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Urban housing and social malaise
Urban housing and social malaise A. Coleman
The author notes the failures of post-war development of the inner cities in the UK and the serious social consequences these have had on the quality of life. A previous study on housing deslgn in New York is outlined and the author explains the flndings of very recent work by the Land Use Research Unit at King’s College, London. This study was based in Oxford and London and took six types of social malaise (all related to the activities of children) as test measures for analyslng the effects of 18 design variables. The flndlngs for the blocks of fiata were compared with a sample of 350 houses. A list of recommendations is given and the author finally calls for independent research in this field and a new approach to the subject of land use. Keywords:
urban
planning;
com-
munity; social malaise.
Miss Coleman can be contacted at the Department of Geography, King’s
College, London WC2R 3LS.
‘J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York, 1961. 20. Newman, Defensible Space, Collier Books, New York, 1972. Xand Use Research Unit, Trouble in Utopia, to be published.
14
It is commonplace to identify the world’s most serious problem as population growth with its ramifying land use problems of resource loss, including the sterilization of renewable resource soils by urban development . The loss of land could be minimized by accommodating people in compact cities, but all too often it is being maximized by a centrifugal flight of population, leaving up to a quarter of the land unused, both in the inner city which has been abandoned and in the urban fringe that has been diffusely colonized. A hungry world cannot afford such irrational land use extravagance, and it is important to diagnose and remedy the reasons for the inner city’s unattractiveness. In the UK it is no longer possible to lay the blame on old, decaying overcrowded shims. After 37 years of comprehensive planning, our inner city areas are largely new, low-density developments, set in green lawns. Yet all too often this utopia is even more repellent than its predecessor, with worse crime levels, more mental illness, more family breakdown, more people living in fear, and more social malaise of all kinds. Where has our brave new land use gone wrong? In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs produced perceptive insights into how certain kinds of built environment can impair the normal healthy development of a community structure.’ One sunspot cycle later, Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space turned a fine focus upon housing and identified eight or nine specific design variables that are correlated with levels of crime.* Another sunspot cycle later, the Land Use Research Unit at King’s College London presented its Trouble in Utopia which extends Newman’s work to other kinds of social malaise and doubles the number of design features that can be held responsible.3 It is hoped that remedial action will take place before yet a third sunspot cycle elapses. Newman studied 169 housing estates in New York and established three basic conditions which on the one hand make it easier for criminals to operate and on the other hand make it more difficult for householders to control and defend their territory. The first of these is anonymity, where people no longer feel recognized as individuals in the community, and have become mere units in an impersonal society. In these circumstances criminals feel confident of not being identified, and step up their activities. Barrie Greenbie has shown that the built environment needs to include impersonal areas (distemic space) where people can go about their business without constantly being
0264-6377m4l010014-11$03.00
0 1963 Butterwotth 8 Co (Publishers) Ltd
Urban housing and social malaise
distracted by having to recognize and communicate with others, and also personal areas (proxemic space) where they function as interacting individuals4 Each of these needs its own kind of crime-preventive design, and the tragedy of many modem housing estates is that they have abandoned proxemic designs without achieving distemic ones. Individual households no longer have their own separate territories to control. Instead they are forced to share both the buildings and the grounds of estates of flats with too many people to recognize, or be recognized, as individuals. Control of the territory has been shifted to huge, remote, centralized housing authorities, which are inefficient and unresponsive to their tenants’ needs. Newman has drawn attention to the specific design features which create enforced residential sharing and anonymity, and consequently facilitate crime. The second of Newman’s conditions is lack of surveillance. Designs which are intended to afford privacy to the residents also afford privacy to criminals. The dwelling is not provided with strategically placed windows and doors that allow the householder to oversee his territory and gain speedy access to it if anything is amiss. This seems to be a reaction against the stock figure of ‘the old lady peering through her lace curtains’, but it now emerges that she is misplaced as a figure of fun. In reality she is an important element in naturally self policing communities, and is having to be artificially encouraged by the new and successful community policing programme. Newman’s third condition is the presence of alternative escape routes. Criminals hate culs de sac, whether indoors or out. They are emboldened by the presence of a choice of lifts, staircases, corridors and exits, while multiple overhead walkways linking a great complex of anonymous blocks are as much a paradise to them as they are anathema to the police. Neither Newman’s work, nor that of the Land Use Research Unit to be described in this paper, is deterministic. Badly designed residential environments do not force the inhabitants to become criminals, but they reduce constraints and offer tempting opportunities, and hence make it probable that more of them will turn to crime than if they lived in defensible streets of houses. One cannot therefore point to any one block of flats and argue that its freedom from crime disproves the claim that such designs are detrimental. Instead, one must study a large number of blocks with similar and contrasted designs to ascertain, for example, that only 15% of two-storeyed buildings are likely to be vandalized as compared with 80% of 20-storeyed. The Land Use Research Unit has studied 4082 blocks of flats. These include every block in the two London Boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Southwark, as well as 54 blocks in an estate in Oxford, Blackbird Leys. The land use of each area was mapped at the scale of 1:2500, to include not only 18 design variables for each block but also all the non-residential land uses that provided a context. The work was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust, which also took a constructive and helpful interest in its progress, and the main research team has consisted of Lise Cottle, Rachel Sex, Sarah Brown and Pauline Marshall.
Test measures 48.
Greenbie, Spaces, Press, New Haven, 1982.
Yale
University
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1984
Six kinds of social malaise were chosen as test measures for checking the influence of the 18 design variables. All six are related in greater or lesser degree to the activities of children and reflect the frequent complaints of
Urban housing and social malaise Table 1. The incidence of ths test measure @a %)Test measure
Occurrence in 4082blocks
Litter Graffiti Vandal damage Children in care Urine pollution Faeces
66.99 76.16 36.73 32.64a 26.34b 7.42
parents that blocks of flats are difficult environments in which to bring up families. It is felt that the lack of individual gardens undermines the proper supervision of toddlers at play, while older children can all too easily fall into bad company in the absence of a strong community structure. As well as reflecting the child-rearing problem, the six types of social malaise were selected over a range from mild to very serious. 0
aEstimate based on 2054 blocks. bEstirnatebased on 1765 blocks.
0
0
0
0
Litter measured in and within three metres of the entrance, is thought to be the least serious form of user-behaviour abuse, and it also proves to be the commonest (Table 1). It is classified in three simple groupings; none, clean and casual, and dirty and decayed. Graffiti is the second commonest form of abuse, and C. Redknap has shown that the great majority of it is the work of children.5 It is recorded as none, inside the building only or outside only, and both inside and outside. Vandal damage is more serious and less common. It is recorded as types of target, over 40 of which have been identified. For most analytical purposes the unit used is the number of types per block. This ranges from zero to five, but there are so few blocks with four or five types simultaneously that they have been grouped as a 3-5 class. Excrement in the entrances is still less common. It was initially thought that dog dirt would be dominant, but in practice the role of children seems to be important, especially in blocks located near play areas. Excrement constitutes two of the test measures, as in addition to faeces, mapped for all 4082 blocks, urine pollution was also observed for Tower Hamlets only. The distribution of children in care poses the most serious problem and unfortunately has a higher rate of incidence than the problem of excrement. This test measure could not be observed directly, but data have been supplied by Southwark Social Services Department. For each block it is possible to establish both the number of individual children in care and the number of households involved. Households are considered a better unit, as they do not weight the statistics with the accidents of family size, but in practice both measures produce very similar results. Up to 11 households in each block were found to have children in care.
