The problem isn't the underpass

Poor underpass design, placement and maintenance are only part of the problem

by Mateja Mihinjac

Few examples of pedestrian public infrastructure have as much potential to go wrong as pedestrian underpasses. Nearly every city I’ve visited has at least one that has become problematic.

I have blogged on this in the past such as underpass graffiti and homelessness. But the problem is bigger than that. The problem centers around participatory design and ongoing stewardship.

Underpasses can separate pedestrians from traffic, but many urban designers treat them as a last resort. New Zealand Transport Agency guidance notes that at grade crossings are usually preferred because they keep pedestrians visible and the street active, which supports perceived safety.

Underpass in Ljubljana, Slovenia - a much too-common example of neglect and fear in underpasses around the world 

The tradeoff is predictable. Underpasses often feel isolated, attract neglect, and can be hard to use for older adults, people with disabilities, and parents with strollers.

Research on fear of crime consistently shows that enclosed pedestrian tunnels and underpasses can generate strong perceptions of danger when lighting, visibility, and maintenance are poor.

Because of these concerns, street design guidelines increasingly favour at-grade crossings such as raised crosswalks, traffic calming measures, and pedestrian-priority streets that keep pedestrians visible and integrated into everyday street activity.

A SENSE OF DISGUST & INFRASTRUCTURE LIABILITY

A few days ago I came across an article about one of the underpasses in Ljubljana that has been problematic for years. Recently, the city has decided to close it completely. The underpass runs beneath a busy arterial road and connects a large shopping mall with nearby residential buildings and local services. 

This pedestrian underpass in Ljubljana was built to protect people from traffic. Today, it is closed because it became unsafe to use. 

I remember using the underpass several times a few years ago. Each time I dreaded it. The tunnel was dark and smelled strongly of urine. One entrance was covered with graffiti tags. A section of the corridor was often flooded with stale smelly water. People loitered there for long periods. 

On one occasion a couple of years ago, a man in the underpass approached me asking if I offer “special services,” after saying he only wanted to ask me a question during my walk to the shopping mall. More than fear, the experience produced a sense of disgust — the feeling that this space had been abandoned by those responsible for managing it.

A closed underpass - why were problems allowed to grow in the first place?  

After years of decay, the city eventually closed the underpass completely. What makes the situation even more striking is that the tunnel sits next to one of the most prestigious residential developments in Ljubljana, currently the tallest building in the city.

The article reports the decision to close it came from “professional assessment of the current state of the infrastructure, safety risks and the sensibility of its continued use”. It also reports on people’s complaints concerning the homeless, faeces, urine, syringes, vandalism and rubbish that kept accumulating in the underpass. 

No decision has yet been made whether this closed underpass will eventually reopen. It raises questions: What engineers are responsible for this? Who are the decision-makers? What are they saying? How did they neglect this for so long? One can only imagine what conversations are going on behind closed doors. And that leads to the true problem- the design process! 

IT ISN’T THE UNDERPASS…IT’S THE PROCESS

When cities close infrastructure because it feels unsafe, something usually went wrong long before the first complaint. This is not simply about lighting failures or graffiti. It is about a system that failed to monitor, maintain, and adapt.

Some cities are beginning to recognize that infrastructure like pedestrian tunnels cannot be evaluated by engineers alone.

Steven Eisenhower bicycle Tunnel, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
- photo Steven Vance, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A useful example comes from Toronto, where the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge and Tunnel Environmental Assessment incorporated extensive public consultation. Community feedback helped identify safety concerns and guided improvements to ensure the infrastructure actually worked for those expected to use it.

PRACTICAL LESSONS LEARNED

From a CPTED and SafeGrowth perspective, the Ljubljana underpass displayed several familiar warning signs. Poor natural surveillance created hidden spaces, weak territorial reinforcement meant the area felt like it belonged to no one, and low activity levels reduced informal guardianship. Over time, maintenance declined and limited community engagement allowed problems to persist largely unnoticed.

None of these issues appeared overnight. They develop gradually as stewardship declines.

