Defensible Space in Urban Design
This is a story about how one man’s vision has changed the way the world perceives safety, the dangers of gender-biased data, and the surprising history of car alarms.
In the early 1970s, American architect and city planner Oscar Newman published his book, Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space. A thesis addressing crime in America’s urban centers, it focused specifically on the high rise. Newman hated high rises, and he loved design. He passionately believed that the way an environment was designed could influence human behavior, for better or worse; especially the people who lived and worked and interacted with it on a daily basis.
His theories were initially not well-received, coming at a time when urban blight and crime was on the rise, and high-crime high rises were mostly housing projects in predominantly black, latino and asian neighborhoods in larger cities. Newman’s position went against the long-standing, racist practices of urban renewal and slum clearance, arguing that crime and vandalism were not the inevitable way of life among marginalized groups, but were due to no or poor design.
Prevailing minds of the time believed in racism; Newman believed in defensible space.