Design variables
SC. Redknap, The Effect of Entrance Designs in Blocks of Flats, unpublished report to the Nuffield Foundation, 1983.
16
The most infamous design variable is the number of storeys in the block. It has the effect of creating anonymity, since people piled up at different levels do not have the same opportunities of getting to know each other by sight as they would in a street of houses. High slab blocks are even more anonymous than high point blocks because there is a bigger crowd of people using the same building and this is mapped as the number of dwellings in the block. Other size variables are the number of blocks on the site and the total number of dwellings in all those blocks. A different size measure is the number of dwellings accessible from one entrance. This is not necessarily the same as the number in the block. It may be fewer if the block is divided into self-contained sections, or more if other blocks can be reached by overhead walkways. The worst estate mapped has 2268 dwellings accessible without having to set foot on the ground.
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1964
Urban housing and social malaise
Walkways not only increase anonymity; they also provide alternative escape routes for criminals, rioters and other malefactors. Furthermore they increase the range of other escape-route variables: the number of interconnected exits and the number of interconnected vertical routes (lifts and staircases). Corridor design also affects surveillance. Newman noted that singleloaded corridors, with flats on one side only, are open to surveillance from two sides: the public street and the residents’ windows. Doubleloaded corridors, with flats on both sides, cannot be seen from either side; they are screened from street view by the dwellings, and the flats do not have windows on to internal corridors. The present classification also separates out short single and double-loaded corridors with four or fewer dwellings. With hindsight it would seem preferable to record dwellings per corridor as a continuous variable instead of making an arbitrary break at four. Surveillance is most easily exercised if there are ground floor dwellings with a line of view allowing them to monitor who comes into the entrance. Again, with hindsight it would seem preferable to map this condition directly, in addition to what has actually been recorded, ie two variables which exclude ground-floor dwellings; garages occupying the ground floor and blocks built on stilts. Entrance position is also relevant to surveillance, as those which face into the interior of the grounds cannot be observed from the street. The entrance type variable distinguishes blocks with only communal entrances from those which also have individual front doors to groundfloor flats. It was thought that the individual doors would give the ground-floor households some relief from anonymity and stronger powers of surveillance, but in practice they do not seem to be beneficial. This may be because there is rarely a front garden to insulate private dwelling space from common estate space, and the individual doors often face into the grounds rather than onto the street. They might well prove to be desirable if supported by a better layout. The layering of the dwellings is another variable yielding a result in need of explanation. Double-layered maisonettes are systematically worse than flats on a single level, but the fault may lie less in design than in the fact that maisonettes are larger, and intended for bigger families. A British Home Office study6 found that child density was the only socioeconomic variable exerting a stronger effect upon vandalism than Newman’s design variables. The three remaining variables refer to the grounds. One is the number of access points affording entry from the street If there are several, outsiders can take short cuts through the estate and treat it as public space rather than private residential space. The presence of play areas may have a similar effect, often being interpreted as a public facility. Finally, the grounds are classified according to their spatial organization, a composite variable intended to reflect how easily the residents can control the buffer zone between private and public space. If the grounds are shared by so many people that resident control proves unworkable, they are classified as ‘confused space’, using an objective set of criteria. 6s. Wilson and A. Sturman, ‘Vandalism research aimed at specific remedies’, Municipal Engineering, May 1976, pp 705-707.
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1984
General trends The first and simplest
method
of analysis is the use of graphs to show basic
17
Urban housing and social malaise
trends. The design variable is plotted on the x axis, and the test measure on the y axis. For this purpose each measure is considered in the simplest possible way, as either present or absent, and the number of blocks where the abuse is present is shown as a percentage for each value of the design. Each curve is slightly smoothed, using running means based on three consecutive classes. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the test measures by the number of storeys. while Figure 2 relates them to the number of overhead walkways joining each block. Both sets of curves show a clear upward trend; as the design variable worsens, so does the percentage of afflicted blocks. This is generally the case for all 18 of the suspected designs. There are also certain other recurring characteristics. Litter is the commonest form of abuse, and graffiti is always the second most common, gradually converging upon the litter curve as the design worsens. The vandal damage and children in care curves follow closely similar courses. and the two excrement curves are respectively fifth and sixth. Many of the design variables show marked fluctuations at high values. The fluctuations generally take the form of a trough in the upper part of the trend line. The troughs are most clearly marked in respect of those designs which the authorities can most easily recognize as harmful; high rise and large block size. They are least marked in the curves of variables that are not generally recognized. Authorities are unlikely to reduce child densities on the basis of the number of walkways. On the contrary, blocks with walkways are generally fairly low rise, and children are more likely to be decanted into them rather than out; this may be a reason why the children in care curve rises above the damage curve where there are more than three overhead walkways per block. Not all the children are removed as yet and in any case, bad designs still remain stressful for adults. Other test measures. such as psychiatric illness might not show the same irregularities.
Llttsr
loo-
/’ ,/-
go/ 80/ 70 -
/
/
/
/ :
60-
:
:
/
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. . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .----‘... .. .. ,... ‘........
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:
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,*....
. . ..
..:..
,/ /
/
/ 0 Damage
/
/
‘... Groffltl
/
:... / / /
.:’
/
Figure 1. Distributionof test measures by number of storeys. The dip at around six storeys appears to reflect the policy of reducing child densities in blocks high enough to need lifts. Even though there are fewer children, the various forms of abuse continue to rise as the number of storeys increases. The drop in the children in care curve above 12 storeys is probably the result of a special effort to remove problem families from the worst blocks.
/
/ 0 ._.-. 0. 2
-. I 3
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._.-.-.
-.-.
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Faeces
/’
A.-‘-’ I 4
I 5
I1111 6 7 8 910 Number of storeys
I 15
I 20
I 25
:
LAND USE POLICY January 1984
Urban housing and social malaise
~uff~~~oft~~~ by number of overhead walkways. Blodcs w&hwalkwaysare predominant& f~~~~p~~~~~~ blocks may be moved into them. The chikken cb twt cause so much damage there, but retain their in-care status,so the children in care curve rises a&we the vandal damage wwe.
0
0
1
2 Number
3
4
5
6
of overhead walkways
Correlation analysis It is a natural next step to ascertain whether the rising trends shown in the graphs are statistically significant. This can be done by correlating each of the test measures with each of the designs. In this case the separate classes of each measure are used, and not merely their presence or absence. Table 2 shows the significance levels for Southwark and Tower Hamlets. Blackbird Leys is omitted because its 54 blocks do not have the full range of design variables nor the full range of test measure classes, except for litter. Blocks that are boarded up and running down, and blocks containing shops or other facilities are also excluded, in order to consider purely residential and fully occupied blocks only. There are 2017 of these in Southwark and 1570 in Tower Hamlets. As the design data are not normally distributed but highly skewed, and some of the variables are Table 2.