Modern CPTED guidance recognizes that design alone cannot maintain safe places. Ongoing stewardship and community involvement are essential. Technical guidance such as the Queensland Transport and Main Roads Department’s underpass design guidelines provide useful direction.

Australian urban design guidelines developed by social planner Wendy Sarkissian

SafeGrowth engages residents and local users in diagnosing problems and shaping solutions. Community knowledge often identifies risks long before they appear in official reports. Without that feedback loop, infrastructure can slowly decay into places people avoid.

SafeGrowth emphasizes participatory safety planning, where residents, practitioners, and local agencies discuss design and management issues together. In these processes, the social planning principles championed by social planner Wendy Sarkissian remain especially valuable. 

Pedestrian underpasses are not inherently unsafe but closing them may sometimes be necessary. The real question is why the problem was allowed to grow in the first place.

Safe cities do not maintain themselves. They depend on stewardship and the people who care enough to protect them.

What a high-profile abduction might teach us about neighborhood design

The saguaro cactus surrounds the Catalina foothills where the
Nancy Guthrie abduction took place 
Photo by By Tyrv, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wiki Commons

by Gregory Saville

The American news has been filled with the tragic, and as yet unsolved, story of Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of NBC Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie, believed to have been abducted in the early morning hours of February 1, from her home in the Catalina foothills near Tucson, Arizona. Doorbell camera footage shows a masked, armed individual on her front porch the night she vanished. Despite an intensive police investigation, no suspect has yet been identified and Nancy remains missing. 

Naturally, this story has sparked widespread public concern and last week I was contacted by a reporter working on what has now become a national story. Why were there not more cameras? Why was there no gate? Does living in a high-end neighborhood provide less protection than we assume?

These questions surface every time crime touches an affluent enclave. The underlying belief is that wealth and spacious design should produce security. When that belief collapses, the impulse is to fortify. The truth is that crime is not confined to one income bracket. Crime opportunity, however, is not evenly distributed and social conditions with environmental structure shape when and where those opportunities arise. 

The Catalina foothills residential area near Tucson, Arizona. Sprawling properties, winding roads, privacy and separation - photo Google Earth screenshot

The problem is not the absence of cameras. That is a misunderstanding of how safety works. Crime prevention is not about recording or repelling after the fact. Safety emerges from neighborhood social conditions and from routine patterns of daily life in walkable and friendly settings. This is about urban design and neighborhood life, not about adding more gadgets.

 

ARCHITECTURES-OF-SEPARATION 

Over the years, I have visited the Catalina Foothills of Tucson, a place where residential privacy and separation are set within that high desert landscape covered with the magnificent saguaro cactus. 

Property lots are large, homes sit far apart, vegetation and terrain interrupt sightlines, and routine walking is rare aside from hikers with backpacks. Residents move between home and vehicle, vehicle and arterial road, rarely intersecting in shared public space. These conditions reduce routine visibility. In targeted crimes, offenders often study locations in advance and select environments where access is straightforward and routine activity is predictable. 

Residential style in the Catalina foothills, with a police"Neighborhood Watch" crime prevention sign - photo Google Earth street view screenshot

For example, in 2019 I wrote a chapter in a forensic science text called offender target selection and spatial forensics describing how crime locations follow offender decisions about where social and physical opportunities are most favorable. 

Those patterns show up in criminologist (and former SafeGrowth blogger) Martin Andressen’s book Environmental Criminology: Evolution, Theory, and Practice. They show up in crime analyst Deborah Osborne’s forthcoming revised edition of Elements of Crime Patterns. Clearly, this is not new knowledge. We have understood crime pattern theory for years. 

The theory does not resolve the full picture of crime, but it begins to help us understand why crimes occur in some places and not others. 

When high-profile crimes like the Guthrie abduction occur, the public impulse often turns toward techno-solutions. People imagine that adding cameras, fences, and other architectures-of-separation close the gap between vulnerability and safety. But decades of research in urban studies and in criminology, particularly by criminologists like Robert Sampson, suggest that heavy reliance on fortification can weaken everyday interaction and informal oversight.

