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The Economy of Fear: Oscar NewmanLaunches Crime Prevention throughUrban Design (1969–197x)Joy KnoblauchPublished online: 02 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Joy Knoblauch (2014) The Economy of Fear: Oscar Newman Launches CrimePrevention through Urban Design (1969–197x), Architectural Theory Review, 19:3, 336-354, DOI:10.1080/13264826.2014.1036492

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JOY KNOBLAUCH

THE ECONOMYOF FEAR: Oscar NewmanLaunches Crime Prevention through UrbanDesign (1969–197x)

The architecture of fear has become more

complex, and more subtle, as it has adapted

to the contradictions of privacy and publicity

in American urbanism in the late twentieth

century. In response to a growing fear of

urban violence in the late 1960s, architect

Oscar Newman argued that a network of

private domains would prevent crime and

preserve a way of urban life that he and others

felt was under attack. In his book, Defensible

Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design,

the architect presented a carefully crafted

theory of human territoriality and natural

surveillance, which was received as common

sense because of its resonance with prevailing

public opinion.

Architectural Theory Review, 2014Vol. 19, No. 3, 336–354, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2014.1036492

Q 2015 Taylor & Francis

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Introduction

The fear of violence can have as much influence

on the designed environment as violence itself

does. And yet, the bunkers, bollards, and

checkpoints that have become the physical

manifestation of fear over the last hundred

years also pose a rhetorical problem. These

forms contradict the idea of an open society

and their presentation to the public must be

one of “calibrated superficiality”, carefully

constructed, but seemingly simple.1 Such

forms of security must be packaged to fit

within pre-existing beliefs held by the public so

that the solutions appear as common sense.

When the architecture of the bunker is too

obvious, too clumsy, or too expensive, it starts

to seem like a restraint, rather than a defence.

Building literal bunkers may be particularly

unpalatable in housing because some residents

rightfully feel that it is more of a restraint on

their freedoms than a guarantee of safety. For

architects, the presence of such public opinions

has given rise to an opportunity to use new

discursive skills to massage architectural forms

to engage a wider audience. Designing the

presentation of an idea through a book, journal,

or, more recently, in comic books, architects

from Le Corbusier to Bjarke Ingels have

employed the art of public relations as an

integral part of their work.

The theory of defensible space formulated by

architect Oscar Newman in 1969 was a

masterful response to the public and govern-

ment audiences of his time. His “alternative to

the fortress apartment” was essentially a soft

bunker, a network of defensible territories,

rather than hard walls and locks. The idea was

received as a kind of common sense, and the

book offered a compromise that allowed for

the construction of security without the

impression of restraint. But the seemingly

common sense idea that humans are naturally

territorial has more complex roots in the idea

of private property, post-colonial violence, and

Cold War concerns about human aggression.

In the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists

published high-profile research on the violence

of totalitarian authority, the protests in cities like

Newark and Detroit, and the assassinations of

public figures like President John F. Kennedy in

1963 and Martin Luther King Junior in 1968.

Publications such as Theodor Adorno et al.’s

The Authoritarian Personality (1950) or the later

Kerner Commission report on the Causes of

Civil Disobedience sought to explain the

characteristics that led to violence and disorder.

Then as now, psychological and anthropological

explanations that rely on innate or “natural”

causes for human behaviour are slippery, for it

is hard to argue with the “human sciences” of

biology and anthropology. And yet, when such

ideas lead to seemingly self-evident theories of

form that rely on the idea of a human habitat,

the need to critique these theories of form is

even greater (Figure 1).

The Lessons of a Murder

Defensible Space was launched in a climate of

fear exacerbated by tales of urban violence,

one of the most notable being the murder of

Kitty Genovese. The story of Genovese’s death

begins with the young woman coming home

from her job at a bar, at around 3 a.m. on 13

March 1964. As she approached her home,

Genovese was attacked; the crime took place

not in a deserted alley, but close to the large

apartment building where she lived. The young

woman’s screams brought 38 witnesses to their

windows over the course of the half-hour

incident. Genovese managed to evade her

attacker only to be caught again, and again, and

ultimately killed. Readers of The New York Times

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were told that despite the 38 pairs of eyes on

the street and the duration of the attack, not a

single witness called the police until after the

victim was dead.2 The author of the article,

Martin Gansberg, relayed the homicide detec-

tive’s assessment of the crime as a case where

“good people” did nothing to help a neighbour,

echoing the apocryphal Edmund Burke quote:

Figure 1. Front cover of dust jacket, Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design(New York: Macmillan, 1972). Courtesy of MacMillan Publishers.

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“The only thing necessary for the triumph of

evil is for good people to do nothing”. But

rather than encouraging Americans to inter-

vene and take cries on the street seriously, the

story emphasised the moral that Americans

should not make Genovese’s mistake and rely

on their neighbours for help. As such, it joined a

larger media portrayal of crime that encour-

aged people to be fearful even on the streets

near their homes. The simplified version of the

story has since been challenged, not least by

the court records which indicate that some

neighbours did shout at the attacker and one

succeeded in driving him off. Despite these

revisions, it is the simple story of a woman

murdered while her neighbours did nothing

that has become famous.

Eight years later, another death was made into

a high-profile sign of the dire condition of

American cities. This time, the architecture was

to blame, when Pruitt Igoe, hopeful public

housing project turned icon of the death of

modern architecture, was demolished in 1972

in St. Louis. Defensible Space, Crime Prevention

through Urban Design was published a few

months later, just in time for vivid images of the

implosion to appear on the dust jacket with the

caption: “The final remedy found by the city of

St. Louis for part of its public housing

problem”.3 Newman proposed an alternative

to these deaths, a way to save cities, modern

architecture, and the human population of

cities. The book was a success: it sold well, it

was applauded for overturning all existing

theories, and Newman’s ideas remain the basis

for an ongoing industry of Crime Prevention

Through Environmental Design (CPTED)

(Figure 2).

