Two Kansas Citys - Design, community, and crime

 

Downtown skyline of Kansas City, Missouri - day and night. Two different cities.
How you look determines what you see.

 

 by Greg Saville

This week we spent time in Kansas City. I watched this city not as a tourist, but as a field observer. One afternoon I photographed the downtown under a calm blue sky. It was interesting, but not remarkable. That evening it stood silhouetted by a burning orange sunset. The sky had changed. The city had not. Depending on how you look, you see two different cities. 

Kansas City has one of the most famous policing studies (the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment). It also hosts interesting crime analysis and mapping research on “Risk Terrain Modelling”, a tool for police crime analysts. But when you search social ecology and crime in neighborhhoods, Kansas City is more a police research laboratory and less a neighborhood research laboratory. 

I was interested in the people living in neighborhoods. That too is where crime can be addressed, perhaps not with formal police methods. Social ecology studies show how crime prevention can happen in more informal, and powerful, ways. A walk in two Kansas City neighborhoods was revealing. 

South of Midtown is the Country Club Plaza and Brookside neighborhoods. These are analytical approximations of the three neighborhoods. There are numerous ways to classify neighborhoods, in this case established urban indicators of land use, movement patterns, and activity. 

 

A LOOK AT BROOKSIDE

Brookside is a 1900-1930 streetcar community where clusters of shops and stores lined the sides of the streetcar routes. Brookside has a mixture of architectural styles, with front porches, short setbacks, and a continuous tree canopy overhead (a Third Generation CPTED concept called biophillia).

Brookside neighborhood. A commercial main drag surrounded by residential
 - the streetcar city 

Residences and apartments radiated in grid streets perpendicular to the main street. It is an comfortable neighborhood to stroll with shopping, coffee shops and parks nearby. History describes how design features here evolved organically, with different builders over decades and families rehabbing to their own style. 

The short front yards and gardens not only brought people outside to interact, but they helped people get to know familiar faces. 

Straight and angled parking, seating on the sidewalk, planters, different architecture

The eyes here did not simply see the street, but I was told they loved their neighborhood. That did not just ensure eyes on those streets, but eyes that cared about their neighbors. As a result life here unfolds in predictable ways, a slow rhythm that enhances both the sense of community, and the historical memories of community from one generation to the next. 

A LOOK AT COUNTRY CLUB PLAZA

Just north of Brookside was Country Club Plaza (The Plaza). Here, activity and design are deliberate. It was built in 1922 using Spanish Revival architectural styles including apartments, retail, entertainment, eateries, and offices. 

Country Club Plaza neighborhood, built in 1922, has Baroque and Moorish
Revial Architecture, fountains, murals, and Spanish style art

The Plaza is privately-governed, and though it has residential and apartment living, it is often termed the first outdoor shopping plaza in the country. 

It was a beautiful neighborhood with fountains and murals. This managed economic ecosystem was an architectural showpiece and a place where security is controlled. 

I wondered: these are two different kinds of neighborhoods, but how did The Plaza and Brookside look from the perspective of our Third Generation CPTED Neighborhood Livability Heirarchy? 

Country Club Plaza, a 15-block area, has a long, and complex, story in urban planning history

Both places work, but for different reasons. Brookside might be slightly closer to the advanced level on the Livability Hierarchy. Interestingly, there was one category where they differed most: Crime! 

 

CRIME IN EACH NEIGHBORHOOD 

Crime is not simply a function of environmental opportunity. It is a function of how places regulate that opportunity over time. That becomes clear when comparing Brookside and the Country Club Plaza using available crime data. Any clean comparison requires assembling patterns from multiple sources, an imperfect solution but good enough for a quick look. 

Country Club Plaza crime reports, Jan-April 2026.

Brookside crime reports, Jan-Apri 2026

Even with data limitations, the pattern is clear. Brookside’s residential fabric shows lower and more stable incident levels, while The Plaza carries greater and more visible crime pressure. That difference is reinforced by a spike in crime incidents since last year at The Plaza. Management brought in increased private security measures such as lighting, CCTV, and armed security. 

In practical terms, Brookside operates as a self-regulating neighborhood system with continuity of residents and routine use. The Plaza, by contrast, is a high-activity destination that depends on formal control to manage the risks it attracts. Looking at it this way, strong social continuity regulates opportunity more effectively than design and management alone.

 

FLAWS IN CPTED TRADITIONALISM 

None of this suggests either neighborhood is unpleasant. Likely, both sit in the moderate range of the Livability Hierarchy, though Brookside appears stronger.

None of this suggests crime prevention absent. In Kansas City, police and security agencies conduct CPTED surveys, and violence prevention groups promote CPTED toolkits. But these approaches remain rooted in traditional 1st Generation CPTED and typically offer little more than surface attention to social activity and connection. The kind of social ecology seen in places like Brookside demands far more. It emerges through daily life and the conditions that reinforce it over time.

As Oscar Newman and Jane Jacobs both argued, safety does not arise simply from physical features like walkability or shared amenities. Those matter, but without understanding how community life forms and sustains itself, they are not enough. Adding design features without that understanding does little to create lasting safety.

HOW YOU LOOK AT SAFETY MATTERS

That is why 2nd Generation CPTED and SafeGrowth focus on community development. It is not enough to only rely on checklists of surveillance, access control, maintenance, and territorial reinforcement. This is the flaw of CPTED traditionalism. Real safety requires building the social conditions that sustain it.

Brookside did not become safe by defining property boundaries, installing lights, or eliminating blind corners. It evolved into a safe place through the visibility of vibrant daily life and the development of pro-social activity built into the work and play of residents. Kansas City shows this gap plainly: between the appearance of safety, and the lived reality that sustains it.