Cell phone addiction - digital connection but personal isolation 
Photo Andi Graf, CC0, via Wiki Commons

We do not need more fragmentation in social life. We already live in a time of cell-phone addictions and reduced face-to-face interaction. Design choices that further fragment daily contact risk weakening the informal neighborhood awareness that helps prevent crime.

A NEW PATTERN

There is a different pattern that is rooted in active neighborhoods where people routinely see one another and recognize what is usual and what is not. Environments that support casual interaction, visible frontages, walkable connections, and shared local spaces create conditions where unusual events become conspicuous rather than concealed. 

In such contexts, residents are more likely to notice something out of place, to recognize a pattern that does not fit, and to raise an alarm. In the Guthrie case, some elements of that pattern did exist since a neighbor noticed a “suspicious man” near her home a few weeks before the abduction, but did not report that until after the crime. 

There are many ways to design residential living where a sense of connection
aligns with beautiful topography

Why would someone related to a national celebrity choose a different kind of residential neighborhood with more people, especially when recognition can bring intrusion. A mother may not want to be approached about her daughter’s latest broadcast or asked for donations. That is entirely understandable. 

But, there is another way to think about this. Our upcoming book, Hope Rises, on the social ecology of safety, elaborates on how communities and designers can build environments that support everyday awareness and prevention long before any technology is needed. There are places where this balance already exists in both rural and urban places. Consider an urban example with famous actors like Robert DeNiro in the same neighborhood where Jane Jacobs wrote Death and Life of Great American Cities over 60 years ago. 

BALANCE ALREADY EXISTS   

In parts of New York’s Greenwich Village and Tribeca, residents like actor Robert De Niro live not behind isolated compounds but within dense streets where shopkeepers, doormen, and neighbors recognize the everyday rhythm of the block. That familiarity does not eliminate privacy. Instead it creates a quiet form of guardianship. People know when something does not belong, and that awareness becomes its own protective layer. 

In a connected neighborhood, familiarity can create a protective buffer around even the most famous residents. People may respect boundaries, but they also notice when something does not fit the usual rhythm of the street.

Too often, more cameras, higher gates, private patrols, and eventually automated AI surveillance systems become the default solution. Such solutions are already dominant in gated suburbs across the world. The long-term effect is not only financial cost but social fragmentation. As we retreat further behind walls, everyday familiarity declines and trust erodes. Quality of life narrows.

When crime like this touches a community, questions about cameras and fortification are natural. But the deeper conversation is about how we arrange our environments so that privacy can coexist with oversight, so that homes are part of a living neighborhood rather than isolated estates, and so that safety emerges from connection as much as from precaution. Until then, we hope Nancy Guthrie returns safe and sound. 

When new stadiums arrive, what happens to the life already there?

Public presentation of the new NFL Denver Bronco Stadium - Press from across the country, national media, local reporters, and hundreds of community members came to hear about their proposed future   

by Gregory Saville

We walked across cracked sidewalks and street litter beside the deteriorating railway grounds known as Denver’s Burnham Yard, only a few blocks from the Art District on Santa Fe. I found myself wondering what this place will look like in five years when the massive new Denver Broncos football stadium rises from this worn industrial landscape.

It brought to mind the role of Third Places as community activators, how they are the core of neighborhood life, and how fragile they are. Third Places have made previous appearances in this blog about creating social life out of industrial decline, and how art co-ops lower crime.

Anchoring the Art District is the Denver Art Society (DAS). It stands as a Third Place and cultural anchor that artists built through years of volunteer effort and community commitment, and I could not ignore the uneasy questions that follows so many large development projects across North America: When the stadium arrives, will this cultural nexus survive as part of the new district? Or will it be pushed aside in favor of land uses that generate revenue but leave the streets quiet between scheduled events?

The unique Third Place that is the Denver Art Society

during the monthly First Friday artwalk 

Stadium projects are often justified on economic grounds and those claims depend as much on sustained daily activity in addition to event crowds. When the stadium falls silent after events, what will happen on Santa Fe? Economic vitality cannot depend on rare bursts of activity separated by long stretches of inactivity. Healthy urban districts depend on steady patterns of daily presence that keep streets occupied, like what happens every day at DAS. As Jane Jacobs demonstrated, eyes on the street help keep public spaces alive and safe.