And yet, Genovese was not actually murdered

while her neighbours did nothing, Pruitt Igoe

was not demolished because high-rises are

inherently unsafe, and Newman’s revolutionary

ideas came ten years after Jane Jacobs had

already made her own very similar argument

about safety, through her theory of eyes on the

street. What explains the prominence of all the

above facts, if none of them are exactly true?

More than just an attempt to right history,

which has already been done in these cases,

what follows is a demystification of the

mechanism by which defensible space became

popular and of the role of fear of crime in

motivating changes to housing form.4 For,

amidst a climate of tightening resources, new

policing technology, and new theories of human

aggression, housing authorities picked up

Newman’s idea, the urban public picked up

his book, and the discipline of architecture,

disgusted and exhausted, began to turn its back

on the social project of providing decent

housing that had been central to so many of the

strands of the modern movement, from the

work of Minoru Yamasaki to Alison and Peter

Smithson and Catherine Bauer to Le Corbusier.

The economy of fear occupied both a literal

and a discursive environment. On the one

hand, the existing designed environment of

public housing was a source of fear, a site onto

which fears were projected, and a site of

intervention in an attempt to solve the problem

of crime. At the same time, the discursive

environment of scarcity, declining funding for

social programs, urban migration, racial ten-

sions, and government faith in science and data

provided the medium in which CPTED gained

such popularity. Studying defensible space yields

insights into the complex intertwining of the

literal and discursive environment, or between

form and idea. The literal deterioration of

housing, graffiti, vandalism, and lack of main-

tenance spurred fear. And the discourse

surrounding American fear of crime did

produce real spaces aligned with Newman’s

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principles—namely, low-rise, high-density hous-

ing with separate entries and proprietary pieces

of the ground to replace mid-century public

housing. The towers in the park with shared

resources and shared spaces were replaced

with an aggregate of semi-private territories.

Figure 2. Back cover of dust jacket, Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design(New York: Macmillan, 1972). Courtesy of Macmillan Publishers.

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Fear and Human Territoriality

Oscar Newman was an architect and planner, a

consultant for the Department of Housing and

Urban Development as well as the New York

City Housing Authority (NYCHA). He was an

entrepreneur and a writer who published

Defensible Space as a popular account of

architecture’s ability to “create encounter” and

foster a good society. Published by Macmillan in

hardcover in 1972, then in paperback in 1973,

the book was widely reviewed in the popular

media. The paperback boasted a laudatory

quote from Time magazine on its cover as well

as praise from the San Francisco Examiner, the

Sacramento Bee, the Village Voice, the New York

Times Book Review, and Forum, as well as an

endorsement from Ada Louise Huxtable, the

New York Times architecture critic, who called

the book “a supremely significant study”.

Defensible Space was marketed as a response

to fear of urban crime. The front flap of the

original dust jacket asked, “When louder

alarms, increased police surveillance, and

stronger locks fail to prevent crime, where do

residents turn?” Newman offered a solution

that could be implemented by housing

authorities, architects, and planners to address

the crises of rapidly changing cities, particularly

the dire conditions in the high-rise housing built

after World War II, housing which the dust

jacket called “a panicky response . . . They were

designed for population, not protection; and

they have become ‘containers for the victimi-

zation of their inhabitants’”.5 This artificial

environment was considered to be so bad that

it threatened the continued existence of a

healthy urban society, particularly so in the case

of children. Newman opened the book with

the declaration that the 1968 Federal Housing

Act had recommended that families with

children should only be housed in high-rise

buildings when there was no other option.

Police were themselves afraid to enter many

high-rises, and murders like Genovese’s

shocked even veteran investigators. The fabric

of society was coming apart and the only

answer was to form enclaves and retreat.

Newman’s theory would allow for the

preservation of a way of urban life that was

very much under threat, or so readers were

told. Defensible space was no small thing; if

implemented, readers were told it might be the

“last stand of the urban man committed to an

open society”.6

Rather than life in artificial containers, Newman

advocated design for “natural surveillance”

and tapped into a newly popular theory of

territoriality. He was particularly intrigued by

Robert Ardrey, an anthropologist and play-

wright, whose account of innate animal and

human aggression joined Konrad Lorenz’s On

Aggression (1966) and Desmond Morris’ The

Naked Ape (1967).7 Earlier, Raymond Dart had

argued that the evolution of large brains came

after tool use among early humans, displacing

the idea that large brains were a requirement

for tool use. Or, as Ardrey’s artful language

declared: it was not the case that man had

fathered the weapon, but “the weapon, instead,

had fathered man”.8 The theory suggested that

early humans had picked up and then wielded

objects out of a need to defend themselves,

and the skills learned in manipulating those

weapons had led to larger brains. The idea is

illustrated in the famous scene around the

monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001:

A Space Odyssey. Released in 1968, just as

Newman started his research, the film depicts

primates attacking each other, illustrating the

“killer ape” theory, which argued that human

violence and technology are inextricably

intertwined. The theory that humans were

inherently violent and warlike was meaningful in

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an age dominated by fear of nuclear apocalypse

and crime in the streets. The idea was

provocative: that try as one might, one’s innate

nature would always govern. Or, “The dog

barking at you from behind his master’s fence

acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of

his master when the fence was built”.9 When

compared with the full title of Ardrey’s book (A

Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of

Property and Nations), it’s clear that such

theories were being used to naturalise the

concept of private property in the face of Cold

War communism as well as to explain

aggression, and, in Newman’s hands, to make

the link between cities and crime.

