Neighborhoods - social immune systems

Night skyline of Calgary - city of neighborhoods, residential towers and site of the 2026 CanAm ICA CPTED Conference

by Gregory Saville

I’ve been diving into some exciting reading starting with a disturbing sci-fi called Scythe. It’s the story of a future where AI has helped humanity conquer disease, aging, and accidental death and now governs society with near-perfect efficiency. Scythe reads like the smooth winter ice on a northern lake that seems safe, right up to the moment it begins to crack beneath you. 

I’m also re-reading two non-fiction books. They are more challenging, perhaps because they are real and, like real life, contain possibilities for multiple futures. Paul Hawken’s 2007 Blessed Unrest, is a sweeping account of the vast, decentralized movement of environmental, social justice, and community organizations quietly reshaping the moral ecology of the world in recent decades. It is a story in which much has already come to pass. 

The book reads as a cultural argument rather than an empirical one. Hawken does not offer crime statistics or econometric models. He is describing something more organic: the emergence of civil society as a kind of adaptive immune system responding to social harm. Steven Pinker has convincingly posed a similar argument over a longer historical arc in Enlightenment Now. For practical examples, think of our blogs on adaptive reuse community marketplaces in Denver and Third Places for the homeless in Madison.

East Village riverwalk views in Calgary - one of the Jane's Walk Tours during the 2026 CPTED conference - Street activation means incorporating nature

 

THE GREAT CRIME DECLINE CONTINUES

Are there data to support this urban adaptive immune system? 

The Great Crime Decline started in the 1990s and accelerated from 2007 and 2017. In the United States, FBI Uniform Crime Reports document declines in the crime rates, including statistics that show the national violent crime rate declined 18.9 percent over a decade. It is one of the steepest and most sustained drops in modern U.S. history. 

Interestingly, over that same period, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of nonprofit organizations grew by roughly 29 percent, while employment within those organizations increased by about 18 percent. Growth in the for-profit sector over the same period was far more modest.

CORRELATION ≠ CAUSATION

SYMMETRY > 0

Being cautious about this parallel timing, it’s important to note the trends do not prove Hawken’s thesis more than any social theory is conclusively proven. Yet there is no denying it gives it empirical weight. 

This could not be farther from the AI-perfected Scythe society. It suggests that civil society (admittedly, a slippery term in need of tightening) expanded rapidly during the same time that violent crime receded across the country. Society might not look very civil in today’s news in this country, but this pattern happened over decades, not within the past year. 

Nonprofits and Third Places in civil society may not directly cause crime drops in any simple way because functioning neighborhoods are ecosystems that evolve together across the city in complex ways. But it is worth restating a powerful, and obvious, hypotheses – improvements in civic capacity have direct impact on livability and for crime. This is an hypothesis tested in different studies over the years, for example: Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofits on Violent Crime.

Comeback Cities by Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio 

HOW DOES IT WORK?

My second read, Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival, answers how this works. Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio examine how American cities began recovering in the 1990s after decades of disinvestment. Their conclusion? Urban revival did not come from top-down policy or market forces alone, but rather from the slow reconstruction of neighborhood institutions, community development corporations, and housing nonprofits. It is the same long-term strategy upon which SafeGrowth works to rebuild trust and local ownership.

Criminologists Tarah Hodgkinson and Martin Andresen reinforce this point in their study Preventing Crime at Places by examining the limits of place-based prevention approaches that focus narrowly on opportunity reduction rather than underlying motives.

“By building cohesive networks of capable community partners, integrated strategies can improve the overall well-being of the community through local governance systems.”

Where do we find places of activation? Libraries, cultural spaces, shared work hubs, neighborhood cafés, arts centers, and informal gathering sites. These are not simply amenities in the narrow sense. They function as social infrastructure, creating routine contact and informal guardianship. Our blog on the Third Place, the Denver Art Society, offers examples how they use problem-solving as a way to improve street life.

 

Public art in Calgary. Great places need cultural statements
- proof that cities, like people, benefit from a little headspace

THE STORY WE KEEP MISSING 

As urban chaos captures our attention across the country, another story has been quietly unfolding for decades. We examine it in depth in Hope Rises, our forthcoming book.

This story sits at the core of our livability thesis. Rather than treating crime as a technical failure to be corrected by AI, we need to focus on strengthening the everyday environments where people meet, live and play. Environments like ecologically designed village-style housing, Third Places, and urban green spaces and parks.  

When cities invest in social infrastructure, whether through housing organizations or grassroots nonprofits, they reinforce the conditions that make violence less likely to take hold. When cities organize neighborhoods with interlinked safety plans and provide opportunities for the training to deploy problem-solving, they show how to increase social resilience.

