Oscar Newman’s (Sept 30, 1935 – April 14 2004) study of crime and highrise environments – and how design could intervene – became greatly influential, not only in the US or even in the UK, but around the world and in many different kinds of urban settings through the concept of ‘defensible space’. That widely circulated ‘theory’ of urban living was generated by a situated science – one conducted in the ‘laboratory’ of the highrise projects of New York City. A close reading of Newman’s work reveals that it is not simply that the New York highrise projects exhibited pathologies. There were specific levels of accounting for and recording of evidentiary ‘pathological’ events (in the form of housing and police records) which allowed his science to be constructed. These records established an important precondition for the influential science of highrise living that Newman produced.

Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design was published by The Macmillan Company, New York in 1972 [image_6]. When it was first published Newman could already be claimed as ‘one of the country’s finest and most innovative architects and urban planners’ (from the Defensible Space dust jacket [image_7]). At that time Newman was the Director of the Institute of Planning and Housing at New York University where he was also Associate Professor of City Planning. He also worked as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the New York City Housing Authority, and various other housing development agencies. [17] The work for Defensible Space was conducted through a specific project that went under the title ‘Security Design of Urban Residential Areas’ which was an on-going study on the ‘effects of the physical layout of residential environments on criminal vulnerability of inhabitants’ [18] or, put slightly differently, ‘the forms of our residential areas and how they contribute to our victimization by criminals’. That project emerged out of a specific set of conditions, which Newman very usefully charts in some detail in the opening pages of the book. Newman’s genealogy for the work points to the evident facts that certain building types were ‘having a disastrous effect on their occupants’ [19], such that by 1968 the Federal Housing Act specified guidelines that families with children no longer be located in highrises [20]. Foremost amongst this evidence was the symptom of increasing crime rates in North American cities and the subsequent Federal funding, under the auspices of the Safe Street Act 1968, of efforts to supplement existing deterrence and prevention measures. So a key feature of the logic of Newman’s science is this: crime was a symptom of an urban pathology that gave him an opportunity to investigate the determining relationship between environment and human behaviour. As he puts it, increasing crime rates offered him the ‘opportunity to study the phenomenon in detail and to isolate its working ingredients’ [21].

This work proceeded from a base in the academy and specifically the Institute of Planning and Housing at New York University, as stated, but it had a wide range of intellectual, funding and policy allies. Funding and ‘professional guidance’ came initially from the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice from the US Department of Justice, through their Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation branch. As the work of the project required physical interventions in actual housing developments, it had to proceed with the financial and institutional support of the relevant Housing Authorities, in this case primarily the NYCHA. Newman’s team was able to garner some (proportion unknown) of the Authority’s ‘Modernization Budget’ in an exercise that combined ‘modernization’ interventions with ‘experimental’ intervention [22]. The project also depended upon the cooperation of, and data collected by, the New York Housing Authority’s own police force. Finally, a specific sub-project of experimentation with electronic surveillance and security devises of various kinds (‘our electronics proposal’) was seeded by funding from the Office of the Mayor of New York and then funded by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, via the New York State Office of Planning Services, Division of Criminal Justice. Through this network of support and affiliation Newman was able to assemble a team that included architects and urban designers, planners, three graduate students, a social psychologist and environmentalist, a computer programmer and an Administrative  Assistant, who by Newman’s own admission, had a ‘gruelling …and thankless role’.[23] This impressive list of funding bodies, institutional allies and the expert team it supported, are a testament to the way in which this research was being endorsed even before its findings were presented.

This level of belief and investment in this project’s claims, objectives and science is something in need of further investigation. The research was grounded in a reforming and interventionist ethos with a very clear pragmatic objective: to make urban life better by establishing the physical and social conditions that would mitigate against criminal acts against people and property. The front cover of the original hardback edition of Defensible Space is a no-nonsense affair that features a number of claims:  ‘An alternative to the fortress apartment’;  ‘An investigation of how architecture can affect the attitudes and actions of tenants’;  ‘A proposal to design crime-free urban housing’. From this bullet-point set of claims it is immediately clear that crime, then a city-wide worry, was the main ‘problem’ to be resolved. But the cover also makes clear that this is not simply diagnostic work, it is also interventionist work that envisages and offers a template for an ‘alternative’: ‘THIS BOOK IS ABOUT AN ALTERNATIVE’ the cover claims in bold capital letters underneath the image of Pruitt-Igoe being demolished. This book, the dust jacket text claims, is ‘about a means for restructuring the residential environment of our cities so they can again become livable [sic] and controlled, controlled not by police but by a community of people sharing a common terrain’. The book heralds a project that was envisaged then as returning the streets of the city to all, as a democratic and empowering process.