Such arguments intentionally blur the lines

between human and animal, borrowing from

the zoological for the sociological. Ardrey, for

one, traced the origin of his idea to zoological

research on territoriality in the 1920s and

1930s, a time when thinkers and leaders were

intrigued by the possibility of a communal

society that would do away with property

entirely. But, he explained, even though they

wanted to get rid of property, these thinkers

had to admit that ownership of property was

as basic as the sex drive, if not stronger.

He claimed that the territory drive had not

been discovered sooner because most of the

research on behaviour had been performed on

animals in zoos and laboratories. In the zoo or

laboratory setting, the animals had ample food

and little ability to establish turf. Ardrey

explained that the revolution in thinking about

the sex drive occurred when American

psychologist C. R. Carpenter travelled to

Panama to study howling monkeys in 1934.

The psychologist returned home to his “low-

flung modern house” with tales of easy

sexuality and violently defended territory in

the Panamanian jungle.10 Carpenter’s account

“demolished” Sigmund Freud’s theory of the

sex drive as only applicable in situations of

ample food and restricted space, such as zoos.

In captivity, where the animals had enough food

and not much land to defend, the sex drive

governed.11 While humans in cities may be

more like animals in the zoo than in the wild

(having little space and ample food), Ardrey

argued that they were like animals in the wild in

being more motivated by turf than by sex.

In addition to using research in animal

behaviour, his ideas were informed by his

experiences in post-colonial Africa, where he

witnessed upheavals and political unrest that he

felt were rooted in similar aggressions and

drives. Historian Marianna Torgovnick has

argued that such confusion of animal and

human allowed authors like Ardrey to draw on

their own image of the primitive to answer the

problems of modern society, equating animal

behaviour with non-Western societies and

denying the coeval status of the non-

Western.12

Following Ardrey, Newman never forced his

readers to make the conceptual leaps between

animal and human explicit and, instead, relied

on his audience’s willingness to make the leap

from animal territoriality through “primitive”

universals to the residents of public housing.13

On the first page of Defensible Space, Newman

wrote, “We have become strangers sharing the

largest collective habitats in human history”.14

The claim was a simple, clear declaration of his

opinion that cities are artificial. But it was also a

formulation that, washed of any specific idea of

who “we” are, allowed a growing silent majority

to make the leap untroubled by any explicit

racial implications. Perhaps, because he was

talking about public housing, he removed the

animal or anthropological examples and

replaced them with the language of common

sense. He simply opened the chapter on terri-

toriality with a common—if misleading—use of

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“history” as an indication of universal, innate

qualities. He wrote: “Historically the intactness

of the family living unit and the territorial zone

of the cluster of family units has always been

given architectural expression”.15

Newman’s theory of defensible space also

reflected the earlier anthropological interests

of the Team 10 group, beginning in the 1950s as

they pursued a more authentic grounding for

architecture. In the post-war, post-colonial era,

their search often took the European and

American architects outside of the

modernised West, seeking anthropological

research on so-called “primitive” societies. Van

Eyck was entranced by the mud villages built by

the Dogon in Africa, and a Native American

pueblo found its way into his Otterlo Circles as

the illustration of the “vernacular of the heart”.16

Similarly, Alison and Peter Smithson pursued an

interest in the Sea Dayak longhouses—

particularly the multipurpose space of the

longhouse porch—as they designed the

elevated corridors for the Golden Lane

Competition in 1952.17 The Smithsons were

intrigued by the anthropological lens that was

turned on the British working class—and the

Sea Dayaks—by Tom Harrisson, a polymath

anthropologist with a popular series of BBC

television programs on remote locations such

as Borneo. The Smithsons’ work was informed

by photographs by Nigel Henderson and

discussions with his wife, Judith Stephen,

another anthropologist.18 Photographs of

African dwellings were common in the pages

of the journal, Forum, and Newman used one

such photograph taken by Aldo Van Eyck to

illustrate his theory of the threshold. Georges

Candilis, Alexis Josic, and Shadrach Woods

produced a diagram, appearing in the 1959

Otterlo volume edited by Newman, which

assembled four typologies of habitation: an

African village, an igloo, a pueblo, and a modern

structure similar to the United Nations building.

The accompanying text drove the point home:

“En Afrique, au Pole Nord, a New York ou en

France, la notion: Habiter se decompose

toujours en deux fonctions bases: de plus, les

services sont le memes [sic] partout et

toujours: element determines [sic]”.19 The

message was that in studying people untainted

by the modern world, architects were able to

tap into the basic nature of humanity and its

housing needs. The proposition was as much

about the problems facing the white Europeans

and Americans as it was about the Africans and

others. In Newman’s work, the direct refer-

ences to African and other non-white peoples

were left out of the text. Even so, his work

would have recalled the popular anthropolo-

gical theory of human territoriality.

Newman’s invocation of the architectural idea of

habitat and the popular idea of human

aggression was a bold one. He argued that by

reinforcing this natural tendency, architecture

could solve the problems of housing and cities,

and foster an open society through form. Deftly

avoiding an authoritarian tone, he framed

“defensible space” as simply removing the

artificial problems of communal spaces in cities.

He would be simply allowing a natural

phenomenon of human territoriality to resur-

face and solve the crime problem through self-

policing. Thus, “defensible space” combined

visual surveillance with territory, operating in

response to the post-Genovese era with its faith

in the so-called bystander effect. Triggered by the

media presentation of the 38 neighbours who

did not intervene, the bystander effect predicts

that when a given individual feels that he or she is

responsible, he or she will act. In what remains

one of the landmark findings of social psychol-

ogy, the recommendation is to avoid the dangers

of an undifferentiated crowd where no one feels

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compelled to act.20 With clearly defined

territories, each resident would be empowered

beyond simply having “eyes on the street”.

Common Sense

In Newman’s book, the power of human

territoriality was presented as common sense.

