Environmental criminology

crim·i·no·gen·ic  also crim·o·gen·ic adj. Producing or tending to produce crime or criminality

Definition from www.dictionary.com

When we were young the future was so bright, the old neighbourhood was so alive,
And every kid on the whole damn street, was gonna make it big and not be beat
Lyrics from ‘The kids aren’t alright’ by The Offspring

You better watch how you talking, and where you walking, or you and your homies might be lined in chalk
Look at the situation, they got me facing, I can't live a normal life, I was raised by the strip
Death ain’t nothing but a heartbeat away, I'm living life do or die, what can I say
I'm 23 now but will I live to see 24, The way things is going I don't know.
Lyrics from ‘Gangsters Paradise’ by Coolio

"No reason to get excited," the thief he kindly spoke, "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.”
Lyrics from ‘All along the watchtower’ by Bob Dylan

I have a friend back in India – Mansi – who worked in the same office I did. When we weren’t pretending to be hard at work we would engage in long discussions (with her doing most of the talking and me most of the listening, big surprise there) that usually concerned my dismayingly cynical worldview at the time. I say at the time because she did quite a bit of progress in making a convert of me. One of the things she said that now seems patently obvious (but not necessarily then) is that people aren’t inherently bad, evil, or any of that jazz. There’s no vengeful God saying do it My Way or Go to Hell - if there’s a God (and in the depths of my deeply logical soul I believe there is), all She’s trying to do is to help us discover ourselves. When people do what Society labels Bad Things, it’s because they’re misguided (people going off to war because their leaders told them it’s the Right thing to do, or leaders sending people off to war because they’ve deluded themselves into believing that it’s the Right thing to do – and of course some of that oil would be very useful too thanks). We grow up being taught (misguided?) to believe that money and possessions are necessities, right up there with food, clothing and shelter. Grow up and become a big man son, make lots of money, own more than one car. I’ve never believed that, but I’ve never denied it either. The thing is, while there is a quantifiable minimum standard for the latter, none exists for the former. You have Recommended Daily Allowances for food, standards to make sure buildings don’t collapse about your ears (although sometimes they still do), and your mom is going to be around telling you to put on a sweater before going out, do you want to catch your death of cold? But how much money is enough? So we go through life in a general state of dissatisfaction because we can never own enough, and when we see another more ‘well-off’ person, we get envious. I think that holds true for most, if not all, people. We aren’t saints (and we aren’t devils); we never said we were; it’s just that some people go too far. 

Maybe this isn’t entirely relevant, but for some reason I just feel like all this needs saying. I sat down in front of the computer thinking I would have to force stuff onto the screen, tired out at the fag end of a difficult (but enjoyable) semester where I’ve had to juggle work and studies in between catching something like 4 to 5 hours of sleep daily over the past month. So far, so good (I think). 

Of course, realizing that people are just misguided is small comfort (if at all) for the families who lose loved ones to someone out to make easy money. And it isn’t just the actual crime that is unacceptable; it’s the fact that people go through their days being afraid that the crime might occur. As architects we like to think we have the power to shape society. I like to think so too, however naïve that may seem. By empathising with our fellow men (and women) maybe we can design better, not just by reading books or downloading statistics from the Net and generally refusing to get off our high horses. Empathising… and understanding how the places we build encourage or discourage crime and/ or a sense of safety – places that are environments where the Built and the Community and the Natural come together. Somewhere along the line we’ve lost the feel for architecture as Environment Making and instead gotten seduced by sleek imagery and Form Making. I’ve been guilty of the same on occasion (still am for that matter). Anyway, enough rambling and essay padding… how do designed environments encourage or discourage crime?

