STUPID URBAN PLANNING IDEAS ENCOURAGE CRIME

Theory trumps the facts every time. It's private space that creates safety, not big public spaces

Burras Road was a pleasant cul-de-sac of 21 new homes in Bradford, England. Its residents were blissfully unaware that, just east of the site, approval for a proposed new shopping center required the breaching of their cul-de-sac by a bicycle-pedestrian path. Planners favored this requirement because, they say, cul-de-sacs do not encourage movement and therefore are "auto-dependent" and "anti-urban." Opening up the site would connect residents to local services, and the path would promote walking and cycling.

The path connecting the shopping center to the cul-de-sac opened in 2000. Although there is no evidence that the path has led residents to drive less, it did have a profound effect on their lives. During the next six months, a neighborhood that had been virtually crime-free saw its burglary rate rise to 14 times the national rate, with matching increases in overall crime, including arson, assault, and antisocial behavior.

Because a secondary school was located west of the cul-de-sac, the pedestrian path opened the neighborhood to a constant stream of students and others going between the school and the shopping center. Crime and vandalism became commonplace. "The path turned our piece of paradise into a living hell," one resident complained.

At a late stage, the local police crime prevention officer had tried to prevent the route from opening, predicting it would be a disaster, only to be told that the path was "sacrosanct." Residents' quality of life apparently was less important than the dubious goal of reducing auto dependency.

Architects and urban planners who call themselves New Urbanists say their proposals, including developments that mix residential and commercial uses, have homes with tiny private yards and large common areas, and feature pedestrian paths, will solve all sorts of social problems, including crime. Yet the housing and neighborhood designs they want to substitute for the modern suburb almost invariably increase crime......

With SafeScape, Zelinka and Brennan added one more urban malady to the mix. Their book asserts, without substantial evidence, that mixed uses, pedestrian paths, and interconnected streets (as opposed to cul-de-sacs) reduce crime. The book's publisher, the American Planning Association, has 30,000 members who work for city and county governments throughout the country, many of whom are New Urbanists eager for support for their preconceived notions. Police, lacking their own experts, often assume that planners know what they are doing: At least one police chief, Mark Kroeker of Portland, has taken it seriously.

A teacher of urban design at St. Louis' Washington University, Newman watched the decline of Pruitt-Igoe, an award-winning high-rise housing project that had closely followed Le Corbusier's vision of a Radiant City. Completed in 1956, the project suffered so much crime that it quickly became unlivable. Despite offering essentially free housing for many poor people, its high vacancy rates led to closure, and its 1972 demolition has come to symbolize the failure of government housing projects.

Newman noticed that there was a low-rise housing project across the street from Pruitt-Igoe whose residents were in the same socioeconomic class but that "remained fully occupied and trouble-free throughout construction, occupancy, and decline of Pruitt-Igoe." What, Newman wondered, were "the physical differences that had enabled one to survive while the other fell apart"?

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Newman carefully compared crime rates with the design features of thousands of blocks in hundreds of urban neighborhoods that collectively housed nearly half a million people.

The result was his 1972 book Defensible Space, which showed that the safest neighborhoods maximized private space and minimized common zones. Safe areas also minimized "permeability," that is, the ease of entry to and exit from the neighborhood or housing area. Cul-de-sacs are thus a crime-prevention device, and any breaching of cul-de-sacs will predictably increase crime. Newman didn't include suburbs in his study because they had much lower crime rates than the urban neighborhoods he did examine. This, he believed, was because the suburbs were less permeable and more defensible.

Relying more on mid-rise developments than high rises, New Urbanism claims to have fixed the problems of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. Yet New Urbanism shares many features with Pruitt-Igoe, including the large communal areas and permeability that Newman found caused so many problems.