His argumentation was simple, using “A Tale of

Two Projects” to compare a good case and a

dangerous one: the low rise at Brownsville and

the high rise at Van Dyke. He used photographs

of the projects, showing graffiti as an index of

violence, in contrast to baby carriages indicating

that the buildings were safe even for children.

He also used data, gathered from the New York

City Housing Authority, allowing him and his

reviewers to claim that he had proof that high-

rise buildings with a certain type of visually

ambiguous circulation caused more crime.

Experts critiqued his analysis, but the popular

reception of the “proof ” in this data remained.21

The book applauded “current practitioners of

defensible space”, including some notable recent

work by eminent architects, though, of course,

the book had only recently begun circulating the

ideas. Examples included work by Lawrence

Halprin and I. M. Pei, as well as the firms, Davis

and Brody and Chloethiel Woodard Smith;

principals of the latter two were so esteemed as

to have been on the 1968National Commission

on Urban Problems appointed by President

Lyndon Johnson and chaired by Senator Paul

Douglas. These architectural examples were

intended to illustrate what could be built under

the difficult climate of existing fire codes, scarcity

of funding, and high interest rates.

Newman proposed a powerful social theory,

exemplified in the paradigmatic drawings of

defensible space that use the soft lines of a

pencil to trace groupings of small, closed circles.

In one drawing, eight circles are nested inside a

larger boundary with their backs to the heavier

boundary. In another, these cells aggregate into

a tree-like structure of private, semi-private,

semi-public, and public space (Figure 3). The

small spaces maintain their independence from

each other and their detachment from the

building envelope. The small circles represent

individual housing units along with the grounds

or stoops that belong to each unit, containing

the private space of family life. The social model

of an aggregate of cells has been theorised as a

multitude, and its urban form analysed by Peter

Sloterdijk as a foam city. The foam city replaces

the city of the masses with partition walls that

act as an “interautistic minimum”.22 These cells

maintain their autonomy and their difference,

only loosely connected through shared owner-

ship of a wall. In Newman’s world, clear

partitions would produce a safe society.

The diagram provided a distilled version of his

spatial theory that was quick and accessible to

his audience of administrators and city

residents as well as designers. Tilted on the

45 degree angle, the drawing is easier to read

for those unfamiliar with reading plans. Such

diagrams contributed to the common-sense,

self-evident quality of the book, transforming

behavioural and sociological theories into the

visible realm in a way that resonated with a

growing middle class. For designers, such

diagrams were appealing as abstractions that

distilled social science into a form that they

could clothe with materials and dimensions of

their choosing, while maintaining the psycho-

logical mechanism of territoriality. Foreground-

ing the spatial diagram also masked the agency

of the housing authority, police, or federal

granting agency who sought to reduce urban

crime and pacify a population truly caught living

in these containers. As with Jeremy Bentham’s

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aim for the panopticon, the environment itself

was the means to produce peaceful, productive

behaviour, avoiding the costs, abuses, and

rebellions that come with overt policing.

The Research Economy

Newman’s background prepared him to craft a

careful presentation of his ideas that would

resonate with his many audiences, from

architects to housing authority officials, to

members of the urban public. He was well

acquainted with the intellectual and practical

problems of architecture and urban design in

the post-war period. At times, he came into

direct contact with some of its most influential

ideas first hand (Figure 4).

Newman was born in Montreal to a union

organiser father and a mother whose family

had emigrated from Russia to Quebec in

1840. He began his studies at McGill

University in sociology, but soon lost interest

and dropped out to work on a farm in New

Jersey.23 He eventually returned to McGill and

graduated from the six-year architecture

program with honours in 1959, and then

went to Europe on a travel scholarship. After

his funds were spent, he sought work with

Team 10 member Jaap Bakema and his firm,

Van den Broek and Bakema, where he was

given the task of chronicling the recent 1959

conference of the Congres International

d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in Otterlo.24

Producing an account of the conference

brought Newman into close contact with

Van Eyck’s anthropological viewpoint and the

Smithsons’ attempts to remake Le Corbusier’s

“streets in the air”.

Returning from the Netherlands, Newman

worked with Thomas Vreeland, and the pair

earned some recognition for their work on a

190-acre “student city” in Quebec as well as a

New Jersey project that was selected for

Figure 3. Diagram of territory, produced with the help of an architecture graduate student named Jerry Rosenfeld,Newman, Defensible Space, 9. Courtesy of Kopper Newman.

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publication in the Robert A. M. Stern-edited,

40 Under 40: An Exhibition of Young Talent in

Architecture.25 After his work with Vreeland,

Newman taught in St. Louis at Washington

University, where he conducted his own

architectural research, leading an Urban

Renewal Design Center. Between 1966 and

1967, he came into contact with Kevin Lynch,

the founder of cognitive mapping, whom he

thanks for “useful early direction and useful

criticism” in his work on a study of the

Lawndale area of Chicago between 1966 and

Figure 5. Mock-up for a drawing in Newman, Defensible Space, 184, no date. Courtesy of Kopper Newman.

Figure 4. Oscar Newman (no date). Photograph courtesy of Kopper Newman.

