Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

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Control yes, but even more so, prevent it.

If the only response to crime is repressive without managing/anticipating things way ahead, that do favour crime, it's not going to foster peace, neither a family/youth-friendly environment.

As the article series suggests, architecture alone _does_ influence individuals and groups experiences and behaviours. It's been studied and worked on for a long time [1] and it's worth studying further, reporting and repeating as the OP does very well.

1: see Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), Oscar Newman (Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space), C. Ray Jeffery (Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design), Alice Coleman, among others.

Good point and links on architecture. I am so grateful to the architecture student who told me about Jane Jacobs around 1990 and opened my eyes to how much urban architecture design (things like height restrictions as in Philadelphia, unsafe edge effects of big special-purpose areas, sidewalks & porches, and mixed-use zoning) can affect human behavior and "eyes on the street" safety. I also liked the point that new ideas require old buildings (for cheap rents).

This article and your comment makes me think of Lawrence Lessig's "Code 2.0" book where he writes that (at least) four things can shape human behavior:

    * rules
    * norms
    * prices
    * architecture

All are important -- but they influence people in different ways at different times. If we want to have healthy cities, all are worth considering.

Hopefully we could do so in a "Kaizen" approach of incremental improvement and usually small steps within existing cities? But we likely need a lot of new cities too with more housing (perhaps by upgrading towns on existing transit lines). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen

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