pushes further: repair harm, include victims, reintegrate people, and rebuild relationships so communities can heal. Vancouver, Canada is the latest city to scale this up as a Restorative City.

Restorative Vancouver - photo courtesy of the peacemaking group Peace of the Circle led by Dr. Evelyn Zellerer

Class #3 Structure & Ecology — “Place shapes possibility”

The third cluster steered theory into bigger waters: neighborhoods, cities, the social fabric. In the 19th century, French sociologist Émile Durkheim called it anomie when shared expectations fray and meaning is lost. Working in Boston and New York, Robert Merton wrote “Social Structure and Anomie” (1938), turning that into strain theory: if we celebrate success but block lawful means, people will innovate—sometimes illegally.

Chicago researchers Clifford Shaw & Henry McKay mapped delinquency across the city. Crime radiated in zones from the core; neighborhood conditions mattered more than individual traits—a theme that still resonates in SafeGrowth work. In the 1930s, they launched the Chicago Area Project to build cohesion and youth capacity; decades later a RAND corporation evaluation confirmed that it worked—delinquency fell and community organizing improved.

Neighborhood conditions affect social cohesion, collective efficacy, and crime

Richard Cloward & Lloyd Ohlin’s book, Delinquency and Opportunity, 
saw gangs as the street’s answer when legitimate paths are closed. Robert F. Kennedy read their work and helped channel it into Great Society programs to unblock pathways—jobs, training, education.

Conflict theorists added sharper edges: law can reflect the push-and-pull of groups; others, leaning on Marx, tied crime to class domination and surplus labor. These theories led to stormy seas—often more political than operational—but a needed reminder that power, inequality, and law are braided together.

Then came a three-point compass: Routine Activities Theory. Felson and Cohen argued crime happens when a motivated offender, a suitable target, and no capable guardian converge in space and time. Paired with British criminologists Clarke and Mayhew’s situational prevention, that changed practice: reduce temptations, harden targets, add guardianship, design better settings. In 1981, Canadian criminologists, Patricia and Paul Brantingham's environmental criminology, put crime theories into geography. 

In the mid-1980s, British criminologists Ronald V. Clarke and Derek B. Cornish crafted their prevention studies into a new twist on a very old idea - many offenders make rational decisions to commit crimes - the Rational Choice Theory.  I recently wrote a blog memorial to my friend, the late Ron Clarke (and his co-author Patricia Mayhew) for their tremendous theoretical contribution to the field. SafeGrowth taps into some of these ideas in early phases of prevention; and then extends them in later phases by using community capacity-building.

From the 1960s, Jane Jacobs’s ‘eyes on the street’ in urban planning and architect Oscar Newman’s defensible space in the 1970s, through to Robert Sampson’s collective efficacy in the late 1990s, the through-line is clear: urban design + neighborhood trust + willingness to act = effective prevention. SafeGrowth broadens this ecology of crime into long-term neighborhood capacity and livability.

According to legend, King Odysseus left Troy on a voyage home to Ithica following the Trojan War. Crime theory over the decades resembles that journey - photo courtesy of Tungsten, Wiki Commons

Final Class – Coming Home

Looking back, criminology’s odyssey isn’t about crowning one victor; it’s about integrating what each island on the Odyssey taught us. C. Ray Jeffery's desire for an integrative theory was right all along - albeit in a more expansive form. Pathology showed that bodies and brains matter—in context. Social psychology showed how we learn, belong, and are labeled—and how restoration can replace stigma. Structure and ecology mapped how inequality, environmental opportunity, urban design, and cohesion set the neighborhood stage where all those human stories play out.

That synthesis is where prevention lives. Biology supplies tendencies; peers teach habits; place turns risk up or down. This is the true ecology of crime—not a buzzword, but a practical way to braid the human, the social, and the spatial into strategies that work.

Odysseus doesn’t return the same man who left Ithaca. Neither do we. The destination isn’t a single, final theory. It’s a way of working together—scholars, residents, planners, cops, and city builders—to make safer, more livable neighborhoods that grow and flourish. That is our Ithaca: not a port where the voyage ends, but a place strong enough to launch new journeys and welcome people safely home.