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1967.26 Moreover, in the early 1970s, he

participated in debates at the Institute for

Architecture and Urban Studies, led by Peter

Eisenman.27

Added to his experience with the dominant

debates in architecture, Newman’s research

was subtly shaped by the “research economy”

of the 1970s. At this time, funding sources

shifted from large federal programs to promote

the health, education, and welfare of the

population to so-called franchise-state efforts

to prevent crime, punish offenders, and

manage the population through incentive

structures. As explained by Alan Wolfe, the

late-twentieth century American government

came to outsource more public functions to

private agencies and to rely on independent

expert consultants, resulting in what he called a

franchise state.28 Where the calls for research

in the early 1960s were founded in the belief

that Americans could use their “pragmatic

genius” to solve any problem they put their

energy into, that optimism and energy were on

the decline by 1968–1969, when Newman

began the defensible space research.29 By the

end of President Johnson’s term, the funding for

social programs was largely diverted to the war

in Vietnam, bringing to an end Kennedy’s and

Johnson’s plans to bring the world-renowned

American affluence to all of its citizens. The

Great Society ideal of improving life for all

Americans gave way to a division among

welfare programs, with social insurance pro-

grams for some groups—such as Social

Security for the elderly—split off from the

increasingly unpopular Aid to Families with

Dependent Children, which served low-

income women and children, often African-

American. The discourse of poverty shifted to

more and more quantitative research, shying

away from the conflicts over the “culture of

poverty” raised by the 1965 Moynihan Report,

but also in service of a government with an

increasing appetite for data about poverty

programs.30

Between 1960 and 1973, fear of crime played

an increasing role in American politics. Crime

rates were up; some of the rise was real,

while some was imagined. Demographically,

there was an increase in the proportion of the

population between the ages of 15 and 24,

which may have contributed to a particular

increase in crimes against property.31 Such

vandalism presented a visible marker of

disorder that worried many older citizens,

especially when combined with the tendency

to conflate violent protests with street crime

under the heading of “violence in the streets”

and to suffer a vague fearfulness as a result.

In addition to riots, three prominent assassina-

tions—of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy,

and Martin Luther King, Jr—added to the

perception that the stability of American

society was threatened by violence. Experts in

the 1960s cited a range of factors as causes

for the alleged crime wave, whether it was

the liberal Warren Court and its protection of

defendants’ rights or the general thirst for

violence diagnosed by Karl Menninger as a

persistent feature of American society. The

presentation of violence in the news media

most likely also played a part in the rising fear,

contributing to a general sense of the

deterioration of the moral and social order.

However, it was unclear then, and remains

unclear today, whether the number of crimes

actually increased or if an increase in reporting

and the automated processing of reports

produced the impression of a crime wave.32

Along with the growing use of punch card

systems, closed circuit cameras, and stream-

lined reporting systems like the 911 telephone

system, criminologists and other social scien-

tists took on an increasingly public role,

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causing further public exposure to the

problem of crime.33

American fearfulness influenced a shift in

federal policy after Republican Barry Gold-

water seized on the growing fear of crime and

made it a central issue in his campaign to

replace President Johnson in 1964. While

Johnson won the election, he realised he would

need to respond to the rising fear of crime in

order to combat the political threat being

wielded by the Republicans. He began to frame

a new “war on crime”, while at the same time

arguing that his war on poverty was in fact a

war on crime. In 1967, Johnson called for a

Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement

and Administration of Justice, which eventually

yielded such recommendations as the Law

Enforcement Assistance Administration

(LEAA) and the emergency 911 system. The

LEAA was eventually funded with the passage

of the Safe Streets Act of 1968. Amid debates

about federalism—the extent to which the

federal government ought to intervene in social

problems—the LEAA was structured as a

system of grants from the federal government

to state and local agencies.34 It was the LEAA

that funded Newman’s research, even as he

sought funding for less crime-related work on

community and housing.

In early 1969, when Newman began the

defensible space research project, he was

teaching at Columbia University and hoping to

study enclaves.35 He was intrigued by a housing

type he had encountered in Europe, where

housing surrounds the exterior of a block, with

a park-like centre. At Columbia, Newman

encountered the psychologist George Rand,

who was there on a two-year fellowship

sponsored by the US Department of Edu-

cation. Rand was working on an interdisciplin-

ary study of the relationship between spatial

perception and architectural design, in addition

to teaching a course on the social meaning of

space. In the course, Rand brought together

sources from philosophy and anthropology,

mixing Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-

Ponty, and Robert Ardrey. Realising their

shared interest in territory, Rand and Newman

decided to pursue a joint project and started to

look for funding, beginning with the National

Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Rand recalls

that they had several connections there and

were aware that the NIMH had funded other

architectural researchers, such as Christopher

Alexander. After visiting Washington, DC,

several times without success, they decided to

shift their efforts to the LEAA due to the

recently passed Safe Streets Act. While the

architects and the agency were both sceptical

initially, Newman was convincing and the pair

eventually built a good relationship with Henry

Ruth, the head of the LEAA.

In addition to the LEAA’s interests, Newman

and Rand’s theories appealed to housing

authorities tasked with managing the dire

conditions in public housing in the late 1960s

and early 1970s as they faced “white flight”,

which left surrounding neighbourhoods in

decay. They were also challenged by a loosen-

ing of the regulations over eligibility and an

ongoing national migration of former agricul-

ture workers into cities. These changes meant

that the role of public housing shifted from a

brief springboard for those temporarily in need

to one where long-term residents had little

prospect for a better situation. In these years,

public housing officials faced reduced budgets

and rising demand, making them amenable to

Newman and Rand’s overture about saving

money on maintenance and policing. Rand

recalls that housing authorities who maintained

police forces of their own were initially quite

eager to hear Newman and Rand’s proposal to

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solve problems without expensive personnel

increases. Newman and Rand sought out the

New York City Housing Authority, with whom

they held a number of meetings. After some

convincing, “arm twisting” and a few visits to

public housing, they were granted access to

NYCHA police records and other data.36

Architecture and Social Science

In a 1969 conference organised by Newman

and Rand, the author of a soon-to-be published

study of Pruitt Igoe, notable sociologist Lee

Rainwater, commented on the feeling that

most public housing researchers felt very much

under attack.37 Speaking to an audience

composed of LEAA personnel, Department

of Housing and Urban Development adminis-

trators, NYCHA representatives, psychologists,

sociologists, and architects, Rainwater

explained that in order to take action and

improve housing, what was needed was a more

concrete grounding from which advocates

could argue.38 Newman’s forthcoming data

analysis would fit this bill. A far more agnostic

tone was taken by psychologist Erving Goff-

man, a man much admired by Rand. Goffman

was the author of a well-regarded study of

behaviour in public spaces, and the attention to

the semi-public zone between housing and

street was of great interest to him.

