The science of Oscar Newman had a very special impact on the scholarship of a geographer at King’s College London – Alice Coleman. Coleman readily adopted Newman’s ideas in her own scholarship on the problems of city living. This is evident in Coleman’s most popularly influential and academically controversial book: Utopia on Trial: Visions and Reality in Planned Housing [image_9]. This book was published in 1985, some 15 years after Newman and, not incidentally, in the middle years of Thatcher's Britain.

Coleman wrote Utopia on Trial in conjunction with a small group of scholars, whom she had assembled under the label of the Design Disadvantagement Team, based in the Land Use Research Unit of King’s College, University of London.[37] The book reports on the substantive findings of what she describes as a 'large and intensive research investigation', involving a team of up to 6 people working for over 5 years and supported by the funding input of the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust, including the 'active' and  ‘constructive’ interest of its then Director, Robin Guthrie [38].

This was a book that combined a populist tone with claims to rigorous science. The populist tone of the book is most evident in its chapter headings, which extends the metaphor of the ‘trial’ contained in the title by using headings such as ‘Utopia Accused’,  ‘The Evidence’, ‘The Suspects’, ‘Case for the Prosecution’ and ‘Cross examination’, ‘Corrective Measures’ and ‘Summing-up’. Despite this rhetorical style, Coleman's work, like that of Newman's, considered a claim to scientific status essential. Her key research question was this: 'What is wrong with modern housing estates?'. Her research aimed to settle the matter of what the cause of the malady was. 'Blame is cast in all directions - on planners, on architects, developers, residents, children, cleaners, caretakers, the police, and other scapegoats', she says, 'but these cross-currents can flourish only because there has been not real factual evidence to sift out the true from the false' [39]. Coleman goes on: 'Without a firm foundation of truth it is all too possible that policies for improvement may be wrong, and that expensive rehabilitation schemes may prove ineffective and a waste of money.' The Land Use Research Unit at King's had, as Coleman specified in Utopia on Trial, 'a long tradition of establishing previously unknown facts about the British environment'. It had pursued this role, Coleman clarified, through a commitment to the 'principle' that 'a large comprehensive survey will yield more accurate and reliable information than small samples' [40]. Building on that tradition, when Coleman's team began to consider the problem of housing they 'naturally thought in terms of detailed mapping on a scale that would generally be considered daunting' [41]. The scale of the study was such that, by Coleman's own admission, 'many people have difficulty in believing what they hear'. The survey covered over 4,000 blocks of flats, containing 106, 520 dwellings accommodating about a quarter of a million people, and spread across two London boroughs - Southwark and Tower Hamlets. In addition, some 4172 houses and an 'out-of-town estate' were 'thrown in for good measure'.

The preface of Utopia on Trial makes explicit mention of the influence of  Oscar Newman, who was the ‘original inspiration’ and ‘gave valuable advice’.[42] Her study design tracked closely that of Newman's. What she studied 'on this enormous scale' was the 'most glaring difference between modern problem estates and the ordinary unplanned housing of the past: design and layout' [43]. She goes on:
'These features have been mapped in detail and rigorously tested to see which of them are associated with various lapses in civil behaviour: litter-dropping, graffiti-scrawling, vandalism, pollution by excrement, and family breakdown leading to children being placed in care.’
 In framing her project, Coleman talks specifically of predecessors: she cites Jane Jacobs, but also in the British context Pearl Jephcott's early survey of highrise living in Glasgow, and of course, Oscar Newman, whose work she praises as 'the most scientific research to date' and ‘brilliant’ [44]. The 'science' of Newman’s research attracted specific praise: 'To avoid any risk of bias in selecting his evidence, he opted to study all the public housing projects (council estates) in New York', a number that happened to be quite close to the 4000 block sample that Coleman adopted in her London work. The second thing that Coleman liked and appropriated from Newman's work, was 'the idea of a specific test measure', based on levels of crime and vandalism, 'to serve as an index of the goodness or badness of each block' [45]. Coleman interpreted Newman's project as being a study of which design features attracted the most crime or vandalism, and lauded his decision to determine this 'precisely' through the use of 'the statistical method of correlation'. She concludes her case about Newman's method thus: 'While Jane Jacobs' work had been mainly descriptive, Newman's was also quantitative, which gave added value to his evidence' [46].

That Coleman’s book had a rhetorical framing that appealed to a wider audience greatly compromised the academic credibility of her work. As Murie (1997 31-32) [47] reflects: ‘Alice Coleman’s work on the design of estates is not highly regarded in the academic community. It offers an under-contextualized and simplistic view of the impact of design on council estates’. Her Utopia on Trial was, by our early cursory investigations, given scathing reviews by contemporary geographers and urbanists, not least because of its simplistic commitment to an environmental determinism. Much of her on-going research on multi-storey housing was sponsored by the Thatcher government and became valuable evidence for the process of privatising public housing stock.