Sustainability and Safety Through a Community Garden

Northey Street City Farm. Activating space on market day - all photos by Mateja Mihinjac

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Mateja Mihinjac is a criminologist completing doctoral research in CPTED at Griffith University, Australia. She is a member of the International CPTED Association and been involved in criminal justice issues in Europe and Australia for a number of years. Mateja’s guest blog offers an excellent example of placemaking through community gardens.  

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For an avid market-goer like myself, Northey Street City Farm with a Sunday organic market is a perfect place to stock up on my fruit and veggies for the week. By promoting social interactions at a micro-level, community gardens like Northey improve community integration, strengthen social ties, promote wellbeing and even improve safety.

These by-products of community garden activities cumulate in social capacity building (a basic principle of 2nd Generation CPTED), which advances self-sufficiency and a sense of community ownership. In turn that promotes what Jane Jacobs famously called the healthy ecosystem.

Urban gardens for placemaking have made appearances in this blog, such as those in Portland and Indianapolis. The Northey Street City Farm provides yet another version - the urban farmer's market.

A market-goer pedaling her own smoothie

Located in the suburb of Windsor in Brisbane, Australia, Northey gets swamped by both stallholders as providers of sustainably grown local produce and Brisbane residents as its consumers. It is, however, more than just a market.

Northey Farm is also a welcoming community garden that has been open since 1994 as a non-profit community organisation offering economically sustainable produce and community building activities through permaculture.

On a daily basis this place is activated by a number of placemaking activities; tours around the Farm, courses teaching how to start a community garden, how to garden and plant, cultural events, and playgroups for kids. The place also offers a quick meal and a cuppa at the garden’s café or you can maintain your own vegetable garden within the Farm community.

Offering ample opportunities for refreshment and interaction

Translating these ideas across the whole city offers the prospect for building a vibrant city with positive interpersonal relations. It will help connect people with their environment while offering opportunities for fun and exploration.

Northey Farm symbolises the ideas stemming from Jane Jacobs’s vision of a modern urban city—to become a safe and liveable ecosystem. Because it is sustainable, it demonstrates how we can create thriving urban ecosystems in the years ahead.

View of the cafe at the centre of the market

CPTED in covered parking

Sightlines into the underground Metrotown parking from upper mall levels

Beneath the behemoth Metrotown mall lies the second largest covered mall in Canada, a vast underground lot with 4,000 spaces. That might seem small compared to the world’s largest at the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton (20,000), the world’s largest covered lot at Seattle’s airport (13,000) or the largest downtown underground lot in Chicago (9000).

Yet Metrotown is big. And it joins thousands like it around the world, some massive. Dubai is planning 40,000. You might assume the existence of widely used design safety standards in such places. You know what they say about assumptions!

DESIGN STANDARDS?

Some municipalities do have design snippets (CCTV, lighting, security patrols), and the National Institute of Building Sciences also posts a few. But, realistically, those are a pittance in such massive expanses.

I’ve written about some great designs like lifestyle malls and creative wayfinding. 
As well, Randall Atlas’s book 21st Century Security and CPTED (2nd edition) has over 40 pages about parking lot security.

Walking through Metrotown I remembered teaching CPTED for the RCMP in the 1990s. We often used the Metrotown parking lot as our lighting test-bed, auditing the entranceways, examining the lighting and marveling at the vast expanses. I was impressed last week that Metrotown owners have instituted significant design upgrades over the past decade. The photos tell the story.

Dedicated pedestrian walkways. White painted ceilings.

Window glazed atrium safe areas adjacent to security office.

1. Separate paths for pedestrians, color-coded with different light sources than the rest of the lot to enhance wayfinding.
2. Sodium lighting (recall the yellow versus white lighting debate in the comment section of my blog on lighting ). However in this case lighting dispersion was more even and intense than years ago. White wall paint enhanced reflectivity. Looking out into the lot it was easy to see before walking to cars.
3. Pedestrian entranceways from the upstairs mall were designed with transparent glass to allow clear sightlines from top to bottom.

The best feature had been enhanced from early years. It was the glazed atriums on each stairway level. Pedestrians walking down the stairs first entered enclosed safe atrium areas on each floor. These areas had tempered glass and were often next to the security office. This gave a clear view into the parking lot from within the safe areas.

