Defensible space on the move: revisiting the urban geography of Alice Coleman Abstract

Armed with this evidence Coleman then produced ‘design disadvantagement scores’ which were calculated by adding together threshold disadvantagement values for each design variable based on abuse indicators. The higher a block of flats’ disadvantagement score, the higher the percentage number of blocks affected by the indicators of ‘abuse’. Coleman’s findings, she argued, demonstrated clearly the negative social impacts of certain types of housing design, most notably multi-storey blocks of flats.

Coleman’s 1985 book Utopia on Trial: Visions and Reality in Planned Housing, summarized the findings of this project. It presented her findings in the style of a court room trial. The accused, ‘suspects’, were the bad housing design features, the case for the prosecution presented the evidence of the trend curves that linked indicators of social malaise to design disadvantagement indicators, and the ‘corrective measures’ entailed rehabilitating the offenders’ (essentially multi-storey flats) through design interventions embedded in estate improvement programmes. The prosecution, with Coleman as prosecutor, won. Utopia was a trenchant critique of multi-unit, public housing in general, and the modernist council tower block in particular (Towers, 2000:113-117). Coleman (1985) saw this typology (and flats in general) as failed utopias that ‘aimed to liberate people from the slums but (came) to present an even worse form of bondage’ (p.180). She made three main recommendations: that no more flats should be built, that house designers should renounce the layouts of the last decade, and that existing flats should be modified to remove their worst design features. Such modifications included dismantling overhead walkways, dividing up the ‘confused’ space of large communal green areas into individual gardens, etc.

‘Coleman’s dismissal of the influence of poverty is based on an unsound method and an inadequate theoretical analysis. Her recommendations for policy are in consequence a diversion from the real needs and issues’ (Spicker, 1987:283).

A particularly forensic re-examination of Coleman’s methods was presented by the then early career geographer Susan Smith. Her review of Coleman’s work in the influential journal Urban Studies trawled through the statistical irrationalities of Coleman’s self declared ‘accurate factual observations’, ‘scientific tests’ and ‘fair and unbiased’ evidence. Smith concluded that:

‘Coleman has used her armoury of statistics to shoot herself in the foot….She has done nothing…to clarify our understanding of relationships between dwelling design and the quality of life, and her recommendations are dangerous in offering politicians and planners an over-simplistic, yet superficially appealing, panacea for the complex social problems of urban communities in an ailing economy’ (Smith, 1986: 246).

A common thread in criticism of Coleman's approach was its grounding in architectural determinism, which contended that the built environment caused people to behave in certain ways. Not even architects wanted to claim this power. Bill Hillier, at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, argued that Coleman’s claim to have established a ‘scientific’ correlatiom between design features and social malaise was unfounded:

‘Her method of quantification of malaise is flawed, her correlations largely illusory and her attempt to test for social factors desultory’ (Hillier, 1986:39).

As architectural historian Jeremy Till (1998:66) later reflected:

‘To promote, say, balcony access over chronic unemployment as the cause for social unrest is symptomatic of a determinist approach to architecture [that is] extraordinarily misinformed [and] extraordinarily dangerous. Misinformed because, in its focus on architecture alone, it conveniently overlooks the wider social and political structures that contribute to the production and inhabitation of the built environment; dangerous because of the political amnesia that it thereby induces.".

Coleman was clearly upset by these negative peer reviews, and even now when she reflects upon them one can feel her sense that they were unjust in the face of her ‘facts’. When asked what she thought about the reactions to Utopia on Trial, Coleman’s account recalls the good with the bad:

‘Well, the first year it was wonderful... everybody reviewed it. I took people out, you know, famous people from the various papers and so on. And they gave me big reviews about it... And then at the end of the year I began to get some very bad reviews from people who didn’t like it and just cooked up what they could say against it. For example...the architectural correspondent of The Guardian, wrote a most dreadful review on it...And he obviously hadn’t even read it, he couldn’t have read it because he couldn’t have written what he had, you see. Anyway, his editor decided that it would be nice if he interviewed me. So he rang me up: “Can I come and see you?”. I said, “no”. “No? Why not?” [he asked]. I said “well, because of what you have written about me, you obviously hadn’t read it, you haven’t got it right”. “Oh”, he said, “you win some, you lose some, isn’t it the same with you?” I said, “no. I’m an academic and I am trying to get it as accurate as I can the whole time”. So that was that. Then, to my surprise, he wrote another review in the same paper, same author, same book, glowing. He had read it!’ (Coleman interview , 2010).