Long before Burnham Yard attracted such interest, artists had already transformed the Santa Fe corridor into a place of daily cultural production. It hosts open studios, exhibitions, music performance venues, and cultural anchors such as Su Teatro Cultural and Performing Arts Center, the Colorado Ballet Academy, and the Center for Visual Art at Metropolitan State University of Denver. 

Through co-ops like DAS, artists mentor young creators and welcome visitors into shared and safe spaces where participation matters.

Denver's First Friday monthly artwalk is among the busiest,
and liveliest, in the country

History warns that when large developments arrive in districts already shaped and restored by artists, the outcome often follows a familiar pattern. Artists transform overlooked industrial areas into places people want to visit and experience. Their presence attracts attention and investment. Rising land values create pressure for redevelopment that favors larger and more profitable uses. The cultural anchors that made the district desirable struggle to survive within the new economic landscape they helped create.

THE PUBLIC MEETING

On Feb 13, I attended a Denver Bronco public presentation that revealed both the scale of public interest and the limitations of conventional participation processes. I stood with hundreds of residents and two city councilwomen to learn about the proposed stadium and its surrounding development. 

Over 700 community members attended the new stadium announcement - one city planner described attendance as the largest he has seen 

We have learned repeatedly in our SafeGrowth work that, if large development projects are to fulfill their economic promise, they must become part of a living district rather than stand apart from it. Protecting and strengthening institutions like the Denver Art Society is not an obstacle to economic development but a prerequisite for its long-term success.

THE CHOICE FOR THE FUTURE

The choice facing Denver is not simply where to locate a stadium. It is whether to build upon the existing cultural foundations on Santa Fe that already support year-round creative life and economic activity, or to repeat a familiar pattern of displacement that replaces community assets like the Denver Art Society with occasional spectacle and inactive streets.

The future of Burnham Yard will reveal whether lasting economic vitality in Denver grows from the daily life of its communities, and whether the cultural institutions that built the Art District on Santa Fe will remain part of that future or become another casualty of progress that failed to recognize the value already present.

Caveat Emptor - When CPTED standards fail the test

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the original evidence-based detective. He understood what professional standards require - verified facts, not confident claims.

by Gregory Saville

Caveat emptor: Let the buyer beware.

That warning exists for a reason. Professional standards are not casual suggestions. Cities rely on them to shape public investment and guide policy. A standard implies established evidence, professional consensus, and independent review. Without those foundations, the word “standard” is meaningless.

For years, I have read and helped create CPTED standards for municipalities and governments. Most recently I came across some "national CPTED standards" though I'm unsure what makes them national or from where they derive their authority. For practitioners and city officials unfamiliar with how standards are developed, such claims may appear credible. The language sounds authoritative. But standards are not created by declaration. Their authority emerges through evidence and multidisciplinary collaboration.

CPTED has a long and well documented history. Since its early development in the 1970s, its principles have evolved through research, application, and field tests and they appear in peer reviewed studies, books, and professional publications.

Standards come from findings; findings come from verified evidence and data

For example, the International CPTED Association (ICA) has published a scientific CPTED bibliography documenting over 600 studies. It also publishes The CPTED Journal, a peer-reviewed journal with the latest research studies on the field.


This is what professional legitimacy looks like. Evidence is published. Methods are documented. Claims are subject to independent review.

GLOBAL ISO STANDARDS 

Most recently, CPTED entered the International Organization for Standardization process. ISO standards are developed through rigorous evaluation by international technical committees representing multiple disciplines and countries. The global CPTED standard is ISO 22341:2021, and ICA experts helped draft the initial framework and later iterations adopted by ISO. For governments around the world, these standards provide developers, planners, and public officials with verified guidance grounded in scientific evidence and international professional consensus.

