Philip Langdon writes:

(I've posted on this bogus issue of new urbanism being crimogenic and my conclusion then as it is now is that the question is bunkogenic. My friend Phil Langdon speaks far more authoritatively. D.S.)

Phil writes::

There was quite a bit of discussion a few months ago when a crime analysis from England by Peter Knowles was distributed on a listserv by Randal O'Toole, chief organizer of the "Preserving the American Dream" conferences. New Urbanists noted that the place Knowles studied in England was not in fact new urbanist. Knowles didn't seem to understand the principles of new urbanism, and seemed to think that New Urbanists want to keep cars out of communities, which is not the case. Now another supposed expert from Britain, Stephen Town, is about to appear seemingly out of nowhere to appear at Randal O'Toole's "Preserving the American Dream" conference to discuss New Urbanism and crime. Town says that a new urbanist development in Hulme, England, suffers from crime because it has alleys.

It's peculiar that O'Toole keeps going to England...

...in his search for individuals willing to claim that New Urbanism somehow engenders crime. O'Toole lives in Oregon, so he could easily visit Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon, to get a sense of whether the new urbanist design of that community (including alleys) is causing crime to flourish. I'm confident that he would find that Orenco Station has little or no crime problem. Or he could visit Fairview Village, a new urbanist development east of Portland that has been inhabited for nearly a decade. I think he would find that Fairview also is not a hotbed of crime.

Or he could choose from many other developments in the US. Late last year New Urban News identified 369 new urbanist projects of at least neighborhood scale (15 acres or more, with an interconnected network of pedestrian-friendly streets and a mixture of housing types, organized around at least one central gathering place) that are built or under construction across the US. These range from developments projects in the suburbs, to small-town neighborhoods, to HOPE VI redevelopments in large cities. These are the places where the strengths and weaknesses of New Urbanism ought to be judged for the American public--not a development in England that few Americans, let alone New Urbanists, have ever seen or heard of.

As of now, we are being asked to take O'Toole and Town on their word that Hulme is in fact a new urbanist project. After O'Toole's previous effort to affix the new urbanist label to an English development that is not new urbanist at all, the burden of proof is on O'Toole to show that the latest criticism of New Urbanism deserves to be taken seriously.

Two things would be useful at this point:

First, O'Toole should arrange to have a new urbanist present at Stephen Town's presentation, to respond immediately after the talk is delivered. This would allow people to hear more than one side. If O'Toole is interested in open discussion, this is a must.

Second, O'Toole might collect what has already been written about the relationship between New Urbanism and crime and disorder and make that available to people at his conference or on his website. One of the reasons why the US Department of Housing & Urban Development decided to incorporate new urbanist ideas into HOPE VI projects was that elements such as clearly defined private spaces, porches overlooking public areas, and streets inserted into what had been uncontrolled and unsafe open ground served to held reduce crime and put residents in a better position to deter intruders. Stories from around the country have led me to believe that on the whole, New Urbanism had created a safer, more orderly environment in previously dangerous public housing projets. If this is not the case, we need to learn about it, so that we can find strategies that work better.

But let's have no more attempts to present the experience of one or two developments in England as representative of what New Urbanism is accomplishing in the US. Here is the text of a story I wrote for the December 2003 issue of New Urban News:

In October, Randal O’Toole, organizer of a national campaign against smart growth and New Urbanism, began circulating a study from England that claims that new urban design techniques make communities more vulnerable to crimes such as burglary and car theft. Closer inspection reveals, however, that the English study was not based on new urban communities at all. It was based on developments containing design features that new urbanists commonly reject.

So the findings end up being worthless.

The study, “Designing Out Crime: The Cost of Policing New Urbanism,” was produced by Peter Knowles, architectural liaison officer for the Bedfordshire, England, police department. It compared the incidence of crime in a Bedfordshire housing development that uses the police’s “Secured by Design” techniques and in another Bedfordshire development purportedly employing new urban planning ideas. Knowles concluded that New Urbanism’s planning ideas are associated with six times as high a crime rate.