SlgntfiwncehwelsofKendall’s tau C @effkMb. Tcmerliwnlets
soulhwti
Signii7cancff/eve/s V very hiihly significant t-l hi~~s~ff~ S significant - notsignihcant negativelysignificant l
Testmeasures I” Rter G graffiti 0 damage C childrenincam U urine F faeces
l&ND
USE POLlCYJanuary 1984
LGDUF
LGDUF
Number of storeys Bfocksin the astilage Dwellingsin 8x3 bbck Dwellingsin the curtilage DwellingsaccessiblefromoneeftMnce
VVVVV vv--v VVVVH vvvvv vvvvv
vvvvVV-” HVVVV vvvvvvvvv
Number of walkways Sides joinedby walkways Interconnectedexits Vertical circulation Horizontalcirculation
v v v vvvvv vvvvv vvvvv vvvvv
Entrance type Entrance pcsition Buildingson stilts Garages Fiats or maisanettes
VVHVV vvvvv -HVS-vv-v v v
Access (gates or gaps) Spatial organization Ray areas
vvvvv VVHVvvvvs
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16 18 17 t8 15
15 t6 14 16 8
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19
Urban housing and social malaise
ordinal, Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation is inappropriate and Kendall’s tau C method has been used. Of the 180 coefficients, no fewer than 84.4% are positive and significant, and 67.8% are highly significant. Every design variable is significant for at least half the test measures and every test measure except faeces in Tower Hamlets is significant for at least 80% of the design variables. The coefficients are low in value, as also were Newman’s coefficients for crime, but this is only to be expected in view of the fact that some of the 18 design variables may be offsetting the effect of others present in the same block. Non-design factors, such as child density, may also be exerting an influence. It is certainly not claimed that design factors explain the whole of the various social malaise distributions, but the significance levels confirm the evidence of the trend lines in suggesting that design does contribute an effect. Unfortunately, Kendall’s tau C correlation does not permit the calculation of a coefficient of determination, so it is not possible to specify precisely how much of the variation is statistically explained by each design variable.
Houses A sample of 350 houses have been examined for each test measure for comparison with the 4082 blocks of flats. No graffiti, vandal damage, or excrement are found to occur, and the number of children in care is very small (0.89%). Litter is found in 15% of the single family houses. and virtually doubles in houses converted into flats, but, as Figure 3 shows, both these categories are much better than purpose-built flats. Houses are not only better in themselves; they also seem to exercise a 100 Flats,
Houses and converslons
purpose - built Litter
go/--------
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related to the complexvariable, spatialorganization.
Single family houses are best followed by houses converted into a few flats. The semi-public flats where households are sufficiently few to cooperate in controlling the territory are better than a confused space where control is impracticable. Each type of confused space is improved by giving gardens to ground-floor flats, which is ‘semiconfused’. Such gardens are not effective at the foot of high blocks.
LAND USE POLICY January 1984
Urban housing and social malaise
moderating effect upon nearby flats. This effect gradually wanes as flats replace houses. Table 3 shows how the percentage of blocks affected by each test measure increases as the proportion of flats increases. (This cannot be calculated for children in care or urine pollution as figures are not available for all three areas.) Tower Hamlets, which has the highest concentration of flats, also has the greatest frequencies of abuse, even though the designs are no worse on average than those of Southwark. It would seem that every additional block of flats assists in the deterioration of its neighbours, and this could explain why correlation coefficients are generally lower in Tower Hamlets than in Southwark. It could also explain why the deleterious effect of flats in general took so long to be appreciated. When the trend away from houses first began, the concentration of flats was low, and gave rise to little or no contrast with houses. The steady multiplication of flats has been accompanied by a gradual deterioration, exacerbated by two other factors. Most of the design variables have become more extreme over the years, and an increasing proportion of the population has been forced to live in flats, regardless of whether their family structures or lifestyles are suited to shared residences. There is now a vast over-supply of flats in relation to genuine demand and an under-supply of houses. The result is that flats become increasingly hard to let, while house prices continue to soar. It seems self-evident that there should be a halt called to the building of further flats, and a determined effort to eliminate the shortfall in houses.
Threshold levels Even if no more flats are built, there would still remain an immense number of existing blocks. A whole generation of investment has gone into creating them, and a second generation of investment is now going into improving them, but ‘before and after’ studies indicate that the current expenditure is not generally any more effective than the first round. Levels of litter, graffiti, damage and excrement usually remain the same. Improvement schemes include repairs, modernization, replacement of defective components, landscaping, and the installation of security devices, but the basic designs that generate social malaise in the first place are being overlooked. If design remains bad, then security devices such as entryphones are frequently vandalized. They are only intermittently effective but continually a financial charge. There is a clear need for practical guidelines on design improvements to reduce the various forms of social malaise tested, and quite probably other kinds of problems as well, such as crime (as demonstrated by Newman) and psychiatric illness (as hinted in a preliminary investigation by the Land Use Research Unit). Existing blocks cannot be reduced to the best designs shown by the trend lines for each design variable. Some kind of practical compromise is needed, and this is supplied by finding a threshold level for each variable, Table 3. Abuee levels releted to commWhn
of fItMe.
-of
-of
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LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1984
Am
-pkdbyfi*
LmcW
Gl-eUlH
Dmnege
Feecea
Blackbird Leys Southwark Tower Hamlets
17 57 77
57.41 76.30 96.71
18.52 69.11 66.97
14.75 90.67 49.97
0.00 7.25 7.66
Urban housing and social malake Table 4. Lllter threshold for type of corMor.