If we are going to do more covered parking in the 21st Century, here's a starting point for minimum standards.

Clear sight-lines from atrium. Prevention education signs.

Medical magic to cut murders?

Awhile back I wrote about the murder rate gap between BC and Washington State and listed a few theories to explain it: An aging crime-prone demographic; handgun availability.

There was one theory I missed or, rather, ignored.

The Wall Street Journal, however, didn't: "In medical triumph, homicides fall despite soaring gun violence". Murder is down, says WSJ, due to a buffet of medical morsels; better medicine, quicker paramedic responses, the spread of trauma centers.

WSJ spares no marvel in the new buffet: doctoring skills brought back from the Afghan and Iraq wars; helicopters to ferry patients to emergency wards.

A week ago CBC Ottawa joined the chorus.

Apparently, says CBC Ottawa, murders are declining even though gun violence is up. For proof just look at jumps in attempted murder rates (I did). Those are the victims saved in the emergency wards by better medicine!

As Star Trek engineer Mr. Scott says in another fantasy show, "It's a fine bit of reasoning, indeed!"

Except it's wrong. The numbers don't add up to support the medical theory.

Statistics Canada rates for murder and attempted murder follow similar paths. The theory suggests they shouldn't. Look at the patterns.

Source: Statistics Canada

There might be something valid in 1975 when the rates crossed paths (but not accounted for in this theory about "recent" medical improvements). Afterwards, as one dips so does the other.

If the medical theory was right the gap between murder and attempts should widen. It doesn't. In fact the gap actually narrows since the late 1990s. Is medicine cutting those murders but having no impact on attempts? Only if police are not recording attempted murder victims, perhaps hiding them somewhere else in the stats? That's unlikely and the data do not support it.

I crunched the Ottawa crime stats to look a bit closer. Again, the data tell another story. Check out the chart.

Ottawa murder and attempts decline together

As murder drops so do attempts. Murders ebb but attempts don't flow as the theory predicts. There is something very rotten in the medical buffet. As the UNC School of Government blog concludes; "Medical progress, probably. Medical triumph, I doubt."

Medicine has improved. Better doctors and technology is incredible. That's good news. As well, we have methods to cut crime; SafeGrowth, CPTED, Ceasefire, problem-oriented policing, neighborhood reinvestment. That's good news too. But confusing matters with unproven theories is neither scientific nor helpful.

When will reporters and their editors start chasing facts and stop chasing slick headlines?  No wonder the public is so ill-informed about policing, crime and its prevention.

In praise of sodium lighting

Our community center last night at the end of the street

Since 1970 the light source of choice in most cities has been sodium vapor, those yellowish streetlights you see glowing everywhere.

Sodiums are an efficient light source but many lighting engineers despise their color. According to one New York lighting designer "There is this negative subliminal response…the connotation is crime." Says another: "Yellow light muddies the colors of surrounding neighborhoods and makes people feel less secure because the colors around them are not true."

In fact there is very little actual research showing any of that. Most research says nothing about light color, only light quantity.

Regardless, it was only a matter time before a new lighting kid showed up on the block. In this case it was the LED - light emitting diode.

For example Seattle, like most North American cities, is converting to more cost efficient LEDs. They might be more efficient but they they produce a harsh, sharp image on everything.

A decade ago I was guest editor of a publication on lighting and CCTV. My thoughts then: If street lighting enhances architecture where pedestrians can appreciate the facades and details of downtown buildings, there may be problems lighting a downtown so bright it detracts from the aesthetics.

Whenever I see downtown LEDs they remind me I was probably right.

The photos in this blog demonstrate downtown sodium lighting. They show how well-placed sodiums provide adequate lighting and highlight the beautiful textures in downtown architecture.

High risk facilities like automated bank machines can be well lit with sodium

In none of these photos did sodium lighting detract from prevention or turn people off. There are no people in the photos because, at least in the photos I took, I had to wait for them to move aside in order to show the effect. Obviously, sodium lighting did not make them feel less secure. In fact, the opposite.