Unfortunately for the study’s credibility, Knowles equated New Urbanism with features found in what he called “Radburn layouts.” Apparently he did not realize that new urbanists have widely rejected Radburn-style layouts. Whereas Radburn-style layouts severely limit the number of through-streets, and often run pedestrian paths through areas that are difficult to keep under surveillance, new urban developments favor amply connected street networks, placing much of the pedestrian movement in areas where it can be seen from homes and porches. Streets with long blank walls or with bollards keeping vehicles out — which Knowles associated with New Urbanism — are in fact features that new urbanists avoid. Knowles contended that alleys “compromise defensible space” and make it easier for parked cars to be broken into. Security in alleys is a reasonable concern, but to assess whether alleys actually spawn disorder, a study of offenses in new urban communities would have to be carried out — something Knowles has not done.

New Urban News has not heard of significant crime problems in any of the more than 200 sizable new urbanist communities in the US. The US Department of Housing & Urban Development has embraced New Urbanism partly because its characteristics — such as porches, well-demarcated front and back yards, and highly visible parks and squares — promise a safer, more orderly environment featuring “eyes on the street.” At Diggs Town, a 428-unit public housing project in Norfolk, Virginia, there used to be 25 to 30 police calls a day, but after Urban Design Associates redesigned the project along new urban lines, the number of police calls plummeted to two or three a week. The results are reported in “Restoring Community Through Traditional Neighborhood Design: A Case Study in Diggs Town Public Housing,” published in Housing Policy Debate.

Crime has been rare in Celebration, Florida, the largest, most complete “new town” to employ the principles of New Urbanism. “I can tell you anecdotally that at Orenco Station we’ve had a miniscule crime rate, one of the lowest in the region,” says Michael Mehaffy, who was involved in building that new urban development in Hillsboro, Oregon. “People regularly leave their doors unlocked there, and neighbors in the alley watch each others’ houses when they’re gone.”

David Brain, Laurence Aurbach, Patrick Condon, Emily Talen, Matthew Lyons, and others have challenged Knowles’s allegations on the Pro-Urb e-mail discussion list. Mehaffy, now director of education for The Prince’s Foundation in London, says Knowles’s study, which complains about the British government’s favorable attitude toward New Urbanism, appears to be “less an example of credible science” than “a polemical exercise aimed at attacking a movement that is growing in momentum in the UK and elsewhere.”

Philip Langdon, New Haven, Connecticut, Senior Editor, New Urban News. (New Urban News is a newsletter covering New Urbanism and community design, published from Ithaca, NY, eight times a year.)

Comments

[Ian]

I don't know the specific development in Hulme, but that part of Manchester has had huge crime problems for many years - largely drug related as far as I can tell. Any new development in that area is likely to have such problems - whatever the built form - until the root causes have been addressed. There is a process underway in the area however to gate off rear alleys, which seems to be having a major impact on crime levels - burglary etc.

I should add that rear alleys are a common form of development in the north of England and have been since the 1850s. Over that period crime rates have no doubt fluctuated while the built form remained the same.

I'm not convinced that comparative studies at a given time are enough. Some time series data is also needed.

Having said that I don't like the implicit assumption in the post that because something is happening in England - by which I assume you really mean not in the US - it doesn't count.

[ian]

I've looked up Stephen Town - he appears to be the Police Architectural Liaison Officer in Bradford as as such employed to implement the Secured by Design Initiative.

http://www.planetizen.com/oped/cmt_item.php?id=1312

My experience of this is limited and was some time ago, so may not be typical of current practice. However the prescriptions of the ALO I met would have created a barren and inhuman landscape, forbidding almost all landscaping. Nothing above knee height would have been allowed since criminals would have been able to hide in it.

As far as I can see, the criticisms by Robert Steuteville of 'Secured by Design' were and remain valid and nothing said by Stephen Town really addresses them.

[Laurence Aurbach]

There is no doubt that new urbanism in England and elsewhere is just as important as development in the U.S. In fact, Space Syntax Ltd. is based in London, Brussels and Sydney, where it produces (among other topics) the most rigorous studies of the urban form-to-crime relationship. Space Syntax's research was discussed in this previous thread.

