Anyone who has set foot in a troubled public-housing project knows the feeling: an almost palpable sense of not being in control, of being vulnerable to criminals. Even the police, normally cocksure, seem troubled at such places as the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side. Patrolling the grounds, they crane their necks, searching high-rise windows for snipers.
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The usual way to deter murder, rape and assault in the projects is manpower-more police equals more safety. But another approach argues that the form and arrangement of buildings can prevent encounters with criminals.
This idea is called “defensible space.”
At its most basic level, defensible space holds that certain layouts of buildings favor criminal activity, while others enhance neighbors’ ability to watch over their surroundings.
For example, drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes once controlled the stairwells inside the three-story buildings at the King Kennedy development in Cleveland, making residents virtual prisoners in their apartments. Eliminating the stairwells and giving residents private front doors in 1993 helped lead to a major decrease in crime that continues.
But defensible space ideally extends beyond changes in the physical environment and builds a sense of community. Indeed, the very notion of urban civilization and community policing are bound up in Western history; the word “police, ” like the word “politics,” derives from the Greek word polis, meaning “mother city.”
Does it work?
Defensible space is most effective wrapped in a bundle of social and management changes, as when residents of the renovated Cleveland complex signed a covenant that obligates them not to use drugs or when a private management firm upgraded living conditions at a Boston development.
Applied without such measures at the most troubled projects, defensible space has proven powerless to endow residents with the same sense of security other Americans take for granted.
At the Robert Taylor Homes, whose 28 U-shaped towers comprise the world’s largest public-housing project, a haphazard use of defensible-space techniques in the late 1980s wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and left the residents as vulnerable as ever to crime.
That effort should serve as a warning to officials of the Department Housing and Urban Development now that they have taken over the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA).
HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros is an avid backer of defensible space and has even written a brochure this year touting its virtues. Now, he and other HUD officials must decide when, where and how to use this technique if they are to make good on their promise to improve the quality of life immediately for the CHA’s 86,000 official residents.
The importance of defensible space extends beyond making people feel safe within the borders of public housing. Many public-housing residents, especially single mothers, have expressed a reluctance to find jobs, frightened that children left at home will be victims of violence. And in a cycle that is typical of public-housing’s history, escalating spending for police and security guards drains resources earmarked for improving its aging building stock.
The CHA in fiscal 1994 spent about $70 million on security, nearly double 1992 expenditures. That amounted to $4 of every $10 the agency got from the federal government for modernization improvements such as fitting aging apartments with new stoves and cabinets.
Residents want safety now
Defensible space grows out of the work of urbanologist Jane Jacobs, who suggested in her classic 1961 urban-planning study, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” that one of the uses of city sidewalks, besides facilitating the movement of pedestrians, is promoting safety.
The more people on a sidewalk, Jacobs reasoned, the more pedestrians would feel safe amid the strangers one invariably encounters in a city (as opposed to the cozy familiarity of a small town). People sitting on stoops and neighbors looking out the windows of rowhouses built to the lot line provided another informal deterrent, which Jacobs memorably labeled “eyes on the street.”
In 1972, New York City planner Oscar Newman took this idea and dramatically expanded it, coining the term defensible space.
“Architecture is not just a matter of style, image and comfort,” Newman wrote in a book bearing the name of his then-radical theory. “Architecture can create encounter and prevent it. Certain kinds of space and spatial layout favor the clandestine activities of criminals.”
Comparing crime-plagued high-rises with smaller-scale public-housing developments of equal density and the identical social profile, Newman documented that the high-rises were far more dangerous. A simple but powerful factor explained why the residents of the high-rises were so besieged: the configuration of the physical environment.
With the towers set in vast open spaces, far back from the street, it was virtually impossible for residents to casually supervise activity on the sidewalk from within their apartments. The corridors, elevators and stairwells of the high-rises constituted a virtual maze in which criminals could hide and escape. Their drab architectural style instantly identified them as the home of the most vulnerable members of society. And because middle-class communities did not want low-income housing, the projects invariably were located amid downtrodden neighborhoods plagued by crime.