aBetter than expected frequency Worse than expected
Chfland casual llttof
Design value
Lltkf rme
Landings
232a
76oa
31oa
1393
Shared balconies Single-loaded corridors Double-loaded corridors Total
8Ob lsob t9b 572
362b
147b
I 070”
cd’
579 1845 266 4082
t28b 2310
Mltyd desayed lmer
118b 1200
Total
that separates design values having better than expected test measures from those having worse than expected. The method adopted is to compare the observed number of blocks with the statistically expected number for the same design value and test measure class. Better than expected status is accorded when the number of abuse-free blocks exceeds the expected number or the number of abused blocks is less than expected. An example is set in Table 4. The expected value corresponding to each observed value is calculated by the chi-squared formula of multiplying its row total by its column total and dividing the product by the grand total, 4082. For litter, landings are the only better than expected design value, but shared balconies also feature as better than expected for the other measures. Both have four or fewer flats on the same floor. This indicates that the various forms of social malaise would all be ameliorated if blocks with long single-loaded or double-loaded corridors were divided into self-contained sections, each having no more than four dwellings per storey. For most of the design variables the threshold is identical for all the test measures. The thresholds identified are set out in Table 5. Only 15 variables are mentioned rather than 18. The number of dwellings in the curtilage is omitted because it duplicates the combination of blocks in the curtilage and dwellings in the block. The number of sides joined by walkways is omitted as it is sufficiently covered by the number of walkways variable. Garages and stilts are combined as they both function in the same way to exclude dwellings on the ground floor with their superior surveillance quality. But it is not sufficient merely to note these thresholds; they have to be properly understood. Walkways, for example, should be completely removed, but this has been considered too expensive in part of the study Table 5. Threshold levels mcommendad for deslgn Improvement schemes. area, and they have been blocked off instead. This is ineffective and a as the barriers have been vandalized and breached, and Designvalue not waste of money, to exceed local youths soon learn to climb over seven foot brick walls almost in their mfwholdlevelof Design variable stride. 3 Number of storeys It may also be a waste of money to improve a given design variable in a 1 Blocks in the curtilage block where other designs are left unaltered to continue exerting a malign 12 Dwellings in the blodc Dwellings accessible from effect. To avoid this, we have devised a simple package, the disadvan6 the same entrance tagement score, which directs attention to each block as a whole. Number of walkways Interconnected exits Vertical routes Dwellings per corridor
0 1 1 4
Entrance type Entrance position Stilts or ground-floor garages Flats or maisonettes
Communal only Facing the street, butsetback 0 Flats
Access gates or gaps Spatial organization Play areas
1 Semi-public 0
Disadvantagement
score
For each block of flats it is a simple matter to count how many of the design thresholds in Table 5 have been breached. The total number constitutes the disadvantagement score, on a scale from zero to 15. This system of scores appears to be realistic, as the worst scoring estates are those most adversely mentioned by interviewees and also most known to the police. Figure 4 shows the frequency distribution of scores in the study
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1984
Urban housing and social malaise
0
1
2
3
5
4
7
6
a
Disadvantagement
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
scare
Figure4. Frequency distribution of diidvantagement scores in 4082 blocks of flats. The malority of the blocks have multiple design problems and expendire on improving one design may bs wasted unless others are improved simultaneously.
area and Table 6 shows the probable percentages of abuse occurring in blocks with given scores. The disadvantagement score shows how far deleterious values of one design variable are reinforced or offset by the values of other variables. It is not surprising, therefore, that it has stronger correlations with the various test measures than most of the 18 designs taken separately. When an improvement scheme is mooted for any block of flats it should include a systematic appraisal of every design variable that breaches its threshold and contributes to the disadvantagement score. Each one that can be redesigned below its threshold will reduce the score by one point, and the final score achieved by the scheme is likely to indicate the probability of success. Reducing a score from 14 to 10, for example, may be a waste of money, because 10 is a score at which all the test measures remain worse than expected, and the improvements will probably be destroyed by vandals.
Recommendations Oscar Newman has demonstrated that design amelioration can bring definite improvements, both to the built environment and to the well being of the residents. In the UK, however, where blocks of flats are vastly more varied in design, and where more design variables are implicated, cost-benefit studies still remain to be undertaken. In principle, however, there are indications as to what kinds of design modification are likely to be most beneficial. The removal of overhead walkways between blocks would seem to be a priority; estates with walkways are the most notorious of all. As well as being detrimental in themselves, walkways also increase the upper range of three other variables; interconnected exits, vertical circulation channels and dwellings accessible from the same entrance. All of these could be brought nearer to their threshold levels as a result of walkway removal, even if they do not actually fall below them. Table 6. Probsbllity of social problems st sekted
Scora
LAND USE POLICY January 1984
Llttar
0
44
3 6 9 12 15
67
94 100
GraftI 26 56 66 61 90 90
6 14 30 43 53 62
dlsadva~
aaxw
childml In cam
UrilM
Faeata
12 24 41 46
5 23 33 39
2 3 4 7 13 20
23
Urban housing and social malatie
General
references
A. Coleman, ‘The human habitat’, Built Environment, Vol 6, No 4, 1961, pp 232241. A. Coleman, ‘Defensiblespaceonthemap’, Urban Design Quarterly, February 1983, p 3. ‘Vandalism on council A. Coleman, estates’, Architectural Annual Review, 1983. L.M. Cottle and R.J. Sex, ‘The new residential environment of the inner city’, International Journal of Environmental Studies, Vol 19, 1982, pp 97-101. 0. Newman and K.A. Franck, Housing Children’s Anti-Social Design and Behaviour, Draft report, 1981. 0. Newman, Factors lnffuencing Crime and Instability in Urban Housing National Institute of Developments, Justice, Washington, DC, 1981. S. Wilson and A. Sturman, ‘Vandalism research aimed at specific remedies’, Municipal Engineering, May 1976, pp 705 707. S. Wilson, ‘Vandalism and “defensible space” on London housing estates’, Designing Out Crime, Home Office Research Unit, HMO, London, 1980.
24
Attention to spatial organization can also bring multiple benefits. If each block is walled off from others to achieve its own site curtilage with only a single gate fronting on to the street, the score is reduced by two points. If the block is small enough to be reclassified as semipublic as a result of this treatment, a third point can also be subtracted. If it is too large, there may be an opportunity to eliminate confused space by dividing the grounds up into individual front gardens for ground-floor flats. It is desirable to divide bigger blocks into self-contained sections by partitioning long corridors into short landings or balconies. This might necessitate the expense of extra staircases but it would also have side benefits in the reduction of interconnected exits, dwellings accessible and sometimes vertical routes, to their threshold levels. Furthermore, the construction work could include the creation of entrances facing the street in certain cases. It must be stressed, however, that design modifications should not be proposed on a blind rule of thumb basis. It would be pointless to introduce individual gardens below tower blocks where there is a serious risk of dangerous objects being dropped down into them. Some of the worst estates appear to be so perversely designed, that improvements of any one design variable are made impossible by the nature of the others, or by fire regulations. A great deal of ingenuity may be needed to find permissible and workable ways of reducing the disadvantagement score.
Conclusion Residential land use is a major component of cities - a component considered so important that it has been presided over not merely by one land use planning authority but two. The second is the local authority housing department which has substantially replaced private housebuilding firms in many inner city areas, and has used its monolithic power to demolish houses and introduce flats. Despite the good intentions behind this concept of ideal housing, the result has been traumatic for large numbers of residents and a financial burden to the taxpayer and the victims of crime. However, housing authorities are not about to expose their mistakes, and nor have planning departments taken a lead. This illustrates the need for independent research, unhampered by the uneasy knowledge that the research organization is responsible for what may have to be criticized. It also illustrates the need for land use to be treated as an important topic in its own right, and not simply as a mere handmaid to planning.
LAND USE POLICYJanuary
1984
The author notes the failures of post-war development of the inner cities in the UK and the serious social consequences these have had on the quality of life. A previous study on housing deslgn in New York is outlined and the author explains the flndings of very recent work by the Land Use Research Unit at King’s College, London. This study was based in Oxford and London and took six types of social malaise (all related to the activities of children) as test measures for analyslng the effects of 18 design variables. The flndlngs for the blocks of fiata were compared with a sample of 350 houses. A list of recommendations is given and the author finally calls for independent research in this field and a new approach to the subject of land use. Keywords:
urban
planning;
com-
munity; social malaise.