We know very little about the impact of color on night time behavior, especially crime. And since no one is apparently paying attention to the crime and social impact of LEDs, I hope we don't learn, too late, that brighter isn't always better.

Better angels of our nature - Ode to 2014

The perfect way to start a new year is to take a big picture look at our future trajectory. For that, one book stands above all others - Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature.

This summer I linked to a TED Talk by Pinker when I first described his work in my blog Rising above the swamp.

I've just re-read Better Angels and it's terrific. Pinker shines a beam of analysis through the dark media images of "breaking news exclusives" and instant access to every hell-in-a-hand-basket story in every corner of the globe. In doing so he reveals that violence world-wide is on the decline. Contrary to media stories, things are getting better, not worse!

Pinker is no slouch waxing eloquent. He is an award-winning, Harvard based, Canadian-born experimental and cognitive psychologist. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Time Magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential scientists.

Peter Singer's review says it all:

"The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. "

Pinker's book Better Angels of Our Nature reexamines the history of violence

Enter the naysayers: Edward S. Herman and David Peterson's On The Alleged Decline of Violence.

First they say Pinker ventures too far outside his field of expertise. Now there's an irony-drenched slam (Herman is a professor of finance and Peterson a journalist).

Then they claim Pinker "completely ignores the kind of violence that is built into the structure of social relations and shows up…as unequal life chances…such as the savage global class war of the 1 percent against the other 99”.

Wandering so blithely onto the thin ice of political polemics, I wonder how long it would take their "savage global class war" to crash through the frozen pond of cultural relativism upon witnessing the bloody genocidal slaughter of the Mongol invasions or a half million murdered during the Christian Inquisitions?

Perhaps the long-term decline of violence will not persist. Perhaps war will break out over environmental collapse or an empty island in the East China Sea. There are plenty of problems to fix, especially the environment! And crime still persists.

But I'm a bit weary of the cynical, sky-is-falling crowd…when it isn't. Stewart Brand says "It is sometimes fashionable to despise modernity. A more appropriate response is gratitude." 

I agree.

A new year is upon us. Let's take a breath, appreciate our remarkable historical progress, and then reset our sights on our many remaining problems. Including crime.

Happy New Year!

We still allow places of high crime risk. We can do better.

A perfect storm for Christmas - cutting murders

Last week New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu announced early results from their homicide reduction program. Unknown at the conference, this creates a fantastic new opportunity. It all starts with the following hypothesis:

Neighborhoods infused with SafeGrowth will help violence reduction strategies like Ceasefire to cut crime more effectively and longer than neighborhoods without.

New Orleans homicide strategy includes the Chicago-style Interrupters, blight reduction and other SafeGrowth-like programs. It also includes David Kennedy's anti-gang violence program called Ceasefire. It's this latter program that caught my eye.

New Orleans' Hollygrove neighborhood - photo Megan Carr

For years I've been a supporter of David Kennedy's Ceasefire. And David is still on the job in places like New York. Ceasefire tackles neighborhoods wracked by violence by calling-in gang members and giving them a choice between arrest and targeted sanction or job training, counseling, housing, and social help.

The message to gang members: We care about you because you are part of our community, but the violence has to stop! As Mayor Landrieu said at the press conference, "the laws of engagement on the streets of New Orleans have changed."

He credits Ceasefire with a big reduction in homicides.

ALEADY IN HOLLYGROVE

Here's the thing; New Orleans' Hollygrove neighborhood already had a huge decline in homicides when residents and AARP instituted SafeGrowth and other programs a few years ago. Murders declined from over 24 to less than 6 with no Ceasefire whatsoever.

That's not to slam Ceasefire - it's a good program. True, there has been some criticism that Ceasefire doesn't work or just fizzles out. But now we have the perfect storm for a researcher, an ideal opportunity to test the hypotheses that SafeGrowth creates conditions for programs like Ceasefire to sustain lower homicide rates longer than in other neighborhoods!

I gave up my own evaluation research years ago. Practitioner work takes too much time. But I always encourage researchers to dig in. This meets all the conditions for a natural experiment...a perfect holiday gift for an enterprising criminologist. It could help communities everywhere.

Merry Christmas!