Most crimes aren’t premeditated… unlike what you see in the soap operas (if, God forbid, you do watch them); they are spontaneous acts of “antisocial” behaviour committed because ideal circumstances are noticed and taken advantage of. ‘Situational’ crimes… rape, murder, theft, hooliganism, in most (but not all) cases taking place because of opportunities arising. These opportunities could arise because of ‘routine activity’ – you go to work in the city in the morning and return at night during the week, leaving your suburban house unattended with no one in or around to see that person with the suspicious looking bolt cutters sauntering to the front door. Here the physical (separate row houses) and social (work 9 to 5 in the Big City) environment has created an opportunity for crime by bringing together in one place at a particular time a "likely" offender, a "suitable" target and the absence of a "capable guardian" against crime (www.acpc.org). The ‘rational choice’ theory (Cornish and Clarke, 1986) talks about how crime is purposive behaviour designed to benefit the offender with minimum risks and costs. ‘Committing an offence is usually only one way for the offender to achieve what he wants, whether it is cash, peer approval, excitement, sexual gratification or domination of others. In making the choice to commit crime the offender is influenced by the balance of effort, risks and rewards, compared with the costs and benefits of alternative legal means of achieving his ends’ (www.acpc.org). This probably comes back to the routine activity theory in a way – it’s about making use of opportunities to achieve (perceived) necessities in the easiest way possible. Lotteries are more risky, whatever the lady picking out numbers from the jar on TV would have you believe.

The aim of design should then be:

‘Reducing in-built situational opportunities and perceived rewards, and increasing risks from the point of offender’s point of view, and strengthening a community’s sense of responsibility for place’ (Samuels, 2004).

www.pierluigisurace.it

Active street life hinders opportunities for crime (Jacobs, 1961). And by active she wasn’t talking about cars thundering down expressways, people driving an hour from home to get to their workplaces, doing the 9 to 6 Macarena (I hated that song), and then driving an hour to get back home, repeat ad nauseating. Street life is about people giving life to Place, responsible community members present throughout the day and keeping an Eye out for strangers (not necessarily to drive them out, we aren’t talking xenophobia here). To Jane, healthy urban neighbourhoods are those where there are “interested” people throughout the day – 

Morning: People come in to work, parents drop their kids off to school, shopkeepers set up shop
Noon: Workers, parents and shoppers head to the park for lunch together
Night: restaurants, nightclubs and bars open keeping the place lively
Throughout the Day – retired folk hang around and Keep Watch 

This viewpoint talks about designing places where the people are as (if not more) important than the actual physicality of the architecture. If places are designed to give residents more control over their environment, a community of interest is cultivated, a social fabric that defends itself (Newman, 1976, 1980). This is what Newman called ‘defensible space’ – again, not a propagation of isolationism but an understanding that people are territorial. Give them a place they can (and feel like) call Home, and people rally together and ensure the safety of the community as a whole.  Include young (and old) people in the functioning of the community and chances are no matter what their economic or otherwise situation, they’ll be less likely to turn against their community, because it is theirs. Exclude them, and they couldn’t care less – why should they? Segregate them and stuff them into public housing, and two things happen: one, resentment at their far from ideal social fabric and two, the opportunity for that resentment to be expressed as crime because the physical Architecture allows it. (I blithely use the safe terms “them” and “their” because I’ve never experienced what I’m writing about, but it so easily could have been “us” and “we”.) A lot of crime happens in public housing. In Mumbai, poor people live in crowded apartments blocks called chawls, or in vast tracts of (swamp) slums. In the chawls, filthy though they seem to us privileged folk, a strong sense of community develops – children playing cricket in the public courtyard, elders sitting on cots watching them play, and women grinding spices in the corridors that overlook the courtyard. In the slums, on the other hand, there is no community node – only long stretches of mud huts separated by narrow paths with no opportunities for pause and meeting. An outsider would have to be an idiot to walk into one of Mumbai’s slums and expect to walk out in one piece. Research done by AHURI in Australia over a period of 5 years confirms that crime hotspots coincide with areas of public housing more often than not. Why? Firstly, the whole issue of segregating the most disadvantaged people in environments where they are made to feel like unwanted cast-offs from society (again, speaking from my Ivory Tower). Secondly, the actual design – “poor street lighting, large dark open spaces/schools”… 