Miss Coleman can be contacted at the Department of Geography, King’s
College, London WC2R 3LS.
‘J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York, 1961. 20. Newman, Defensible Space, Collier Books, New York, 1972. Xand Use Research Unit, Trouble in Utopia, to be published.
14
It is commonplace to identify the world’s most serious problem as population growth with its ramifying land use problems of resource loss, including the sterilization of renewable resource soils by urban development . The loss of land could be minimized by accommodating people in compact cities, but all too often it is being maximized by a centrifugal flight of population, leaving up to a quarter of the land unused, both in the inner city which has been abandoned and in the urban fringe that has been diffusely colonized. A hungry world cannot afford such irrational land use extravagance, and it is important to diagnose and remedy the reasons for the inner city’s unattractiveness. In the UK it is no longer possible to lay the blame on old, decaying overcrowded shims. After 37 years of comprehensive planning, our inner city areas are largely new, low-density developments, set in green lawns. Yet all too often this utopia is even more repellent than its predecessor, with worse crime levels, more mental illness, more family breakdown, more people living in fear, and more social malaise of all kinds. Where has our brave new land use gone wrong? In her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs produced perceptive insights into how certain kinds of built environment can impair the normal healthy development of a community structure.’ One sunspot cycle later, Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space turned a fine focus upon housing and identified eight or nine specific design variables that are correlated with levels of crime.* Another sunspot cycle later, the Land Use Research Unit at King’s College London presented its Trouble in Utopia which extends Newman’s work to other kinds of social malaise and doubles the number of design features that can be held responsible.3 It is hoped that remedial action will take place before yet a third sunspot cycle elapses. Newman studied 169 housing estates in New York and established three basic conditions which on the one hand make it easier for criminals to operate and on the other hand make it more difficult for householders to control and defend their territory. The first of these is anonymity, where people no longer feel recognized as individuals in the community, and have become mere units in an impersonal society. In these circumstances criminals feel confident of not being identified, and step up their activities. Barrie Greenbie has shown that the built environment needs to include impersonal areas (distemic space) where people can go about their business without constantly being
0264-6377m4l010014-11$03.00
0 1963 Butterwotth 8 Co (Publishers) Ltd
Urban housing and social malaise
distracted by having to recognize and communicate with others, and also personal areas (proxemic space) where they function as interacting individuals4 Each of these needs its own kind of crime-preventive design, and the tragedy of many modem housing estates is that they have abandoned proxemic designs without achieving distemic ones. Individual households no longer have their own separate territories to control. Instead they are forced to share both the buildings and the grounds of estates of flats with too many people to recognize, or be recognized, as individuals. Control of the territory has been shifted to huge, remote, centralized housing authorities, which are inefficient and unresponsive to their tenants’ needs. Newman has drawn attention to the specific design features which create enforced residential sharing and anonymity, and consequently facilitate crime. The second of Newman’s conditions is lack of surveillance. Designs which are intended to afford privacy to the residents also afford privacy to criminals. The dwelling is not provided with strategically placed windows and doors that allow the householder to oversee his territory and gain speedy access to it if anything is amiss. This seems to be a reaction against the stock figure of ‘the old lady peering through her lace curtains’, but it now emerges that she is misplaced as a figure of fun. In reality she is an important element in naturally self policing communities, and is having to be artificially encouraged by the new and successful community policing programme. Newman’s third condition is the presence of alternative escape routes. Criminals hate culs de sac, whether indoors or out. They are emboldened by the presence of a choice of lifts, staircases, corridors and exits, while multiple overhead walkways linking a great complex of anonymous blocks are as much a paradise to them as they are anathema to the police. Neither Newman’s work, nor that of the Land Use Research Unit to be described in this paper, is deterministic. Badly designed residential environments do not force the inhabitants to become criminals, but they reduce constraints and offer tempting opportunities, and hence make it probable that more of them will turn to crime than if they lived in defensible streets of houses. One cannot therefore point to any one block of flats and argue that its freedom from crime disproves the claim that such designs are detrimental. Instead, one must study a large number of blocks with similar and contrasted designs to ascertain, for example, that only 15% of two-storeyed buildings are likely to be vandalized as compared with 80% of 20-storeyed. The Land Use Research Unit has studied 4082 blocks of flats. These include every block in the two London Boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Southwark, as well as 54 blocks in an estate in Oxford, Blackbird Leys. The land use of each area was mapped at the scale of 1:2500, to include not only 18 design variables for each block but also all the non-residential land uses that provided a context. The work was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust, which also took a constructive and helpful interest in its progress, and the main research team has consisted of Lise Cottle, Rachel Sex, Sarah Brown and Pauline Marshall.
Test measures 48.
Greenbie, Spaces, Press, New Haven, 1982.
Yale
University
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1984
Six kinds of social malaise were chosen as test measures for checking the influence of the 18 design variables. All six are related in greater or lesser degree to the activities of children and reflect the frequent complaints of
Urban housing and social malaise Table 1. The incidence of ths test measure @a %)Test measure
Occurrence in 4082blocks
Litter Graffiti Vandal damage Children in care Urine pollution Faeces
66.99 76.16 36.73 32.64a 26.34b 7.42
parents that blocks of flats are difficult environments in which to bring up families. It is felt that the lack of individual gardens undermines the proper supervision of toddlers at play, while older children can all too easily fall into bad company in the absence of a strong community structure. As well as reflecting the child-rearing problem, the six types of social malaise were selected over a range from mild to very serious. 0
aEstimate based on 2054 blocks. bEstirnatebased on 1765 blocks.
0
0
0
0
Litter measured in and within three metres of the entrance, is thought to be the least serious form of user-behaviour abuse, and it also proves to be the commonest (Table 1). It is classified in three simple groupings; none, clean and casual, and dirty and decayed. Graffiti is the second commonest form of abuse, and C. Redknap has shown that the great majority of it is the work of children.5 It is recorded as none, inside the building only or outside only, and both inside and outside. Vandal damage is more serious and less common. It is recorded as types of target, over 40 of which have been identified. For most analytical purposes the unit used is the number of types per block. This ranges from zero to five, but there are so few blocks with four or five types simultaneously that they have been grouped as a 3-5 class. Excrement in the entrances is still less common. It was initially thought that dog dirt would be dominant, but in practice the role of children seems to be important, especially in blocks located near play areas. Excrement constitutes two of the test measures, as in addition to faeces, mapped for all 4082 blocks, urine pollution was also observed for Tower Hamlets only. The distribution of children in care poses the most serious problem and unfortunately has a higher rate of incidence than the problem of excrement. This test measure could not be observed directly, but data have been supplied by Southwark Social Services Department. For each block it is possible to establish both the number of individual children in care and the number of households involved. Households are considered a better unit, as they do not weight the statistics with the accidents of family size, but in practice both measures produce very similar results. Up to 11 households in each block were found to have children in care.
Design variables
SC. Redknap, The Effect of Entrance Designs in Blocks of Flats, unpublished report to the Nuffield Foundation, 1983.