Scythe imagines a dystopia that is not inevitable. We believe public safety is ecological, and livability is one of its primary engines.

Kayfabe on the street - Why community stories matter

WrestleMania 32 - the 2016 professional wrestling pay-per-view event in Texas drew over 100,000 viewers. Kayfabe rules matter - photo Miguel Discart CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

by Larry Leach 

What lessons can we learn from professional wrestling? Kayfabe is the long-standing convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic. Pro-wrestlers historically adhered to kayfabe so strictly that they would not socialize or travel with those on the opposing side. If you were a babyface or hero, you were never seen in public with a villain. 

Malcolm Gladwell describes this concept as the overstory. In Gladwell’s usage, an overstory is the shared narrative people agree to treat as real, even when everyone knows, at some level, that it’s constructed or selective. It’s the story that makes coordinated social behavior possible.

Similarly, Kayfabe works because people remember the rules of the story and we need to pay attention to this dynamic when we think about community building.

We tell ourselves and each other stories. Some true, some not true, but most that have elements of both. Deep down we think the grass is greener on the “other side”. The people in that other community, city or country have elements to be admired. The weather, the people, the scenery, the government and how they structure their society are all elements that make a place great. But because we have this envy, we tell ourselves that our place is either greater than it actually is or is awful and needs to be torn down and rebuilt. There seems to be no happy medium.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics at Luzor - for millennia, community storytelling has been part of the transformative arts - photo Asta, Public domain, Via Wiki Commons

The stories we tell ourselves matter a great deal in community-building, and we’ve written on this before. For example, I blogged about the behavioral economics concept of nudging which is the idea that we can steer behavior by design and by a community narrative, not by force. 

Consider the role of community storytelling described in Mateja's blog during our work with the UK National Storytelling Laureate, Katrice Horsley, while attending our SafeGrowth Summit in New Orleans.

KAYFABE ON THE STREET

Marketers and politicians try to read this kayfabe and use it to their benefit. We read it every day as politician "X" speaks to his or her base. For us in the SafeGrowth blog team, we continually ask ourselves about our audience and our message. Will our message resonate with our audience? What stories can we share to help or hinder the motivation to take action? 

Teachers helping students with artistic storytelling in a SafeGrowth program

What is your personal Kayfabe? What is your community Kayfabe? What is your country’s Kayfabe? For my country Canada, we are known for being kind, apologetic and welcoming, yet would you be surprised to know that people cut me off in traffic every day and that I have friends who spend HOURS daily complaining about the government?

In my community, one political flavour targets the Federal Government while the other flavour targets the Provincial Government. I recently had a discussion with an Alberta separatist. (For those of you who may not know, recent polls put Alberta separating from Canada at 19 % support. This is a minority political sentiment that has existed for decades.) This separatist shared opinions about how Alberta is getting “screwed” by the federal government of Canada, many which I agreed with and many which have been talked about for 50 years. 

That narrative, whether right or wrong, is not going to change. I asked this separatist some simple questions: What does a separate Alberta look like? Do we have our own currency? What about the military? Simple, and legitimately honest, questions like this can confirm the reality of narratives and show whether they are thought through properly. 

To test whether a narrative is on thin ice, ask the five W’s: who, what, where, when, and why and, for good measure, the faux sixth W: how. Any narrative kayfabe must withstand those questions if it is to earn genuine community buy-in for a community-building project.

Places, urban design, and community art also help convey community stories

STORIES IN COMMUNITY BUILDING

Bringing this back to CPTED, SafeGrowth, and community development: you may gain quick support by echoing how poorly residents believe their city or national government has treated them. You may even agree. But if you don’t understand the local kayfabe about how the community sees itself, how others see it, and what story holds it together, then you are doing little more than repeating the latest Facebook post. 

Communities need solutions to real, often negative issues. But before offering solutions, we must first understand the local challenges and the local kayfabe, or overstory, that shapes them.

My father used to ask his friends: “Do you want to be right or do you want to have friends?” A SafeGrowth spin on the question is, Do you want to be right or do you want community support? You might want both, but gaining the latter will help discover the former. As Greg comments when he quotes Steven Covey’s maxim: “We move at the speed of trust”. 

And since stories move societies forward as much (or more) than facts, you can only earn trust after you understand the Kayfabe.

Hope without surrender

Screen pervasiveness in daily life
Photo: Creative Commons by JuanMA from Pexels 

by Gregory Saville

It was 2005, and we were strolling along Charlotte’s tree-lined sidewalks in North Carolina, streetcars clinking in the background as we weighed dinner options at the end of a long workday. My work colleagues had lived in the city for years. I offered them a challenge: Find a restaurant without a television screen! 