Defensible space recently has come under attack from those who believe it wrongly fixes the major share of the blame for problem projects upon design, distracting attention from the root cause-the clustering of the very poor in isolated areas of cities.
To be sure, changing that deep-seated problem must be the goal of public-housing officials. But doing so is likely to take years, even decades. In the short run, public-housing inhabitants confront the threat of violence every day.
CHA residents are about twice as likely as other Chicagoans to be victims of violent crime. So it should come as no surprise that defensible space strikes a resonant chord among public-housing residents-they want help now, not eventually.
Claiming their space
Help came two years ago to a crime-plagued, 10-building section of the King Kennedy development. Located on Cleveland’s battered Near East side, the project is operated by the Cuyahoga (Ohio) Metropolitan Housing Authority, which runs public housing in the Cleveland area.
Crime problems in the development’s three-story walkups were not limited to stairwells. As is typical in public housing, there was no fence to control access to the project. Criminals easily evaded police by entering one side of a stairwell, then slipping out the other and darting any which way. Police cars would sometimes roar through the development as they chased fleeing drug dealers.
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Today, after a federally funded $5 million redevelopment, residents leave lawn chairs and barbecue grills outside on porches overnight. There has been only one complaint of drug selling since the revamped area, called Renaissance Village, opened in spring 1993.
Much of the improvement undoubtedly is attributable to careful screening of tenants by the housing authority. In addition, the residents underwent home-management training and signed their own covenant, pledging that they would not use drugs.
But the residents affirm that their return to normalcy has been aided by physical alterations that make it difficult for criminals to prey on them.
One of the essential defensible-space concepts used by the designers, Cleveland architect Michael Benjamin and Cleveland landscape architect Jeffrey Kerr of Behnke Associates, divided Renaissance Village into a series of public, semi-public and private zones.
A 6-foot-high galvanized steel fence, placed around the perimeter, breaks this portion of the sprawling King Kennedy project into a village-scale enclave that enables residents to easily recognize each other and thus determine who belongs and who doesn’t. The fence also prevents criminals from escaping on foot in whatever direction they choose.
Like the waist-high picket fences that grace homes throughout America’s suburbs, the fence is as much an implied barrier as a real one. In the manner of suburban fences, it declares to outsiders that they are entering a semi-private zone, apart from the public realm of the sidewalk. To the people inside it, it means that they are in control.
“That fence says a lot of things,” said Pearlie LeSure, a nine-year resident of the complex. “This is my space. If you want to come in, you’ve got to conduct yourself in the right way.”
But defensible space entails more than erecting a fence. Ideally, it addreses all aspects of the physical environment, large-scale to small. It also strives to personalize people’s surroundings, encouraging a sense of ownership.
At Renaissance Village, the most obvious change of this type altered the 20-year-old, brown brick buildings, whose institutional identity was summed up in the way residents termed them “the browns” (just as high-rises at Cabrini-Green are known as “the whites” and “the reds”).
To enable a resident to point to his building with pride, Benjamin stained the upper stories of “the browns” one of three colors-blue-gray, beige or reddish brown. Half-circle classical decorations, which differ from building to building, add to the distinctiveness of each facade.
But most important was the elimination of the crime-prone central stairwells, a classic example of unsupervised interior space. The porches that replaced them endow Renaissance Village with the inherent dignity of classicism. And by giving residents a place to park folding chairs, they create the opportunity for “eyes on the street.” Tot lots and seating areas offer additional places to congregate, putting more “eyes” around the development.
There is no brilliantly innovative architecture here, but the social transformation is profound. Benjamin downplays the significance of the physical changes, characterizing them as a hedge against the bet that other factors-the screening, the household training, the no-drug covenant-would alter residents’ behavior.
“It’s like a scale,” he said. “The more you load up one side with social services, screening and other things, then the less work the architecture has to do. . . . You can`t deny (that public housing) is a different population. Not everyone is upbeat, wants to get a job. You have to protect against that.”