What We See

My blogs of late have told stories of walkability and overcoming complexity - ingredients of the safe and vital neighborhood. There are more and I've been reading about them in a great new book: What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs (New Village Press, 2010). Click here for the website.

I'm not usually a fan of non-fiction anthologies which, having authored a crime prevention anthology myself, is probably just evidence of my own inconsistency. Regardless, What We See is an exception to my rule. It is a fabulous read!

Over 30 writers in this engaging book tell real-life stories about that most crucial skill at the root of Jacobs' insights - how to look carefully and see clearly the ingredients that make great neighborhoods. Authors include noted PBS journalist Ray Suarez, former San Francisco chief planner Alan Jacobs, urban design guru Claire Cooper-Marcus, and former Toronto mayor, David Crombie.

One of my favorite chapters includes Danish planner Jan Gehl's tribute called "For You Jane". Says Gehl:

A strong tailwind towards better cities has definitely started blowing. It is now known that looking carefully after pedestrians and the bicycles provides an opportunity to address [how to] make cities more lively, safe, sustainable, and healthy. More eyes steadily on the street. People are universally the greatest urban attraction. These are some obvious virtues of a city planning policy inspired by your principles…Thank you, Jane.

Overcoming complexity - A Philadelphia story

Simple solutions to complex problems

CPTED prevents crime by designing defensible space into places - what 1st Generation CPTED calls territoriality. It is a strategy that doesn't always happen with design. It needs help.

Walkability was my theme this past week. A walkable street helps encourage neighborhood vitality, which in turn helps folks take ownership of their public domain. Walkability is the first step towards territoriality and defensible space.

This week I was reminded of another by one of my Philadelphia students in a SafeGrowth course run by the Community Safety Initiatives folks at LISC; The revitalization of public space by citizens.

Betsy Casanas sent me the following story regarding how to do what 2nd Generation CPTED calls culture-making:

Our project is called "Reclaiming Vital Spaces" We have done so much already in the past couple of weeks. We've built 8 new beds with a few guys in an adjudicated program, We've done a workshop with one of the neighboring schools and created permanent art work for the fence with a 3rd grade class. We've just received 2 benches from a neighboring center who is interested in having their kids participate in the garden.

We have organized a group of neighbors to take over several of the boxes and grow there own food. In the coming weeks we will build a steel sculptural fence because we can't afford to buy a real fence. I think this one will be much more amazing anyways. We did get a small grant that will help us buy a tool shed, tools, benches and picnic tables. 


Semilla Arts organizers for social change

How, one wonders, does such a SafeGrowth-like approach ever start in the first place? Betsy filled me in:

As a reaction to the social conditions in North Philadelphia in 2007 artists Betsy Casanas and Pedro Ospina co-founded “Semilla (seed) Arts Initiative” a grassroots initiative that uses art as a catalyst for social change and artistic collaborations as a means of empowering individuals and communities. Semilla’s goal is to unite the community by actively involving them in the process of physically transforming their own neighborhood, exposing them to solutions and possibilities. 

I'm very impressed by some of the things I've seen in Philly during this SafeGrowth project. I can hardly wait to see what they come up with next month when we return.

Most encouraging of all is Betsy's conclusion:

The vitality of any community can be found in the strengths and stability of its members and their ability to overcome the complexity of today.

Yes! In a nutshell, that's it!

If walkability is the first step to safety, overcoming complexity is the second.

Community vitality is found in the ability of it's members to overcome the complexity of today!

Thank you to Betsy, Pedro, and their dedicated kin for reminding us where to find yet another key to open safe places.

Walkability - the first step to safety

Discovering fun things during Jane's Walks

I spent a few days this week enjoying the fascinating streets of Toronto where dozens of neighborhoods flourish in ethnic and class diversity. Treed sitting areas, fruit and vegetable stands and street performers of all kinds; thriving streets in famed Jane Jacobs' hometown (at least in the non-suburban, bicycle friendly neighborhoods between the expressways).