However, Goffman charged that the group was

moving much too quickly from objective

analysis of behaviour in such semi-public spaces

to design decisions. He worried that while

psychology knew a bit about the so-called

“egocentric” kind of territory—i.e., personal

space surrounding an individual’s body—the

field knew little about the way in which “turf ”

functioned in humans.39 Goffman explained

that his caution was amplified by the current

state of psychology, which he characterised as

severely chastened by failing to predict the

racial unrest and student protests of the late

1960s.40 While architects and administrators

countered that it was their job to make such

choices in light of inadequate information,

Goffman declared that it was not the role of a

social scientist to advocate policy when the

facts were still uncertain. He declared:

Just because action is going to be taken

doesn’t mean that I have to present a

plan . . . I can argue with you about the

binds you get into when you start trying

to act rationally about so large and vital

and living a thing as living arrangements,

and just because somebody has to make

those decisions does not mean to say I

have to. I will just stand by and criticize

whatever you do . . . That is my job. You

make the decisions, and I do the

bitching.41

Following Goffman’s presentation, Newman

countered that he did not think social science

had achieved any great theory of society, so

that architects might as well try to understand

social forces for themselves.42 For their part,

the audience was excited by Goffman, and they

continued to refer to his remarks on the

second day of the conference. Various

interpretations of his words were offered,

among them the conclusion that it was so rare

to hear an intellectual of that calibre address

the topic of public housing that they had all

been stirred up by it. In this milieu, Newman

too was perceived as an intellectual and an

intense personality, and one of the participants

wisely remarked that Newman’s ideas were

very “saleable” and that they belonged on

Madison Avenue. As a result of the conference,

Newman and Rand gained a substantial

transcript of material and NYU gave them

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another grant, which allowed them to hire five

or six staff for the office.

The pair went on to study the 165 housing

projects with almost 1600 buildings under the

aegis of the New York City Housing Authority.

NYCHA provided crime report data, allowing

Newman to claim that he had access to a vast

“laboratory” of public housing. This research

was intended to come out in 1970, but the

release was interrupted when Rand accepted

an offer to teach at UCLA and departed from

what he recalled as a “tumultuous” relationship

with Newman.43 A sense of the disagreement

can be gained from an essay Rand published in

1969. In the essay, he objected to the way that

“the architect-planner” instrumentalises psy-

chologists for “a redefinition of priorities, a

finger on the panic button, and a rationalization

for his carrying out his strategies as quickly as

possible”.44 In an elegant framing, Rand

described the architect-planner :

He looks to the psychologist to redefine

the moral status of life and death so that

he may loosen the funds from industry

and government to convert each

metropolis into a “Garden of Eden” in

accord with his utopic vision of the good

life.

The two never published a co-authored study,

but it seems that Rand was aware of his utility

to Newman in receiving funding from the

LEAA. After Rand left, Newman leveraged his

early success to grow his consulting practice,

eventually founding an Institute for Defensible

Space. He performed a study of CPTED for the

Jersey City Housing Authority, where he was

paid $15,000 to recommend hardening of

locks, placement of officers in transparent,

bulletproof “booths”, the installation of inter-

coms, better lighting, and the rearrangement of

the grounds.45 And, of course, after Rand

departed, Newman published Defensible Space.

Newman continued to work with the New

York City Housing Authority, arguing that his

expertise would save the NYCHA money by

reducing their maintenance and policing costs,

and they gave him access to their data.46 He

built his expertise with NYCHA data and was

instrumental in encouraging the use of

surveillance equipment on their sites, such as

cameras to allow tenants to buzz only known

visitors through the remote door downstairs in

a tower or a Compu-Guard system to allow

tenant patrols to monitor the grounds.

Counter to some theories of surveillance,

there is evidence that residents did not see the

cameras and patrols as an entirely negative

experience. Depictions of surveillance technol-

ogy emphasised tenant patrols and showed

tenants using the monitors. Historian Fritz

Umbach has claimed that some public housing

residents saw surveillance technology as “proof

of their social dignity” in that they were

acquiring amenities that luxury housing

possessed.47

To demonstrate his success and gain further

projects, Newman led Department of Justice

experts, as well as members of other housing

authorities, through Bronxdale and other

projects, demonstrating what he had been

able to do for NYCHA. The housing authority

was no doubt happy about the grant money he

brought in, but they were less pleased when

the study came out. Eventually, the relationship

between the architect and the housing

authority deteriorated and the NYCHA chair-

man Simeon Golar wrote to Mayor Lindsay

saying: “Beyond considerable statistical and

factual error, the book panders to hate and fear

in the crassest possible manner, dishonestly

pretending to be a scholarly exercise and

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trading on professorial credentials”.48 He

claimed the book was racist for its assessment

of the success of the recently built Co-op City

as due to its “exclusively white, middle-class

and elderly population”,49 pointing out that Co-

op City had been integrated from the start.

What had been a mutually beneficial relation-

ship became antagonistic as Newman’s theory

came out in popular form. It seems he could

not please everyone.

Conclusion

Without the climate of fear of crime and scarce

housing funds, Newman’s project to study

housing may have developed in another

direction. Unlike architectural research pro-

duced from within a stable bureaucracy,

Newman took on an increasingly common

role in the franchise-state economy where he

acted as part researcher and part entrepreneur.