Coleman is especially clear about the injustice of the critique that she worked within a simple environmental determinist model. Being a geographer, where there was a history of debate about environmental determinism, her views are well formed in this regard:

‘I don’t think it’s right to say that determinism is a bad thing….My work is not determinist. It is probabilistic… all this deterministic business I think it’s... talk about nothing’ (Coleman interview, 2010).

‘we are not dealing with determinism….Bad design does not determine anything, but it increases the odds against which people have to struggle to preserve civilised standards’ (1985: 83).

Despite all the academic criticism, Coleman's work (like Newman’s before it) gained important allies, a process The Architect’s Journal (1990) termed ‘Colemanisation’, and Coleman herself ‘The Thatcher Project’. In 1987 her work was the main impetus for an important 'Rehumanizing Housing' conference (Teymur, Markus and Wooley, 1988) in which the pathology of twentieth-century housing became top of the agenda for British architects (Harwood and Powers, 2008). There were also other receptive ears to the line of argument being forwarded in Utopia on Trial, some of them very powerful. According to Coleman, The Prince of Wales, who had an emerging interest in architecture and inner city rehabilitation, read the book on his way back from a visit to Australia. He was so impressed with what he read that he contacted Coleman and asked her to tour three of the estates she had worked on with him (see Figure 3). The event has entered into modern London folklore, as indicated by this account by public historian, Patrick Wright:

‘One fabled day in March 1986, he (Prince Charles) boarded a battered orange minibus hired from a left-wing community group in Tower Hamlets, and journeyed through the city in a company that included geographer, Alice Coleman, architects John Thompson and Richard McCormac, and Nicholas Falk urban planner and environmentalist who organized the trip. The party visited the notorious Aylesbury Estate in Southwark and then zig-zagged up through East London into Hackney, where the Prince alighted, boarded a more reputable-looking official car, and drove around the corner for the opening of Lea View House in Hackney, a pre-war housing estate which had been refurbished by Hackney Council’s Direct Labour Organization, according to a model scheme of “community architecture”...’ (Wright, 2009:297).

INSERT Figure 3 here

With all this attention it is no wonder that Alice reflected: “I thought politically it was going places” (Coleman interview, 2008). She and her science did indeed go to some very influential places. For example, she became part of the ‘shifting kitchen cabinet’ established by The Prince of Wales to help him form his increasingly controversial, public interventions around architecture in Britain. These advisors, Raines (1988: 11) noted, ‘would never be allowed into the bland policy briefings set up by Government’, yet their ideas, and those of Coleman particularly, shaped the Princes’ ‘urban planning philosophy’ [10]. Convinced of the policy relevance of her research a determined Coleman then contacted all the political parties in England, and wrote directly to Margaret Thatcher in December 1987 (see Figure 4). She was invited to a brief (10 minute) meeting with the influential Conservative advisor Sir Keith Joseph, who was Secretary of State for Education and Science at the time. She went into that meeting armed with one of her graphs. According to Coleman, once he had seen this graph he was convinced and immediately ‘alerted’ the Cabinet. Coleman and her science began to circulate more widely in Conservative political spheres. In the same year she was invited to address the Spring Conservative Party meeting, attended by Thatcher’s then Housing Advisor, William Waldegrave. Again, Coleman recounts, just one hearing of her lecture sent him reporting back to Thatcher.

Finally, Alice Coleman was invited to meet face to face with Margaret Thatcher. In Coleman’s narrative of her science in (policy) action she places this meeting centre stage. It happened in Downing Street in the January of 1988. Present were Coleman, Thatcher and two Advisors (one of whom was William Waldegrave). Coleman was given an entire half hour. In Guest (1990) Coleman reflects ‘She (Thatcher) was very business-like, I was quite amazed by her speed of thinking’. Coleman recollects with precision and pride her own performance:

“I had been warned she might grill me, but she does not grill you. She only grills you if you do not know the answers, I had 35 man-years of research behind me and so I knew my stuff and I handled her questions’ (Coleman interview, 2008).