16
The most infamous design variable is the number of storeys in the block. It has the effect of creating anonymity, since people piled up at different levels do not have the same opportunities of getting to know each other by sight as they would in a street of houses. High slab blocks are even more anonymous than high point blocks because there is a bigger crowd of people using the same building and this is mapped as the number of dwellings in the block. Other size variables are the number of blocks on the site and the total number of dwellings in all those blocks. A different size measure is the number of dwellings accessible from one entrance. This is not necessarily the same as the number in the block. It may be fewer if the block is divided into self-contained sections, or more if other blocks can be reached by overhead walkways. The worst estate mapped has 2268 dwellings accessible without having to set foot on the ground.
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1964
Urban housing and social malaise
Walkways not only increase anonymity; they also provide alternative escape routes for criminals, rioters and other malefactors. Furthermore they increase the range of other escape-route variables: the number of interconnected exits and the number of interconnected vertical routes (lifts and staircases). Corridor design also affects surveillance. Newman noted that singleloaded corridors, with flats on one side only, are open to surveillance from two sides: the public street and the residents’ windows. Doubleloaded corridors, with flats on both sides, cannot be seen from either side; they are screened from street view by the dwellings, and the flats do not have windows on to internal corridors. The present classification also separates out short single and double-loaded corridors with four or fewer dwellings. With hindsight it would seem preferable to record dwellings per corridor as a continuous variable instead of making an arbitrary break at four. Surveillance is most easily exercised if there are ground floor dwellings with a line of view allowing them to monitor who comes into the entrance. Again, with hindsight it would seem preferable to map this condition directly, in addition to what has actually been recorded, ie two variables which exclude ground-floor dwellings; garages occupying the ground floor and blocks built on stilts. Entrance position is also relevant to surveillance, as those which face into the interior of the grounds cannot be observed from the street. The entrance type variable distinguishes blocks with only communal entrances from those which also have individual front doors to groundfloor flats. It was thought that the individual doors would give the ground-floor households some relief from anonymity and stronger powers of surveillance, but in practice they do not seem to be beneficial. This may be because there is rarely a front garden to insulate private dwelling space from common estate space, and the individual doors often face into the grounds rather than onto the street. They might well prove to be desirable if supported by a better layout. The layering of the dwellings is another variable yielding a result in need of explanation. Double-layered maisonettes are systematically worse than flats on a single level, but the fault may lie less in design than in the fact that maisonettes are larger, and intended for bigger families. A British Home Office study6 found that child density was the only socioeconomic variable exerting a stronger effect upon vandalism than Newman’s design variables. The three remaining variables refer to the grounds. One is the number of access points affording entry from the street If there are several, outsiders can take short cuts through the estate and treat it as public space rather than private residential space. The presence of play areas may have a similar effect, often being interpreted as a public facility. Finally, the grounds are classified according to their spatial organization, a composite variable intended to reflect how easily the residents can control the buffer zone between private and public space. If the grounds are shared by so many people that resident control proves unworkable, they are classified as ‘confused space’, using an objective set of criteria. 6s. Wilson and A. Sturman, ‘Vandalism research aimed at specific remedies’, Municipal Engineering, May 1976, pp 705-707.
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1984
General trends The first and simplest
method
of analysis is the use of graphs to show basic
17
Urban housing and social malaise
trends. The design variable is plotted on the x axis, and the test measure on the y axis. For this purpose each measure is considered in the simplest possible way, as either present or absent, and the number of blocks where the abuse is present is shown as a percentage for each value of the design. Each curve is slightly smoothed, using running means based on three consecutive classes. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the test measures by the number of storeys. while Figure 2 relates them to the number of overhead walkways joining each block. Both sets of curves show a clear upward trend; as the design variable worsens, so does the percentage of afflicted blocks. This is generally the case for all 18 of the suspected designs. There are also certain other recurring characteristics. Litter is the commonest form of abuse, and graffiti is always the second most common, gradually converging upon the litter curve as the design worsens. The vandal damage and children in care curves follow closely similar courses. and the two excrement curves are respectively fifth and sixth. Many of the design variables show marked fluctuations at high values. The fluctuations generally take the form of a trough in the upper part of the trend line. The troughs are most clearly marked in respect of those designs which the authorities can most easily recognize as harmful; high rise and large block size. They are least marked in the curves of variables that are not generally recognized. Authorities are unlikely to reduce child densities on the basis of the number of walkways. On the contrary, blocks with walkways are generally fairly low rise, and children are more likely to be decanted into them rather than out; this may be a reason why the children in care curve rises above the damage curve where there are more than three overhead walkways per block. Not all the children are removed as yet and in any case, bad designs still remain stressful for adults. Other test measures. such as psychiatric illness might not show the same irregularities.
Llttsr
loo-
/’ ,/-
go/ 80/ 70 -
/
/
/
/ :
60-
:
:
/
-..
. . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .----‘... .. .. ,... ‘........
._.....” .... . ..’
:
/’
,* /R,.....
,*....
. . ..
..:..
,/ /
/
/ 0 Damage
/
/
‘... Groffltl
/
:... / / /
.:’
/
Figure 1. Distributionof test measures by number of storeys. The dip at around six storeys appears to reflect the policy of reducing child densities in blocks high enough to need lifts. Even though there are fewer children, the various forms of abuse continue to rise as the number of storeys increases. The drop in the children in care curve above 12 storeys is probably the result of a special effort to remove problem families from the worst blocks.
/
/ 0 ._.-. 0. 2
-. I 3
-.
.“N
._.-.-.
-.-.
_.
Faeces
/’
A.-‘-’ I 4
I 5
I1111 6 7 8 910 Number of storeys
I 15
I 20
I 25
:
LAND USE POLICY January 1984
Urban housing and social malaise
~uff~~~oft~~~ by number of overhead walkways. Blodcs w&hwalkwaysare predominant& f~~~~p~~~~~~ blocks may be moved into them. The chikken cb twt cause so much damage there, but retain their in-care status,so the children in care curve rises a&we the vandal damage wwe.
0
0
1
2 Number
3
4
5
6
of overhead walkways
Correlation analysis It is a natural next step to ascertain whether the rising trends shown in the graphs are statistically significant. This can be done by correlating each of the test measures with each of the designs. In this case the separate classes of each measure are used, and not merely their presence or absence. Table 2 shows the significance levels for Southwark and Tower Hamlets. Blackbird Leys is omitted because its 54 blocks do not have the full range of design variables nor the full range of test measure classes, except for litter. Blocks that are boarded up and running down, and blocks containing shops or other facilities are also excluded, in order to consider purely residential and fully occupied blocks only. There are 2017 of these in Southwark and 1570 in Tower Hamlets. As the design data are not normally distributed but highly skewed, and some of the variables are Table 2.
