Design, Crime Prevention, and the White Imagination
For architects, planners, and other designers of the built environment, whiteness permeates everything we do; from how we are taught and teach others, to the tenets of our practice.
Design, Crime Prevention, and the White Imagination
By Emily Hays and Derrick McDonald
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The national discourse on policing that followed provided a platform for inquiry into dominant, persisting, and pervasive narratives of safety and security:
Whose security?
Security of which values?
Security against what?
BIPOC designers, notably the collective Design as Protest, called for strategies to dismantle the privilege and power structures that use architecture and design as tools of oppression, and specifically demanded designers “Cease the Implementation of Hostile Architecture & Landscapes.”
DAP defines hostile architecture and landscapes as “design tactics that purposefully restrict specific behaviors in public spaces. The tactics can appear as design guidelines such as Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), exclusionary design elements, and acts of surveillance. Hostile architecture has historically been encouraged under the guise of safety, but its implementation disproportionally excludes marginalized groups from houseless people to Black, Brown, Indigenous & Asian communities. These efforts often criminalize Blackness, promote unwarranted interaction with the police, and center crime prevention over community power.”
A close inquiry of hostile architecture, specifically the origins and implementation of CPTED, reveal the myth of safety and security by which white supremacy is imagined, made, and maintained.
For architects, planners, and other designers of the built environment, whiteness permeates everything we do; from how we are taught and teach others, to the tenets of our practice. The professionalized practices, pedagogies, and policies that are used to make and maintain space are intellectual artifacts of a white, cis, able-bodied, male imagination. This dominant and homogenized way of knowing has been normalized in institutions of design, law, and education, resulting in a worldview that holds the presence, perspectives, and experiences of white Americans — especially males — as “normal,” as the default. This default to a specific embodiment of whiteness is the foundation of white supremacy and its enabling practices.[i]
The dominant narrative of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is that design and other interventions in the built environment can reduce the incidence and fear of crime. The CPTED movement can be traced back to Jane Jacobs and her critique of contemporary planning practice in The Life and Death of Great American Cities. The concepts now called First Generation CPTED were solidified in the early 1970s with the architect Oscar Newman’s book Defensible Space and criminologist C. Ray Jeffery’s Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.
Four components of First Generation CPTED have been widely adopted in jurisdictional design guidelines and embedded in architectural practice. HACKER 2021
Crime is not a universal force that society must work to mitigate and manage. Crime is a classification of behavior that people in power determine as illegitimate or undesirable.
In sociology, crime is any deviant behavior that violates prevailing norms, or “cultural standards prescribing how humans ought to behave normally.” [ii] Criminalization, a legal function of social control, uses the threat of punishment as a deterrent for engagement in “criminal” activity. As cultures change and the political environment shifts, societies criminalize and decriminalize certain behaviors, which directly affects social perception of crime and deviant behavior.
Crime is not a universal force that society must work to mitigate and manage. Crime is a classification of behavior that people in power determine as illegitimate or undesirable. Understanding that crime is produced by those in power is the first step to revealing how CPTED functions to reinforce dominant narratives that conceal, preserve, and protect whiteness. CPTED does not reduce the incidence and fear of crime. By orienting design to a socially produced criminal element, CPTED functions to produce the site and setting in which crime occurs.
Take for instance, the concept of “foreseeable danger,” which frames crime-related risk in a manner that renders the threat of crime and disorder imminent. CPTED tells us that crime is inevitable. This risk of crime is emphasized for property owners in the concept of “compliance through liability,” establishing what appears to be an undeniable need for CPTED.[iii] This is a legitimizing effect of the state, which relies on its ability to enact violence in retaining power.
CPTED proponents and practitioners also use these apolitical frames to imply that the process of differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate users of social space is based on objective criteria. However, assumptions about race, gender, age, and socio-economic status, for example, often become the grounds upon which people are classified as legitimate or illegitimate users of social space. CPTED legitimizes the spatiality of wealth, hetero- and cis-normativity, able-bodiedness, whiteness, and masculinity while delegitimizing the spatiality of Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness, and disability through criminalization.
To assert that safety is requisite and something that must be designed for is to imagine that safety is not something that all people want or have. It is to be complicit in the unsafety of others, to imagine an “other” condition. It is to acknowledge the precarity our society creates for people and imagine a limiting factor on who becomes exposed to that danger, thereby entrenching the condition of safety and unsafety.
Consider surveillance, a critical component of CPTED. The surveillance of Blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm. Surveillance practices and policies not only produce norms pertaining to race, they actively exercise a power to define what is in or out of place. Where public spaces are shaped for and by whiteness, some acts in public are abnormalized by way of racializing surveillance and then coded for disciplinary measures. [iv] These enactments of surveillance manifest boundaries along racial lines, often resulting in discriminatory and violent treatment. The resulting disciplinary action is spectacular and episodic, making everyone aware of the presence of power, represented most frequently by law enforcement.
The criminal justice system is just one mechanism that maintains the privilege and power structure of the political-economic order. The most privileged in our society have unequal influence on who and what is labelled deviant or criminal. In a society based on the institution of private property, theft is inevitably a significant category of crime. In the same way, when people "leave" society, they are labelled deviant and are subject to police harassment because they have refused to participate in productive labor. It’s no coincidence that the criminalization of homelessness in the United States began shortly after the emancipation of enslaved people. To this day, the regular execution of people experiencing homelessness and mental disability throughout this country, and particularly in the city of Portland, are clear examples of how these interconnected mechanisms of oppression evolve to criminalize behaviors that are inconsistent with productivity, individualism, and other hallmark values of whiteness.
Territorial reinforcement creates a spatial order - based on a specific system of property ownership - that operates as an enabling site of power and privilege.
These mechanisms are bolstered by a process of city building that pushes for the privatization of all non-commodified public spaces, while simultaneously supporting policies that increasingly militarize facets of these spaces.[v] Zoning, policy, and city code are mechanisms that the owning-class has used effectively to design and build the reality of our society’s spatial experience. We see time and time again that it is the safety and security of businesses, their owners, and their property that is protected at the cost of Black, Indigenous, and unhoused people. To employ design methodology that perpetuates this violence of whiteness is to be complicit in the oppression of others.
As designers with agency to make and maintain space, we need to be cognizant of the way that CPTED capitalizes on dominant narratives of safety and security to increase surveillance, limit access, and control space.
Black, Indigenous, and feminist imaginations conceive of safety and security within the context of settler colonialism. Without the context of colonialism, they would very likely consider spatial conditions differently, and the spatial expressions of their concepts of safety and security would undoubtedly differ from the conceptions that we endure today. The challenge is finding ways to bring stories from people with this lived experience into conversation with the dominant narratives about the design and construction of spaces that are used to oppress them.
This entry is the first in a three-part series. Future posts will focus on counter-narratives of safety and the alternative futures that are possible through the imagination of BIPOC designers.
[i] Frances Lee Ansley, Stirring the Ashes: Race Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship, 74 Cornell L. Rev. 993 (1989)
[ii] Crime. (2020, December 15). Retrieved July 13, 2021, from https://socialsci.libretexts.org/@go/page/8143
[iii] Parnaby, Patrick F. Designs of Risk: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, Social Control, and the Prospects of Professionalism. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2005.
[iv] Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
[v] Giroux, Henry A. “The Terror of Neoliberalism: Rethinking the Significance of Cultural Politics.” College Literature 32, no. 1 (2005): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2005.0006.
