Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning

CPTED offers a recipe for reducing crime by shifting the availability of easy targets. This does not mean that an offender’s motivations to commit crime have been erased; it simply means that some offenses won’t occur in given areas because offenders either choose to go elsewhere or to not commit the crime. If one assumes that not all crimes are ea

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To have widespread impact, place-based programs need to be scalable to entire populations, offering health benefits to people with a political voice as well as to those without. Think chlorination of public water. The painstaking scientific and political processes that led to widespread chlorination of drinking water is a prime example of structura

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New Urbanism at its core promotes higher residential densities, a mix of residential and commercial land uses in close walking proximity, and a grid street pattern that promotes closer distances between residential and commercial destinations.22 Grid street patterns that have more intersections and smaller blocks also provide for multipurpose uses,

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Our primary results also confirmed the findings of our earlier quasi-experimental study. Interviews of households living near the different lots and an analysis of crime data before and after the interventions showed that those living near remediated lots (either fully greened or just cleaned and maintained) were less concerned about their personal

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Area-specific policies can be put in place to buttress against the negative effects that gentrification can have on longer-term poor residents. Inclusionary zoning, for example, is an approach that requires developers to set aside 10 to 20 percent of residential units for lower-income people, or to pay a fee that gets placed into an affordable-hous

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Public parks are part of the community planning model in most cities, and 70 to 75 percent of Americans report that they live within a short walk of a park.33 Parks are even plentiful in some of the most disadvantaged cities, like Detroit, Michigan, where 74 percent of the population lives within a ten-minute walk of a park.34 In Los Angeles, by co

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Oscar Newman’s 1972 book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design is widely credited for illustrating how the design of public housing influenced criminal opportunity.18 Newman focused his case studies on NYC public housing complexes, where, he pointed out, robbery rates were much greater in high-rise buildings, even when the actual

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Chief among these was the finding that gun violence dropped significantly near the newly greened lots, much more than it did near the vacant control lots. This drop was over 8 percent per year and had been sustained for four years, until the end of our study. These were unexpected findings, as our previous research on urban gun violence and crime g

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The study team conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) where 274 children with asthma received a comprehensive intervention that involved an environmental audit of the home, an action plan for helping remediate the home that included the delivery of allergy and pest remediation materials, and four to eight additional visits by community healt

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