Knowles did not identify the locations he studied, and so it was impossible for anyone to evaluate the physical characteristics of those neighborhoods, aside from the photos he provided. As far as I'm aware, Knowles has not answered the many questions that were sent to him about his methodology.

It's all too easy to anticipate that Stephen Town's study will be similarly questionable. There are many fine new urbanists in England - do they recognize the Hulme development as an example of their design priciples? Do new urbanists anywhere in the world recognize the Hulme development? I suspect the "American Dreamers" don't know and don't care.

[David Sucher]

Just as an aside, I also emailed the police officer who authored the initial British study to alert him to my own very first post on the subject; I thought it only fair, sporting, to tell him of my publicly-voiced criticism.

He did not respond.

[Alan Little]

Let me tell you about Hulme.

I lived in & around Hulme for several years in the mid 80s; later I lived a few miles away and still travelled through regularly on my way to & from Manchester city centre. I left the area five years ago so my knowledge isn't absolutely up to date, but I used to know it well and still vsit occasionally.

When I arrived in 1983 Hulme was a 1960s social housing project made of concrete block monstrosities that was already recognised as having failed. A classic Le Corbusier high rise slum. The buildings were mostly condemned and being let very cheap on short term leases to students (I was a graduate student) pending redevelopment. Hulme is adjacent to Moss Side - an area that then had (and as far as I know still has) a fairly justifiable reputatation as one of the most violent and dangerous inner city areas in Britain. It was also adjacent to two of Manchester's universities and, as I mentioned, rents were very cheap so a lot of students lived there. Burglars know student households are prime targets - high concentrations of computers, stereos, video/dvd players etc.

Through the 15 years or so I knew the area, the concrete block monstrosities were gradually being pulled down and replaced. The worst of them are all gone now. Some of the new developments that have replaced them look much nicer - small streets with houses and shops, some of the architecture really quite interesting. It certainly isn't the cesspit it once was. But whatever the architecture, it's an inner city regeneration zone still in the fairly early stages.

I don't know anything about the places in Oregon or Florida that you're citing as new urbanist developments, but unless the Florida one is in one of the most dangerous parts of downtown Miami there would be very little point trying to compare its crime rate with Hulme's.

[Laurence Aurbach]

After checking into this further, I’ve learned that Hulme is in fact recognized as good example of urban regeneration in Britain. In "Urban Villages and the Making of Communities," David Lunts writes "In Hulme, Manchester, more than 2,000 new homes have been constructed around an infrastructure of linked streets and squares, in an explicit attempt to capture something of the character of the dense urban neighborhood that was torn down to make way for disastrous urban flats in the 1960s." (p. 199) and Hollingsworth, et al, write, "Hulme in Manchester is perhaps the best example where a high level of investment and significant intervention seems to have worked." (p. 141)

What’s more, Hulme is featured in Ian Colquhoun’s newly published book, "Design Out Crime: Creating Safe and Sustainable Communities" as a case study of a "safe and sustainable" community.

Stephen Town has not publicized his study of Hulme, but he did make a brief reply to Robert Steuteville’s PLANetizen op-ed. His criticism seems to be that Hulme has communal and "pretty ugly" rear courtyards. He finds Hulme's crime figures to be "frightening," but does not mention if the new development has improved crime rates.

Mr. Town makes reference to a website about Secured by Design, www.designagainstcrime.org. That website contains a case study about Hulme that is described like this:

"Humle Park in Manchester: An inner-city park was redeveloped in an area of Manchester notorious for robbery and burglary. The park had to be safe and open to different users. The open-plan style includes pathways connecting the park to the rest of the city. The permeable boundary encourages use and inclusiveness, yet can easily be repaired."

So all the sources I’ve found, including those referenced by Mr. Town, claim that Hulme is a model of urban regeneration and crime reduction practices. I hope Mr. Town will publicize his study of Hulme and his evaluation of its design practices. Mr. Town’s methodology and conclusions should prove to be interesting.

I think new urbanism and Secured by Design are aligned in many ways. However, the promotion of cul-de-sacs and gated access points are explicitly counter to new urbanist principles.