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.

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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.

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!

Dignity by design - Rethinking MCM as we build affordable housing

Villa Hermosa in Palm Springs, successful multi-family housing in an MCM design - photo SchoolOfNight, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

by Gregory Saville

Across cities today, the rush to build affordable housing has triggered a frantic urgency: condo and apartment boxes going up fast — but communities left behind. We’re good at erecting buildings — we’re terrible at building neighborhoods. 

Urban design is the first step in that direction.

I’ve spent much of my career walking the streets of neighborhoods where people have little say in the shape of their lives. I’ve worked with gang members, people with disabilities, and residents of subsidized housing. I’ve spent time with youth growing up in trailer courts and high-rises, and I’ve taught students who return to homes where safety is a daily question.

This isn’t a story about where I live. It’s a reflection on what I’ve learned — and how I came to believe that dignity, beauty, and safety should be for everyone. 

THE MCM LESSON

Over the years, I’ve lived in a range of residential styles — some ornate, some utilitarian, some deeply personal. Each space taught me something about how we inhabit place. But the one home style that’s stayed with me most? Mid-Century Modern — MCM.

Not the high-concept, glass-and-steel showpieces in architecture magazines. I’m talking about modest versions — “mid-century modest”: clean lines, functional layouts, floor-to-ceiling windows, open flow to the outdoors. There’s something profound about living in a space where sunlight is intentional and walls don’t dominate. Many of the original architects thought MCM was perfectly suited for residential design – but they lost the plot when it came to scale.

MCM tiny homes provide another affordable housing option - photo via Pinterest 

That simplicity is deceptive. It’s not just aesthetic — it’s psychological. When architecture aligns with the people, not against them, something opens. That absence is glaring in today’s multi-family construction — in cities like Denver, Baltimore, Toronto, Calgary, and Washington, D.C., we’ve forgotten how to build for belonging.

Here’s the thing: design shapes behavior, but scale shapes belonging.

HOPE RISES

In our forthcoming book Hope Rises, we dedicate a full chapter to urban design and architectural history — and how those forces led us to high-crime neighborhoods. Our co-author Dr. Carl Bray, an urban design and heritage planning expert, crafted that chapter with depth and clarity.

When I studied planning, I learned how mid-century modernism reimagined cities — often with tragic results. Tower blocks, land-use segregation, sterile plazas. The urban renewal era promised progress but destroyed communities. Entire neighborhoods vanished. Families were displaced. The irony was brutal: in trying to design better lives, we designed lonelier ones.

We saw it in Toronto’s San Romanoway project in the early 2000s – a story that shows up in Hope Rises. It was in St. Louis, at Pruitt-Igoe, decades earlier. It showed up in the voids Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman wrote about. And in the birth of CPTED — and later, SafeGrowth — as direct responses to the failures of MCM at scale.

But all was not lost.

Danish co-housing in MCM design, open connections to greenery
- photo The Cohousing Newsletter 

Early Danish co-housing used MCM designs
- Skraplanet Co-housing, Denmark

DESIGNING FOR DIGNITY

At the human scale, mid-century design still holds beauty. Done right, it is warm, open, and connective. Like all great housing design, it combines privacy and community.  

MCM uses courtyards to ensure privacy, but loses big fences. It uses walls of windows to ensure connection. Minimalism, flow, connection to nature, indoor-outdoor blending — these aren’t luxuries. They’re tools. In the right hands, they nurture calm and in the right neighborhoods, they support cohesion.

I’ve seen this in co-housing communities — especially early Danish projects designed in the MCM spirit. Affordable. Modest. Yet beautiful and deeply human. Places that offer dignity without needing prestige. That invite safety without fortressing themselves off from the world.

One of the MCM homes in the Skraplanet co-housing neighborhood 

And that brings me here:

Everyone deserves to live somewhere that reflects care. Not opulence. Not perfection. Just care.

Dignified housing isn’t about square footage. It’s about scale, light, safety, and the freedom to feel at home in your own skin. That’s not out of reach. It’s a matter of priority — and the will to design for people, not profits.

We can build dense, multi-family housing. But we must also build neighborhoods with beauty, foresight, and with purpose.

So if you’re living in a space that feels like it was never meant for you — if the broken windows and broken systems suggest you’re invisible — you’re not the problem. The design was.

And that means we can redesign. We start by listening to the needs of residents. Then we build not just structures, but stories of place. And maybe we finish with homes that start to build a community in the truest sense — quiet, steady, and whole.

That’s what SafeGrowth is for.
That’s what our work is about.