SlgntfiwncehwelsofKendall’s tau C @effkMb. Tcmerliwnlets
soulhwti
Signii7cancff/eve/s V very hiihly significant t-l hi~~s~ff~ S significant - notsignihcant negativelysignificant l
Testmeasures I” Rter G graffiti 0 damage C childrenincam U urine F faeces
l&ND
USE POLlCYJanuary 1984
LGDUF
LGDUF
Number of storeys Bfocksin the astilage Dwellingsin 8x3 bbck Dwellingsin the curtilage DwellingsaccessiblefromoneeftMnce
VVVVV vv--v VVVVH vvvvv vvvvv
vvvvVV-” HVVVV vvvvvvvvv
Number of walkways Sides joinedby walkways Interconnectedexits Vertical circulation Horizontalcirculation
v v v vvvvv vvvvv vvvvv vvvvv
Entrance type Entrance pcsition Buildingson stilts Garages Fiats or maisanettes
VVHVV vvvvv -HVS-vv-v v v
Access (gates or gaps) Spatial organization Ray areas
vvvvv VVHVvvvvs
v .
Nurn~r~~s~~va~
16 18 17 t8 15
15 t6 14 16 8
v
v
_
VVHHVVHHvvvvs vvvvs VVSVS svsv-S-
v
v
:SH-H HH-VH VV-HS v v -HVHVVH-
v
v
19
Urban housing and social malaise
ordinal, Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation is inappropriate and Kendall’s tau C method has been used. Of the 180 coefficients, no fewer than 84.4% are positive and significant, and 67.8% are highly significant. Every design variable is significant for at least half the test measures and every test measure except faeces in Tower Hamlets is significant for at least 80% of the design variables. The coefficients are low in value, as also were Newman’s coefficients for crime, but this is only to be expected in view of the fact that some of the 18 design variables may be offsetting the effect of others present in the same block. Non-design factors, such as child density, may also be exerting an influence. It is certainly not claimed that design factors explain the whole of the various social malaise distributions, but the significance levels confirm the evidence of the trend lines in suggesting that design does contribute an effect. Unfortunately, Kendall’s tau C correlation does not permit the calculation of a coefficient of determination, so it is not possible to specify precisely how much of the variation is statistically explained by each design variable.
Houses A sample of 350 houses have been examined for each test measure for comparison with the 4082 blocks of flats. No graffiti, vandal damage, or excrement are found to occur, and the number of children in care is very small (0.89%). Litter is found in 15% of the single family houses. and virtually doubles in houses converted into flats, but, as Figure 3 shows, both these categories are much better than purpose-built flats. Houses are not only better in themselves; they also seem to exercise a 100 Flats,
Houses and converslons
purpose - built Litter
go/--------
_--70 -
.’
/’
,/*
/ 50-
,:.
//
E &I 40-
0
0’
1’
/ 0
20-
0
.’
Figure 3. Test measures
. . . .G .. . . . ..
Damage
/--
/I
---
/
/
-*\ Houses coverted Into flats
,:. ....
....
1’
I Houses
./’ . ....
L -------__
. . . . ..yf’t’
I
1’ 0’
10-
.:.
.‘. ...... .. ...’
::
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,...,
,,: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..
//
30 -
Ol
__dC --’
/-----
608 s
,/’
)I
80-
Se1 Pul COI
yard
/.-. .-.--,
‘..+ Semipublic single block
-.-._.I Semi confused single block
-
.I’
I Confused single block
I Semi confused multiblock
C
,Faeces ._
I Confused multiblock
D
-._
F .-.-
Row blocks
related to the complexvariable, spatialorganization.
Single family houses are best followed by houses converted into a few flats. The semi-public flats where households are sufficiently few to cooperate in controlling the territory are better than a confused space where control is impracticable. Each type of confused space is improved by giving gardens to ground-floor flats, which is ‘semiconfused’. Such gardens are not effective at the foot of high blocks.
LAND USE POLICY January 1984
Urban housing and social malaise
moderating effect upon nearby flats. This effect gradually wanes as flats replace houses. Table 3 shows how the percentage of blocks affected by each test measure increases as the proportion of flats increases. (This cannot be calculated for children in care or urine pollution as figures are not available for all three areas.) Tower Hamlets, which has the highest concentration of flats, also has the greatest frequencies of abuse, even though the designs are no worse on average than those of Southwark. It would seem that every additional block of flats assists in the deterioration of its neighbours, and this could explain why correlation coefficients are generally lower in Tower Hamlets than in Southwark. It could also explain why the deleterious effect of flats in general took so long to be appreciated. When the trend away from houses first began, the concentration of flats was low, and gave rise to little or no contrast with houses. The steady multiplication of flats has been accompanied by a gradual deterioration, exacerbated by two other factors. Most of the design variables have become more extreme over the years, and an increasing proportion of the population has been forced to live in flats, regardless of whether their family structures or lifestyles are suited to shared residences. There is now a vast over-supply of flats in relation to genuine demand and an under-supply of houses. The result is that flats become increasingly hard to let, while house prices continue to soar. It seems self-evident that there should be a halt called to the building of further flats, and a determined effort to eliminate the shortfall in houses.
Threshold levels Even if no more flats are built, there would still remain an immense number of existing blocks. A whole generation of investment has gone into creating them, and a second generation of investment is now going into improving them, but ‘before and after’ studies indicate that the current expenditure is not generally any more effective than the first round. Levels of litter, graffiti, damage and excrement usually remain the same. Improvement schemes include repairs, modernization, replacement of defective components, landscaping, and the installation of security devices, but the basic designs that generate social malaise in the first place are being overlooked. If design remains bad, then security devices such as entryphones are frequently vandalized. They are only intermittently effective but continually a financial charge. There is a clear need for practical guidelines on design improvements to reduce the various forms of social malaise tested, and quite probably other kinds of problems as well, such as crime (as demonstrated by Newman) and psychiatric illness (as hinted in a preliminary investigation by the Land Use Research Unit). Existing blocks cannot be reduced to the best designs shown by the trend lines for each design variable. Some kind of practical compromise is needed, and this is supplied by finding a threshold level for each variable, Table 3. Abuee levels releted to commWhn
of fItMe.
-of
-of
blOCkSdfOCtdby
reddsnhlares
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1984
Am
-pkdbyfi*
LmcW
Gl-eUlH
Dmnege
Feecea
Blackbird Leys Southwark Tower Hamlets
17 57 77
57.41 76.30 96.71
18.52 69.11 66.97
14.75 90.67 49.97
0.00 7.25 7.66
Urban housing and social malake Table 4. Lllter threshold for type of corMor.