Every first weekend in May the Jane's Walk event shows up in streets across the city. Starting in 2007 in Toronto, the Jane's Walk phenomenon has gone viral. Over 400 Jane's Walks now occur in 70 cities around the world. They are named after Jacobs, who was the CPTED pioneer before CPTED existed (she would probably not acknowledge that). Jacobs believed that the best way to get to know a neighborhood is on foot. I think she was right.

HOW WALKABLE IS YOUR HOOD?
Check out how walkable your own neighborhood is using the Walk Score. The Walk Score website allows you to type in your own home address (no spams result later on) and find out how your own neighborhood walkability compares to other cities around the world.

You can rate walkability to amenities such as grocery and hardware stores, restaurants and coffee shops, transit stops, schools, drug stores, parks and other destinations one might actually want to walk to.

HOW ACCURATE IS IT?
I typed in my former addresses to see if it worked. For example homes in Port Moody, British Columbia and Tallahassee, Florida both rated a Car Dependent 15 - a very poor walkability score. It's true that the Tallahassee neighborhood offered nothing of walkable interest though the Port Moody home did have a beautiful bike trail near the ocean. Still, I think they both deserved low walkability scores.

My current home in a small town in Washington State scored a Very Walkable 75 which I figure is about right. It is across from a seaside park, near a bus stop and less than a 15 minute walk to restaurants, library, drug stores, and coffee shops. In fact, all but one amenity here is less than a mile away. No wonder it scores high.

Walkability alone doesn't determine safety. The website rated some highly walkable neighborhoods very accurately, such as obvious choices like Soho and Greenwich Village in New York (same as when Jacob's lived there), the University District in Seattle, and downtown Portland. Unfortunately it rated others less accurately. While Seattle's Pioneer Square scores high, my own SafeGrowth students discovered walkability there is safe in daytime but far less so in nighttime. There are other questionable choices on the walkable cities list.

Obviously, walkability alone does not determine safety. It is, however, an excellent place to start creating it.

Click here for and rate your home on The Walk Score website.

Re-locating crime?

Moving or removing crime from Memphis public housing?

United Airlines is moving to downtown Chicago! Or so we're told in this week's issue of Harvard Business Review. Walgreens too, we're told, is rediscovering downtown. Are Corporate HQ's leading a suburban exodus back to the same city centers that middle and wealthy classes once abandoned to gangs, drugs and crime?

Another sign of change shows up in the Next American City magazine. Apparently Cleveland is re-imagining itself from the ground up. In that case it is the re-use of downtown vacant land - not corporate moves - leading the charge.

Could Richard Florida's predictions about new urban geographies be coming true as we emerge from the Great Recession? Are we really seeing the era when Florida's "creative economy"is extended to blue collar workers?

Perhaps.

Predictions like this echo the 1990s when Boston's Big Dig and urban garden programs heralded inner city gentrification. Of course re-locating downtown poor to the suburbs in favor of a rich, empty-nester class does little more than displace the poor to the suburbs.

Evidence for the re-locating phenomena is well documented by University of Memphis researchers Richard Betts and Phyllis Janikowski. Check out their American Murder Mystery story in The Atlantic.

As Florida says, "what drives a countries economic growth isn't factories or industries. It's people and creative neighborhoods in cities." I think it's the same for safe cities.

We don't want simply to shift urban geographies. We want to improve them.

Sin-city and crime generators

What I learned in Vegas...

A funny thing happened to me in Las Vegas last week. No, it's not what you're thinking! It's not really about clear-headed thinking at all. It's about some fuzzy thinking that replaces coherent understanding about preventing crime.

I've said before the CPTED and Design Out Crime folks don't talk much about the theories behind their work. A few of those thorny theory issues showed up in my blogs last year, such as ROTO (Research-On-The-Obvious).