Perhaps unsurprisingly this ambitious reforming project needed ‘a rather wide readership’ [24]. The cover notes for the book claim that the book is ‘for all who seek a solution to the problem of rising crime’. Specific and stated readership targets include ‘architects, urban planners, community developers and students of these fields’ (cover comments) but also ‘housing developers’ and ‘police’ [25]. It appears from statements made in the forward to the volume that as ‘the significance of finding became more apparent’ Newman decided that ‘the manuscript should be reworked so as to make it more universally available’. For an academic scholar this decision about genre was not straightforward and Newman makes specific reference to his strategy of producing a volume that did not reduce its ‘academic’ and ‘professional’ content, but kept ‘technical terms to a minimum’ [26]. Over time, the book has had a mixed reception. At first his idea of the 'architectural prevention' of crime was, by his own admission, met sceptically and considered naïve by housing managers and tenants. It nonetheless became a planning best seller and nowadays the fact that the phrase 'defensible space' (whether it originally be his or not) is common parlance for many is a testament to the impact of his work.

Newman’s study claims to be about a range of housing types:  ‘high-, medium-, and low-density housing’. Indeed this range of housing type was central to the scientific claims of the study. As the dust jacket claimed: ‘To determine the extent to which architecture can determine crime rates, Newman compared communities in which the inhabitants’ social characteristics were constant, and only the building forms varied.’ But while Newman’s scientific methodology needed to be open to varied housing types and localities in order to secure its scientific status, there is no doubt that the real object of scrutiny was one specific housing type: the high-density highrise. That this particular housing type and urban environment was implicated in specific ways in the moral imagination of Newman’s science can be stated no more clearly than by the illustration on the back of the dust jacket. Here we see one of the early uses of a now emblematic image: the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe by the city authorities of St Louis, here cited as the ‘final remedy’ to the problem at hand [image_8].

In the context of a quantitative thrall in the social sciences, such methodological claims greatly enhance the power of this work, not least by producing a more stable and verifiable relationship to truth. Furthermore, the dependence upon scientific method consolidated New York's status as the central case study of this work. There were characteristics of New York that allowed the analysis of conditions there to be 'most comprehensive and detailed' [27]. Firstly, was the sheer number of public housing projects, some 19% of the nation's public housing stock. Secondly, in the span of 30 years of housing provision by the NYCHA that organisation had built a wide range of housing types such that their stock offered a full sample of housing types (and including a 30 storey building). Thirdly, this stock was spread across a range of inner and out city localities. And being able to examine similar housing types in different locations allowed Newman to claim that he was 'controlling' for location. Similarly, confining the systematic aspect of his study to the socially similar population of New York's housing projects allowed him to claim to have controlled for socio-economic variables. In this way, Newman's scientific claims for his study and the case study of New York are co-constructed.

Central to this relationship between science and setting was the NYCHA’s extensive records on tenants, including what Newman refers to as the 'history of family pathology' [28]. The NYCHA’s ability to hold such records in turn relied upon the fact that it had its own police force which filed reports on all criminal and vandal activity. These records were, in Newman's own words, '[t]he most detailed of their kind kept anywhere' [29]. Not only did this data include details of the 'nature of crime and complainant', but also (and most importantly), it could 'pinpoint the exact place of occurrence within the project or its surrounding area'. Through this type of reportage and data collection it was possible to determine 'exactly where the most dangerous areas of a building are, as well as to compare crime rates in different building types and project layouts' [30]. This level of precision in data collection procedures meant Newman's team could simply tap into existing sources (and tweak data collection formats if needed) in order 'to consider the function of every physical variable and its effects on crime'. In short, New York's public housing projects provided what Newman himself described as 'incomparable laboratory for measuring the effects of different housing environments on crime and vandalism' [31].

For Newman the highrises were the epitome of the anonymous and alienating modern city. These environments were doubly implicated in the crime problem: they were not only the 'spawning grounds of criminal behaviour' [32], they were also 'the most cogent ally the criminal has in his victimization of society' [33]. It was not only the criminal and the victim whose experiences were shaped by highrises; the ability of the police to intervene was interfered with by the highrise form. In the 'labyrinthine profusion of corridors, fire stairs, and exists' police often reported difficulty in 'locating apartments, to say nothing of pursuing criminals'. Furthermore, police officers who were 'polite, conscientious civil servants' in one low-rise context became, across the road in a neighbouring highrise, ' dictatorial, arbitrary, and unrespecting of the tenants’ rights and needs' [34]. For Newman, then, it was 'the apartment tower itself, however, that [was] the real and final villain of the piece.' [35].  And his work set about showing the precise relationship between increased height and increased crime rates. That investigation began, as he notes, with the 'basic hypothesis that a positive correlation exists between the two; that as a building height increases, so does crime.' [36].