As outlined in Joy Rohde’s Armed With

Expertise, the American government increas-

ingly employed private social science contrac-

tors to study human populations for military

and civilian ends, threatening the principles of

an open society.50 Rather than having a single

salary and a single mission, Newman paid for his

research through grants—such as the Law

Enforcement grant—and through consulting

work, most often for housing authorities.

Working closely with housing-authority clients,

Newman came to understand their problems

and their budget and, similarly, during the

relationship he developed with Ruth at the

LEAA, he familiarised himself with their

priorities. Rather than being in a position to

approve plans and dole out money, Newman

needed to find work and to market his ideas to

clients. In addition to temperament, this may be

the major reason that he crafted a popular

book that resonated with a wide audience,

where other architectural consultants pub-

lished short articles on best practices, and

others did disciplinary work that spoke to a

select few.

To be economical is to be affordable, to

operate skilfully in a quasi-ecological system of

exchanges. Human territoriality, and Oscar

Newman’s popular account of defensible

space, suggested an affordable, efficient

means of managing public housing through a

series of trade-offs that were hard to resist in an

era of scarce public funding. Motivated by fears

large and small—the fear of crime, the fear of

the “death” of Great American cities, and the

fear of the failure of the modern housing

project—Newman and the housing authority

managers made decisions within the systems of

exchange open to them. Residents and housing

authorities traded privacy for security, installing

a designed environment suited to private

territories in the hope that it would stall the

deterioration of public, urban life. Using the

word economy in its more common sense,

national and geopolitical changes in economy

produced an era of scarcity in housing

authorities—from the shrinking public subsidies

for housing, education, and welfare to the

decline in post-war affluence and the increasing

costs of “preventative” war in Vietnam. After

all, designers, managers, and intellectuals

require funding for their work and must find

it within a specific economy: an emotional and

financial habitat.

The 1970s were a period of American history

that came to apply the idea of the market to all

areas of social and political life, and the cultural

implications of that shift are just being

explored.51 A mood of scarcity increased the

attention that agencies paid to the manage-

ment of their resources and the creation of

landscapes of incentives. The literal landscape

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or designed environment reflected the new

mood formally as well as symbolically; for an

idea like defensible space to gain popularity, it

had to resonate in both dimensions. The

environment addressed a real problem (crime),

but also expressed a social discourse (private

property as natural and safe). As the critic

Robert Levit argues, the social parable

expressed in some early twenty-first century

architecture is that of a collection of individuals

with “a declining willingness or ability . . . to

imagine themselves in relationship to a social

whole”.52 Newman’s defensible space was an

early and clear framing of this natural, social

foam, and for as long as its diagram remains the

dominant social parable for architects and the

public, it will compete with other such images

that reflect a more trusting society based on

solidarity, rather than incentive.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National

Science Foundation under Grant 1058671 and

the Centre Canadien D’Architecture.

Notes

1. Jimenez Lai, Citizens of No Place: An ArchitecturalGraphic Novel, New York: Princeton Architec-tural Press, 2012, 7.

2. Martin Gansberg, “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’tCall the Police”, The New York Times, 27 March1964, 1–2. According to Gansberg, one witnesscalled the police after the victim was dead,hence the difference between 37 and 38.

3. The first buildings were demolished in March1972 and large photographs were published inLifemagazine on 14 April 1972. Defensible Spaceappears to have been published in the fall, as theearliest reviews are from October and Novem-ber 1972.

4. Katharine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”,Journal of Architectural Education, 44, no. 3(1991), 163–171, doi:10.2307/1425266;Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Public Housing ThatWorked: New York in the Twentieth Century,Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2008; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth [Film], directed byChad Freidrichs et al., Columbia, MO: UnicornStencil, 2011; Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, andAlan Collins, “The Kitty Genovese Murder andthe Social Psychology of Helping: The Parable ofthe 38Witnesses”, American Psychologist, 62, no.6 (September 2007), 555–562.

5. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Preven-tion through Urban Design, New York: Macmillan,1972, dust jacket.

6. Newman, Defensible Space, 203.

7. Erika Milam, “Men in Groups: Anthropology andAggression, 1965–1975”, Osiris, 30 (ScientificMasculinities, Erika Milam and Robert A. Nye,eds), forthcoming, 2015.

8. Robert Ardrey, African Genesis: A PersonalInvestigation into the Animal Origins and Natureof Man, New York: Atheneum, 1961, 29.

9. Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative:A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins ofProperty and Nations, New York: Atheneum,1966, 5.

10. Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative, 210–212.

11. Ardrey, African Genesis, 18. Ardrey argued thatthe only reason this finding remained obscure inthe 1930s was that a world divided by thehope for a socialist future, the German pursuitof Lebensraum, and the fear of a socialistfuture had no interest in hearing that territori-ality and private property were innatecharacteristics.

12. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: SavageIntellects, Modern Lives, Chicago, IL: Universityof Chicago Press, 1990.

13. Newman, Defensible Space, 5.

14. Newman, Defensible Space, 1.

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15. Newman, Defensible Space, 51.

16. Aldo Van Eyck, “Kaleidoscope of the Mind”, Via,1, “Ecology in Design” (1968), 95. See also AldoVan Eyck, Paul Parin, and Fritz Morgenthaler,“Miracle of Moderation”, Via, 1, (1968), 96–124;Aldo Van Eyck, “Image of Ourselves”, Via, 1(1968), 125–129.

17. Mark Crinson, “From Haifa to Stevenage”,Keynote address, “Architecture and the State1940s to 1970s” conference at ColumbiaUniversity GSAPP, 2 April 2010.

18. Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse onUrbanism, 1928–1960, Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2000, 234.

19. Translation: “In Africa, at the North Pole, in NewYork or in France, the concept: Dwelling alwaysdissolves into basic functions, moreover they arethe same everywhere and always, determinateelements”: Oscar Newman (ed.), CIAM ‘59 inOtterlo, Stuttgart: K. Kramer, 1961, 119.

