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Comment by durkie | Hacker News Reader

Geoff Manaugh, author of this blog, has a fun book called "A Burglar's Guide to the City", discussing how city layouts influence the types of crimes committed there.

One example that I remember talks about the differences between Los Angeles and New York City: at one point in the 1990s, LA was the bank robbery capital of the world, averaging over 1 per day for a while, but bank robberies rarely happen in NYC. When you compare their layouts, it makes total sense: LA was built around the car. The pattern of "highway offramp, bank next to the road, highway onramp" was everywhere throughout LA. Robbing a bank in NYC would be just so much harder: parking is more difficult, traffic is slower, way more people around to identify you, etc.

It's a good read.

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You are wrong about the average of one per day. But not in a good sense:

"In 1980s Los Angeles, a bank was robbed every hour (2019)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25511220

To be fair, they said "over one per day", so they weren't really wrong, just imprecise.

One of the early entries in this "genre" is Ornament and Crime by Adolf Loos, from 1910.

"The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects," Loos proclaimed, thus linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts. Loos's work was prompted by regulations he encountered when he designed a building without ornamentation opposite a palace. He eventually conceded to requirements by adding window flower boxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_and_Crime

Loos is very interesting in the current context, as he associated ornamentation with savagery, while many contemporary "civilizationists" (take this label with a massive grain of salt) associate modernism with the International style and a supposed erasure of culture in favor of "globalism" (while also couching their negative views of an encroaching other in much the same language as Loos).

Ironically, you can read it all as a sort of window dressing for a core of xenophobia, as that's the only thing consistent across the two.

My favorite bits from that book were the ones about people living in unseen spaces inside of department stores & malls.

The title of the post immediately made me think about that book. (Not a coincident, as it became clear when clicking :))

I found the book too repetitive and cursory, employing pop-culture movie references too much.

The research that went into the book (as it can be seen from the bibliography) is immense, but for me the book was underwhelming for the potential it had based on the immense knowledge the author has accumulated from those sources. It is still worth a read for those interested in the topics of heists or city planning, but has wasted its potential in my eyes.

Anything in there about highly ornamental gargoyles etc, grappling hooks and cat burglaries? ;)

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