British study linking New Urbanism to crime falls apart
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.”