20. John M. Darley and Bibb Latane, “BystanderIntervention in Emergencies: Diffusion ofResponsibility”, Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 8, no. 4, Part 1 (1968), 377–383,doi:10.1037/h0025589; Newman, DefensibleSpace, 79.

21. Samuel Kaplan, “Defensible Space: CrimePrevention Through Design Will Not SolveSociety’s Ills”, The New York Times, 29 April1973, 16; R. I. Mawby, “Defensible Space: ATheoretical and Empirical Appraisal”, UrbanStudies, 14, no. 2 (1 June 1977), 169–179,doi:10.1080/00420987720080321; Bill Hillier,“In Defense of Space”, Royal Institute of BritishArchitects Journal, 80, no. 11 (1973), 539–544.See the extended discussion of the graphs anddata used by Newman in Joy Knoblauch, “GoingSoft: Architecture and the Human Sciences inSearch of New Institutional Forms (1963–1974)”, PhD dissertation, Princeton University,2012.

22. Peter Sloterdijk, “Foam City”, Log, 9 (January2007), 63–76.

23. Lindsay Miller, “Daily Closeup ‘DefensibleSpace’”, New York Post, 20 December 1972,Series 01, Box 0088B4, Folder 03, La Guardiaand Wagner Archives.

24. Newman, CIAM ‘59 in Otterlo; and interviewwith his wife, Kopper Newman, in Hensonville,New York, 11 May 2012.

25. Robert A. M. Stern (ed.), 40 Under 40: AnExhibition of Young Talent in Architecture, NewYork: The Architectural League of New York andThe American Federation of the Arts, 1966.

26. Oscar Newman, Park-Mall: Lawndale Report ofStage Two of the Park Mall Study, St. Louis, MO:Urban Renewal Design Center, WashingtonUniversity, 1968, n.p.

27. Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Institute forArchitecture and Urban Studies Archives, Series2, Folder B1-4.

28. Alan Wolfe, The Limits of Legitimacy: PoliticalContradictions of Contemporary Capitalism, NewYork: Free Press, 1977.

29. Thomas E. Cronin, U.S. v. Crime in the Streets,Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981, 11.

30. Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: SocialScience, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001, 196–210.

31. Cronin, U.S. v. Crime in the Streets, 25. Despitethe increase in crime rate, many crimes wereminor crimes, such as vandalism, or auto theftfor purposes of juvenile joyriding.

32. Nancy E. Marion, A History of Federal CrimeControl Initiatives, 1960–1993, Westport, CT:Praeger, 1994, 9 (also Appendix showingreported crime rates from the FederalBureau of Investigation’s Uniform CrimeReports rising from 1,861,261 in 1960 to10,192,034 in 1974).

33. Murray Lee, Inventing Fear of Crime: Criminologyand the Politics of Anxiety, Cullompton: WillanPublishing, 2007.

34. Malcolm Feeley, The Policy Dilemma: FederalCrime Policy and the Law Enforcement AssistanceAdministration, Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, 1980.

35. Conversation with George Rand, 9 April 2010.

36. Rand, 9 April 2010.

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37. Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black FamilyLife in a Federal Slum, Chicago, IL: Aldine, 1970;and an earlier, well-known article, Lee Rainwater,“Fear and the House-as-Haven in the LowerClass”, Journal of the American Institute ofPlanners, 32, no. 1 (1966), 23, doi:10.1080/01944366608978486. Rainwater may have beentheir connection with NIMH. He had received agrant for his study of Pruitt-Igoe, a five-year studyat Washington University, in which Newman mayhave participated.

38. “Stenographic Transcript of Proceedings, Designfor Improving Safety in Residential Environ-ments”, 13 November 1969, 55, manuscriptfrom George Rand; hereafter “Design forImproving Safety”.

39. “Design for Improving Safety”, 139.

40. “Design for Improving Safety”, 157.

41. “Design for Improving Safety”, 158.

42. “Design for Improving Safety,” 169.

43. Rand, 9 April 2010.

44. George Rand, “What Psychology Asks of UrbanPlanning”, American Psychologist, 24, no. 10(October 1969), 933.

45. Rae Downes, “How to Make HousingProjects Safe”, The Jersey Journal (9 February1973) (NYU Archives, Bobst Library, NewYork). Newman continued this consultingthrough the 1980s, including acting as aconsultant on the matter of locating publichousing in Yonkers. See Lisa Belkin, Show Me aHero, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 2000.

46. Report by Oscar Newman, New York CityHousing Authority Archives at the Folder :J Christian; Secu-Reports; Secu SystemDefensible Space Modifications to Eight JerseyCity Projects; Date (Range): August,1973–October, 1975; Series: Chairman’sFiles, Box 0088B2, Folder 06, The La Guardiaand Wagner Archives, La Guardia CommunityCollege/The City University of New York.

47. Fritz Umbach, The Last Neighborhood Cops: TheRise and Fall of Community Policing in New YorkPublic Housing, New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press, 2010, 10.

48. Letter from Simeon Golar to Mayor JohnV. Lindsay, 4 January 1973, marked “unsent”.Name: Christian Joseph J.; Series: Chairman’sFiles, Box 0088B4, Folder 03.

49. Newman, Defensible Space, 18.

50. Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militariza-tion of American Social Research During theCold War, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,2013.

51. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture, Cambridge,MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress, 2011; Michel Foucault, The Birth ofBiopolitics: Lectures at the College De France,1978–79, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2004, 251–260; Jonathan Massey, “RiskDesign”, Aggregate, 4 October 2013, http://we-aggregate.org/piece/risk-design (accessed13 May 2015).

52. Robert A. Levit, “Contemporary ‘Ornament’:The Return of the Symbolic Repressed”,Harvard Design Magazine, no. 28 (2008), 73.

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