The authors of SafeScape were familiar with Newman's work, but they chose to misrepresent it. "Newman took the `eyes on the street' concept," Zelinka and Brennan wrote, and "argued that the reason `eyes on the street' provide safety in urban, mixed commercial and residential areas is because there is a visible link between residents and the street." In fact, Newman specifically criticized what he called "the unsupported hypotheses of Jane Jacobs." Newman's work showed that mixed-use development led to significantly higher crime, while he couldn't find any evidence that "eyes on the street" would reduce that crime. "`Natural surveillance' is not automatically created by high-density environments," he wrote, "unless the grounds around each dwelling are assigned to specific families."

One New Urbanist concept built into SafeScape is the idea of maximizing common areas to create "a sense of community." While one of SafeScape's principles is "stewardship and ownership," the authors don't want private areas so much as they want to give people a "sense of ownership" in community property. To that end, say the authors, "Communities should include places that support the coming together of people," such as shops, pedestrian paths, parks, and community gardens. While these things are fine if people want them, when planners impose them on neighborhoods, the results are often disastrous.

Newman took exactly the opposite approach. "The larger the number of people who share a communal space," he found, "the more difficult it is for people to identify it as being in any way theirs or to feel they have a right to control or determine the activity taking place within it." To solve this problem, "`Defensible Space' operates by subdividing large portions of public spaces and assigning them to individuals and small groups to use and control as their own private areas."

Mixed uses vs. separate uses: "Mixed land-use patterns contribute to a safer, more vital public realm," say Zelinka and Brennan. In contrast, Newman found, mixed uses "generate high crime and vandalism rates," and housing units next to commercial areas "suffer proportionally higher crime rates." More recent research in Baltimore and Philadelphia by Temple University criminologist Ralph Taylor and several colleagues confirms that mixed uses increase both crime and the cost of policing.

More here




SENSE GETTING THROUGH IN CANADA?

Scientists who oppose the prevailing views on climate change have been shut out of debate on the Kyoto protocol, the Commons environment committee was told Thursday.

The result is that Canada may be wasting billions of dollars trying to curb emissions of carbon dioxide which is not a pollutant, said Charles Simpson, president of a Calgary-based group called Friends of Science. "The Canadian government has refused to listen to our government's leading experts in the field," said Simpson, a retired oil industry employee. He was accompanied Carleton University geologist Tim Patterson, one of a handful of scientists across Canada who have become known as outspoken critics of the Kyoto protocol. "It is the first time to my knowledge that an independent climate scientist has addressed a committee such as this," Simpson said before introducing Patterson, whose specialty is paleoclimatology - the study of past climate.

Patterson said rising temperatures in the past century are due to natural changes in the energy of the sun, not to pollution. He mocked the view that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. "It's plant food, it's a natural part of the atmosphere." Much of the science accepted when the Kyoto treaty was negotiated in 1997 has since been disproved, he added. "If during the mid-1990s we knew what we knew today there would be no Kyoto protocol because it would have been considered unnecessary."

Environment Canada scientist Henry Hengeveld said Patterson is commenting on matters outside his field. "If he were to argue with other paleoclimatologists I would say fine, and he may be a leading scientist in that field, but he's talking about the whole gamut - climate modelling and everything else. "That's like a dermatologist commenting on the diagnosis of a neurologist. I think this is an example of someone outside his field of expertise, not having read all the literature out there . . . and really being out of his depth."

Hengeveld said climate science is a complex area with thousands of papers being produced, and it is easy to "cherry-pick" the papers that support a particular view.

Patterson's comments were welcomed by Conservative environment critic Bob Mills, who has long maintained that the Kyoto protocol is a farce. "I'm always amazed when most environmental groups seem to think that most Canadians would like to live in a cave instead of the modern economy that we have," Mills said.

Stephen Guilbeault of Greenpeace said the Kyoto protocol was based on an assessment of the latest research by approximately 1,000 leading experts from around the world, and that assessment is continually updated. Guilbeault said he did not want to live in a cave, but rather to achieve greater efficiency in the use of resources.

Source

***************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************