Can the physical layout of a place like a subway platform or a public housing project encourage and sustain muggings and break-ins? That’s the argument Malcolm Gladwell makes in his best seller, The Tipping Point, a book about what triggers social epidemics, including crime. According to Gladwell, a criminal “is actually someone acutely sensitive to his environment, who is alert to all kinds of cues, and who is prompted to commit crimes based on his perception of the world around him.”
It seems that the idea that design could encourage or discourage crime was lost on the folks who designed the mega public housing projects that were built in the 1960s and 1970s. “They were built in shoddy barracks and imposing towers, neither of which gave residents any control over the safety of their communal outdoor spaces. They were, in a sense, dangerous by design (although no one thought of it that way at time),” Emily Badger wrote in the Atlantic Cities.
The hard lessons of the 60s and 70s were reflected in new federal policies, such as Hope VI, which provided money for demolishing the worst public housing projects and replacing them with “mixed-income communities on shorter blocks with less institutional town homes and designing streets, lawns, and porches that people would want to cherish and protect,” Badger wrote.
Is this approach working? Urban Institute researchers found evidence that it does, and not just in the project, but the surrounding neighborhood. The researchers “raise intriguing questions about exactly how a community changes when its build environment does.” According to Gladwell, “environmental tipping points are things that we can change: we can fix broken windows and clean up graffiti and change the signals that invite crime in the first place.”