Standards do not originate from a private consulting firm presenting its own framework or a self-proclaimed expert at a conference. They emerge from broad professional review from experts, academics, and researchers with years of CPTED research and experience. And they do not gain legitimacy through branding or repetition. Their authority comes from the integrity of their development process.

This distinction is not theoretical. It has practical and legal consequences.

The first professional ISO CPTED standard by the International Standards Organization

A GLOBAL CPTED VOICE

The International CPTED Association publishes methodological guidance, including the CPTED Methodology White Paper, to ensure CPTED practice rests on evidence.
 It publishes ICA guidebooks, professional training programs, and ISO standards about evidence via transparent and accountable processes. These resources reflect decades of collective work by practitioners and researchers worldwide.

They also show how CPTED is tested and verified. That is the foundation of any legitimate professional standard.

The stakes are significant. When a municipality or region adopts CPTED standards, it assumes those standards reflect the best available knowledge. But most government attorneys are not trained in CPTED or risk mitigation and cannot assess legitimacy of CPTED standards in their municipal policy. Some might assume their standards are grounded in research and recognized by the professional community, when they are not. That is an error with consequences for public safety, public investment, and public trust.

NASA advisor and astrophysicist Carl Sagan championed the Baloney Detection Kit - facts through evidence and data. Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

THE BALONEY DETECTION KIT

Due diligence matters. Before adopting any CPTED standard, practitioners and clients should ask the simple questions once proposed by famed astrophysicist and NASA advisor, Professor Carl Sagan in his Baloney Detection Kit:

• How was it developed and tested (objective and independent?) 
• Who (and how many) reviewed it? 
• What evidence supports it? 
• Does it reflect the collective knowledge of the profession?

CPTED has matured into a global discipline because it remains grounded in evidence and professional accountability. If its standards carry weight, they only do so because they were earned through scientific validation and international recognition.

In CPTED, as in every serious profession, a standard cannot be declared. It must be demonstrated. Most important, a standard is not defined by who publishes it, but by who recognizes it. Caveat emptor still applies.

 

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 life, contain possibilities for multiple futures. 

The first book, 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. 

His 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, check out our blogs on Denver's adaptive reuse community marketplaces and Third Places for the homeless in Madison.

East Village riverwalk views in Calgary - location of 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

It’s important to note these correlations do not prove Hawken’s thesis. Then again few social theories are ever conclusively proven and, taken on whole, there is no denying the empirical weight suggested by these trends. Further, society might not look very civil in today’s news in this country, but this civilizing pattern happened over decades, not within the past year. 

Nonprofits and Third Places in civil society may not directly cause crime drops since 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 hypothesis has been shown true 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?

The second book, 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! It came from the slow reconstruction of neighborhood institutions, community development corporations, and housing nonprofits. Street activation was the key. That is a very similar long-term strategy upon which SafeGrowth works to rebuild trust and local ownership.

Criminologists Tarah Hodgkinson and Martin Andresen reinforce this very 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 look for places of activation? A few include libraries, cultural spaces, shared work hubs, neighborhood cafés, arts centers, and informal gathering sites. These places are not simply amenities. They function as social infrastructure, creating routine contact and informal guardianship. Our blog on the Denver Art Society as a Third Place, shows how they improve street life through problem-solving.

 

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. We examine this story 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 and urban green spaces/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 opportunities for resident-led problem-solving, they create opportunities to expand social resilience.

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

--------

POSTSCRIPT Feb 12

In the week following this blog, Henry Grabar published an article in The Atlantic  about recent crime declines in cities across the country. He compares the massive public-sector investments that align with these declines. Grabar says the latest steep crime declines quite probably emerge from federal pandemic-related stimulus funding. That is an interesting thesis since, from the social immunity thesis in this blog, it confirms that recent crime declines are an acceleration of the multi-year crime decline trajectory existing for decades. And those declines also may be driven by neighborhood social capacity building. In short, capacity-building and public investment provides the fuel to power already existing civic ecosystems in cities across the country. The takeaway? Careful and targeted social invest works! 

Social immune systems offer a future we can no longer ignore.

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.