aBetter than expected frequency Worse than expected
Chfland casual llttof
Design value
Lltkf rme
Landings
232a
76oa
31oa
1393
Shared balconies Single-loaded corridors Double-loaded corridors Total
8Ob lsob t9b 572
362b
147b
I 070”
cd’
579 1845 266 4082
t28b 2310
Mltyd desayed lmer
118b 1200
Total
that separates design values having better than expected test measures from those having worse than expected. The method adopted is to compare the observed number of blocks with the statistically expected number for the same design value and test measure class. Better than expected status is accorded when the number of abuse-free blocks exceeds the expected number or the number of abused blocks is less than expected. An example is set in Table 4. The expected value corresponding to each observed value is calculated by the chi-squared formula of multiplying its row total by its column total and dividing the product by the grand total, 4082. For litter, landings are the only better than expected design value, but shared balconies also feature as better than expected for the other measures. Both have four or fewer flats on the same floor. This indicates that the various forms of social malaise would all be ameliorated if blocks with long single-loaded or double-loaded corridors were divided into self-contained sections, each having no more than four dwellings per storey. For most of the design variables the threshold is identical for all the test measures. The thresholds identified are set out in Table 5. Only 15 variables are mentioned rather than 18. The number of dwellings in the curtilage is omitted because it duplicates the combination of blocks in the curtilage and dwellings in the block. The number of sides joined by walkways is omitted as it is sufficiently covered by the number of walkways variable. Garages and stilts are combined as they both function in the same way to exclude dwellings on the ground floor with their superior surveillance quality. But it is not sufficient merely to note these thresholds; they have to be properly understood. Walkways, for example, should be completely removed, but this has been considered too expensive in part of the study Table 5. Threshold levels mcommendad for deslgn Improvement schemes. area, and they have been blocked off instead. This is ineffective and a as the barriers have been vandalized and breached, and Designvalue not waste of money, to exceed local youths soon learn to climb over seven foot brick walls almost in their mfwholdlevelof Design variable stride. 3 Number of storeys It may also be a waste of money to improve a given design variable in a 1 Blocks in the curtilage block where other designs are left unaltered to continue exerting a malign 12 Dwellings in the blodc Dwellings accessible from effect. To avoid this, we have devised a simple package, the disadvan6 the same entrance tagement score, which directs attention to each block as a whole. Number of walkways Interconnected exits Vertical routes Dwellings per corridor
0 1 1 4
Entrance type Entrance position Stilts or ground-floor garages Flats or maisonettes
Communal only Facing the street, butsetback 0 Flats
Access gates or gaps Spatial organization Play areas
1 Semi-public 0
Disadvantagement
score
For each block of flats it is a simple matter to count how many of the design thresholds in Table 5 have been breached. The total number constitutes the disadvantagement score, on a scale from zero to 15. This system of scores appears to be realistic, as the worst scoring estates are those most adversely mentioned by interviewees and also most known to the police. Figure 4 shows the frequency distribution of scores in the study
LAND USE POLICYJanuary 1984
Urban housing and social malaise
0
1
2
3
5
4
7
6
a
Disadvantagement
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
scare
Figure4. Frequency distribution of diidvantagement scores in 4082 blocks of flats. The malority of the blocks have multiple design problems and expendire on improving one design may bs wasted unless others are improved simultaneously.
area and Table 6 shows the probable percentages of abuse occurring in blocks with given scores. The disadvantagement score shows how far deleterious values of one design variable are reinforced or offset by the values of other variables. It is not surprising, therefore, that it has stronger correlations with the various test measures than most of the 18 designs taken separately. When an improvement scheme is mooted for any block of flats it should include a systematic appraisal of every design variable that breaches its threshold and contributes to the disadvantagement score. Each one that can be redesigned below its threshold will reduce the score by one point, and the final score achieved by the scheme is likely to indicate the probability of success. Reducing a score from 14 to 10, for example, may be a waste of money, because 10 is a score at which all the test measures remain worse than expected, and the improvements will probably be destroyed by vandals.
Recommendations Oscar Newman has demonstrated that design amelioration can bring definite improvements, both to the built environment and to the well being of the residents. In the UK, however, where blocks of flats are vastly more varied in design, and where more design variables are implicated, cost-benefit studies still remain to be undertaken. In principle, however, there are indications as to what kinds of design modification are likely to be most beneficial. The removal of overhead walkways between blocks would seem to be a priority; estates with walkways are the most notorious of all. As well as being detrimental in themselves, walkways also increase the upper range of three other variables; interconnected exits, vertical circulation channels and dwellings accessible from the same entrance. All of these could be brought nearer to their threshold levels as a result of walkway removal, even if they do not actually fall below them. Table 6. Probsbllity of social problems st sekted
Scora
LAND USE POLICY January 1984
Llttar
0
44
3 6 9 12 15
67
94 100
GraftI 26 56 66 61 90 90
6 14 30 43 53 62
dlsadva~
aaxw
childml In cam
UrilM
Faeata
12 24 41 46
5 23 33 39
2 3 4 7 13 20
23
Urban housing and social malatie
General
references
A. Coleman, ‘The human habitat’, Built Environment, Vol 6, No 4, 1961, pp 232241. A. Coleman, ‘Defensiblespaceonthemap’, Urban Design Quarterly, February 1983, p 3. ‘Vandalism on council A. Coleman, estates’, Architectural Annual Review, 1983. L.M. Cottle and R.J. Sex, ‘The new residential environment of the inner city’, International Journal of Environmental Studies, Vol 19, 1982, pp 97-101. 0. Newman and K.A. Franck, Housing Children’s Anti-Social Design and Behaviour, Draft report, 1981. 0. Newman, Factors lnffuencing Crime and Instability in Urban Housing National Institute of Developments, Justice, Washington, DC, 1981. S. Wilson and A. Sturman, ‘Vandalism research aimed at specific remedies’, Municipal Engineering, May 1976, pp 705 707. S. Wilson, ‘Vandalism and “defensible space” on London housing estates’, Designing Out Crime, Home Office Research Unit, HMO, London, 1980.
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Attention to spatial organization can also bring multiple benefits. If each block is walled off from others to achieve its own site curtilage with only a single gate fronting on to the street, the score is reduced by two points. If the block is small enough to be reclassified as semipublic as a result of this treatment, a third point can also be subtracted. If it is too large, there may be an opportunity to eliminate confused space by dividing the grounds up into individual front gardens for ground-floor flats. It is desirable to divide bigger blocks into self-contained sections by partitioning long corridors into short landings or balconies. This might necessitate the expense of extra staircases but it would also have side benefits in the reduction of interconnected exits, dwellings accessible and sometimes vertical routes, to their threshold levels. Furthermore, the construction work could include the creation of entrances facing the street in certain cases. It must be stressed, however, that design modifications should not be proposed on a blind rule of thumb basis. It would be pointless to introduce individual gardens below tower blocks where there is a serious risk of dangerous objects being dropped down into them. Some of the worst estates appear to be so perversely designed, that improvements of any one design variable are made impossible by the nature of the others, or by fire regulations. A great deal of ingenuity may be needed to find permissible and workable ways of reducing the disadvantagement score.
Conclusion Residential land use is a major component of cities - a component considered so important that it has been presided over not merely by one land use planning authority but two. The second is the local authority housing department which has substantially replaced private housebuilding firms in many inner city areas, and has used its monolithic power to demolish houses and introduce flats. Despite the good intentions behind this concept of ideal housing, the result has been traumatic for large numbers of residents and a financial burden to the taxpayer and the victims of crime. However, housing authorities are not about to expose their mistakes, and nor have planning departments taken a lead. This illustrates the need for independent research, unhampered by the uneasy knowledge that the research organization is responsible for what may have to be criticized. It also illustrates the need for land use to be treated as an important topic in its own right, and not simply as a mere handmaid to planning.
LAND USE POLICYJanuary
1984