There is another side to that coin. I'm referring to the fuzzy thinking of some academicians who study crime-and-place and their kin (crime mappers, police crime analysts).

Let's remember the main purpose of theory, at least in the empirical sciences, is to provide a plausible and testable explanation of why something happens, in this case crime. Events surrounding that explanation - where and when crime occurs - are merely descriptive symbols of the main event, not the actual theory that explains "why" the event happens in the first place.

From this point of view, CPTED and Design Out Crime have very few actual theories - only descriptive symbols.


DOES IT MATTER?

Descriptive symbols are useful. Describing where malaria starts killing people may help us isolate the outbreak and target treatment. Symbols may point us in the right direction toward explanation. But they do not explain the biology of malaria - and that is what kills us! Mosquito nets may help us and we need them. Ultimately, we need to be working toward a cure. We mustn't rest with nets. Same with crime.

What about gambling, casinos, and sin-city?

As I walked around Las Vegas last week I began thinking about all the casino's, the craziness, and all the activity. In Advanced CPTED there is something called "crime generators". These are locales in the city that tend to generate crime opportunities. Large casinos fit the crime generator tag. If mappers scoured the crime patterns, no doubt they'd find lots of hotspots with pick-pocketing, assaults, drug dealing, and fraud in and around the casinos. Or perhaps casino security displaces it to venues just outside the Strip? Either way, no doubt someone would come up with a "theory of casino crime locations", which isn't really a theory at all.

This is exactly what happened with the Broken Windows "theory". Crime went down in New York. Unfortunately for Broken Window Theory, as Professor Zimring showed in his book, The Great American Crime Decline, crime went down in places with no Broken Window programs. That's because descriptive symbols won't really stop crime in the long run. Only prevention based on sound theories can do that.

Yes, theories matter.

Does that make casino's crime generators? Casinos no doubt "generate" direct and indirect crime. But if we could calculate per capita crime rates around casinos, would they be any more crime-prone than other high activity places?

Do activity generators = crime generators?

Probably not in the case of large political rallies (except if you find yourself in Thailand this week). How about in the case of large football games with thousands of drunken fans? Those probably do generate similar (or more) assaults, except if we limit alcohol sales and the home team wins.

That's the problem with descriptive symbols versus real theory. They tell us something about where, and little about why.

THE CASINO CRIME GENERATOR?

It might be simple to conclude sin-city Vegas is also crime city. But FBI crime stats don't show that. We can argue all we want about unreported crime, gambling impact on family life, and so forth (those things are true and serious). Yet according to the 2008 FBI crime rates, Las Vegas wasn't even in the top 20 cities for total violent crime nor in the top 50 for total property crime cities.

So much for crime generators.



Personally, I'm no fan of the Strip in Las Vegas. There are no doubt many tragic realities that arise in that famous (infamous?) epicenter of self-absorption.

Whatever those realities, we must not confuse descriptive symbols that plot when and where with actual theories explaining why crime happens. Descriptive symbols may help us target crime and temporarily reduce it with 1st Generation CPTED and Design Out Crime. But they won't help us prevent it in the long run. Nor will they replace proper and robust theories that help us build safer places - including entertainment meccas like Vegas - in the years to come.

Radiant cities?

Scene from Radiant City - Burns Films Ltd

If you don't watch the regular offerings of TED.com...it's time you do! They are excellent, inspiring and worthwhile stories that will recharge even the most pessimistic (and, by definition, futile) batteries.

TED.com features some of the greatest thinkers today sharing their new ideas in 18 minutes or less, usually in YouTube format. My colleague and planning guru friend, Jon Munn, recently sent me there to watch one choice morsel.

That's where I came across "Radiant Cities".

Radiant Cities is a poignant, and very funny documentary. I won't tell you the plot other than to say you'll never again wonder why we have crime in the suburbs. I especially enjoyed the burb kids featured in the film. They master a satirical humor rivaling Monty Python...except their story is real!

Watch a trailer "here".