They mulled what seemed like an apparently simple task. Surely somewhere downtown in this city of over 2 million, there must be one restaurant that had no TV screens facing diners? 

They rhymed off restaurant after restaurant, each one quickly rejected into the trash bin of screen-dominated dining rooms. After about a dozen failed attempts, we walked into a few nearby restaurants. Nada.

“Look,” I said, “it should be simple”. 

It wasn’t. 

In the end, they dragged me to a local sports tavern so they could watch the game on the numerous TV screens as we ate. Sigh! 

Tech, without surrender.

Years later, it happened again. I was in a taxi in Mexico City and this time the tech was not TV screens. It was far more pervasive. Cellphones! Everywhere I went in that city it was the same. Blank faces staring down at tiny screens in their hands. 

During a subway trip in Toronto last year, I counted fifty people, about 70% of everyone in my visual field, staring zombie-like at their cell phones (eventually, I was one of them). 

This week, debates fill our local school board newsletter on what to do with kids and their cells. Police academy instructors recently told me they solve a problem the simple way by banning cell phones. 

I ask incredulously, “Recruits are not able to control their cell phone usage in class?”

LUDDITE-RESISTENT 

I am no luddite to technology. A year ago, I tested augmented reality and loved it. I recently toured a police drone control center. Like many, I use spell checkers, automated proofreading, and chatbots to clean up text (but never to write it). Something in my primal brain lights up in the presence of new tech, yet something equally deep remains unsettled by the speed and direction of its growth.

The first Blackberry smartphone emerged in 1999 and the first iPhone in 2007. In just 17 years, our species was programmed to bring small slabs of plastic, silicon, lithium, and metal to our faces hundreds of times a day. Pervasive restaurant TV screens collapsed into tiny TVs in our hand. This is not a new phenomenon. I have previously blogged about the internet migration into banks and restaurants.

 

Cellphone addiction is worldwide 
Photo: N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Now comes artificial intelligence, extending that conditioning beyond the screen. Psychologists are increasingly worried about a lack of human interaction, AI addiction and higher levels of loneliness. 

THE PROPHET SPEAKS 

This was all foretold in the 1960s by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher of media, who warned that technology reshapes how people think long before it changes what they think. McLuhan told us that in future, the worst threats will not come from propaganda. The real threat emerges from a much more subtle quarter - technology itself! He called this idea, “the medium is the message” (a term now expanded into “the algorithm is the message”).

McLuhan did not warn us to watch for the manipulators of technology to change our beliefs. He said that technology (the medium) changes the conditions under which believes are formed. When you can change how beliefs are formed, there is no need to censor through propaganda. 

He predicted that electronic media would undermine traditional authorities and lead to a rise in conspiracy stories, exactly what we see today. Consider the rise of influencers, those who confuse volume with insight, the same people who ignore expertise. 

Photo of McLuhan and Powers' Global Village

McLuhan predicted that control emerges not from censorship, but from bombarding people with so much information they could not possibly make sense of it. Consider the 24-hour news cycles in which exclusive stories never end or the endless streams of Facebook or Instagram posts.

McLuhan cautioned that a global village would be created by electronic media. He predicted it would not lead to harmony, but to more tribalism. Instead of bringing people together, constant global connectivity would amplify cultural, racial, and national divisions. Consider today’s culture wars, cancel culture, and group identity-based conflict, all exacerbated by social media.

WELCOME TO 2026

Later this year we will publish our new book, Hope Rises, on SafeGrowth from University of Toronto Press (the same university where McLuhan taught). It does not fully answer our digital tech smothering, but it does offer a different story about a very non-global, village – we call it the NUV (Networked Urban Village). 

Must new technologies dominate every part of our lives?

We describe pockets of this new future from cities all over the world, pockets where we have worked and showcase in this blog, such as adaptive re-use community marketplaces, Third Place designs, design for dignified affordability, and the power of reimagined neighborhoods. 

The key, we have learned, is not to remove tech but rather to refashion it and create a more balanced, transparent tech. Sooner or later, people will tire of the oppressive digital smothering in so much of our lives. People crave people, the face-to-face, the laughter, the human-energy-in-the-room. We see this emerging, gradually, everywhere.

One antidote might be the growth of Third Places, a trend echoing the NUV concept. It is much more than cafes or taverns. Third Places can be multi-purposed centers where old and young meet, green spaces with well-placed parks and benches or trans-species planning with dog parks for pro-social activities.

What we argue is simple: the answer is not longing for a dead past, but renewal into the future. It may sound like magic or nostalgic romance, but rethinking neighborhood life and community design offers something that tech-in-our-ear never can: places where visions are shared and where ideas grow, not faster, but deeper. 

May the months ahead bring some of this hope into your life. Hope without surrender.

Happy New Year!