www.macalester.edu

Dark. A person walking to his or her car in the dark shopping mall parking lot at 2 in the morning, or in dark alleyways, or through dark city parks… The dark is perceived as unsafe, always has been. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King points out how a lot of horror movies have dark or night in the title and/ or as an underlying theme (Night of the Living Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street, After Midnight, Fright Night, Alone in the Dark, Dark Area, Dark Places, Darkness, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Night of Dark Shadows…). Not too many movies about horrors of the day… fear of the dark is a pressure point B movie producers have no hesitation in exploiting.
Have you ever been alone at night, thought you heard footsteps behind
And turned around and no one's there? And as you quicken up your pace
You find it hard to look again because you're sure there's
someone there
(Lyrics from ‘Fear of the Dark’ by Iron Maiden)‍

Most of my friends don’t like going out at night because they think it’s unsafe. The fact that a couple of them have been mugged does seem to support their apprehension. People afraid of being potential victims of crime don’t go abroad at night, preferring the perceived safety of home instead. The result is deserted streets at night and an increased likelihood that the people who do go out will be attacked. ‘Whether a sense of apprehension is accurate or exaggerated people modify their lifestyles i.e. practice avoidance behaviour to accommodate their fears and the all-important sense of community appropriation is lost’ (Samuels, 2004). The Dark and other failures of design create opportunities for crime that have their roots in community (or lack thereof). What are the principles of design we need to keep in mind to avoid these “failures”?  

A. SURVEILLABILITY

1. Natural surveillability: Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street”, aka the Neighbourhood Watch 

2. Light: Isolated pools of darkness like alleyways and parking lots at night are unsafe. Transition spaces should be well-lit and, more importantly, animated with “positive attractors”.

3. Sightlines: Are there pockets in the public domain that are blind spots and hence unsafe?

4. Night-animation: Back to Jacobs’s healthy urban neighbourhood – places that remain active during the night because of appropriate land use mix.

5. Electronic surveillance: CCTV and all the other marvellous paraphernalia of Big Brotherhood. Yes cameras in public spaces can act as deterrents to crime (I slow down automatically when I see a “Speed camera ahead” sign… even when I’m already under the speed limit), but is it worth it? Reality TV doesn’t hold a candle to Real Life. 

6. Problem oriented policing: Developing responses to crimes of similar nature based on observation of precedents – preventive in nature by identifying potential problem areas or individuals

B. ACCESSIBILTY

1. Natural access control: using elements that a) physically stop potential offenders and b) make the place look like a difficult target – rational choice theory in practice.

2. Public access to the city: deserted subway trains and platforms, buses with shady characters skulking in the back like bad pulp fiction characters, and a host of other reasons why people prefer not to travel to the city at night, especially in public transport. Result? Deserted streets as well.

3. Target hardening, hardware and screening: steering locks and swipe cards

C. TERRITORIALITY

1. Natural policing: by neighbours and other community members when you aren’t home, but it helps if they can actually see your backyard.

2. Malaise indicators: such as graffiti are associated with poor policing, even though most of it is an outlet for artistic expression.

3. Negative attractors: such as nightclubs, bars and restaurants.

4. Positive attractors: such as nightclubs, bars and restaurants.

5. Empathetic community policing and housing management: “Community policing is a collaborative effort between the police and the community that identifies problems of crime and disorder and involves all elements of the community in the search for solutions to these problems.” (www.communitypolicing.org) 

Within these broad topics, there are many possible instances of putting these principles into practice. The instances given are just some of the ways we can work with other people to make places that are safer, physically and perceptually. After all, one of the primary functions of the built environment is shelter.

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‍References

Jacobs, Jane (1961), ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’, Random House.
Judd, Samuels and O’Brien (2002), ‘Linkages Between Housing, Policing and Other Interventions for Crime and Harassment Reduction on Public Housing Estates’, AHURI. 
Newman, O. (1972). ‘Defensible Space’, Macmillan.
Newman, O. (1996). ‘Creating Defensible Space’, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development .

www.acpc.org.au
www.csiss.org
www.fairlawnnews.com
www.umt.edu
www.wordbroker.biz/horror_movies/