Once again Coleman turned to her scientific ‘facts’ to make her case. Unlike her earlier meeting Coleman did not take an actual graph with her on that day, but she nonetheless had to hand an inscription of sorts. She began to draw a graph in the air in order to demonstrate to Thatcher the scientific basis of her arguments. It was she reflected ‘a sort of invisible visual’ (Coleman interview, 2010):

‘I was at one point drawing a graph in the air and I said ‘I liked graphs’, and she [Thatcher] joked back, so did she” (Coleman interview, 2008).

Coleman recalls this as a moment of recognition and persuasion, based on their shared commitment to a scientific model of thinking:

‘Remember she was a scientist. ... It appealed to her because it was something which was really backed up. She had read the book, she knew what it was about and she was asking supplementary questions’ (Coleman interview, 2008).

Convinced by Coleman’s ‘invisible visible’ Thatcher allied with her science, or at least with what her science might serve. As Coleman put it: “She was very keen on it” (Coleman interview, 2008). Thatcher "got straight to the point" and asked Coleman: "what do you want?" Coleman specified 5 years of financial support for trialling methods for design improvement. According to Coleman, in that very meeting Thatcher asked her when she could leave her job at King’s and start, the idea being that Coleman and her team would attach to either the Home Office or the DoE. Coleman’s re-telling imposes upon this encounter a sense of urgency: ‘Two days later I got a letter from her telling me to see Nicholas Ridley, then environment secretary. From then on it was in the bag, just a matter of waiting’ (interview in Guest, 1990:20).

John Harvey, the then head of the Environment Agency in the DoE, similarly recalls the direct manner in which government endorsement materialized:

‘I got a phone call one day from the Secretary of State’s office, “oh Professor Alice Coleman is here with the minister (Nicholas Ridley), can you come up?”’... Harvey ran up to the Secretary of State’s office but the discussion had ended and Alice Coleman was coming out. ‘Ridley said: “John, you can take Professor Coleman and explain to her how we’re going to run this....I’ll fill you in later”. Coleman said: “Right, it’s been decided that I’m running this project, and I’ll need £150 [sic] million”. So it was they had this plan and Mrs Thatcher said Alice Coleman needs the money because it’s such an important social experiment, we must test it and see if it works, it’s going to have a huge impact...So she (Thatcher) said: “how much does it cost to renovate an estate, say a typical 1000 dwelling estate?” ... Oh you know £10 million. “We need to have 10 of these”, she said. So we’re looking at £100 million or whatever. Figures plucked out of the air! So I was told to find £150 million for Coleman and the idea was it would come out of the estate action budget’ (excerpted from interview undertaken by Elanor Warwick, 2011).

Subsequently both Sir Keith Joseph and then Michael Heseltine were to visit Coleman at King’s College London where she showed them her work. Roma Beaumont (the geography department’s cartographer at the time) recollects that the departmental seminar room was set up with various large displays showing Coleman’s results and again featuring her persuasive trend lines (Beaumont interview, 2011).

A short time later, through a very sceptical DoE, Thatcher’s promised financial support materialized. The £50m grant was to facilitate the creation of what Nicholas Ridley called the Design Improvement Controlled Experiment (DICE)[11]. DICE and its activities comprised just one strand of a wider shift in central government housing resources to estate refurbishment: from £45million in 1986-7 to £373 million in 1994-5 (Lund, 1996: 128). In DICE a multi-disciplinary team led by Coleman was to work closely with architects and embed her ‘corrective measures’ for design disadvantagement into the physical fabric of seven selected estates in London (see Coleman et al., 1988, Coleman; 1992). The first estate to undergo design improvement was the Mozart Estate in Westminster, where four overhead walkways were removed in order to break up a string of 23 linked blocks. According to DICE, the local beat police reported that this change ‘resulted in a sudden 55% drop in the burglary rate’ (Stage 111 Design Improvement proposals, 1992, DICE Consultancy, King’s College London, Alice Coleman’s team, see http://transact.westminster.gov.uk/CSU/Policy_and_Scrutiny_Committees/Archived_Scrutiny_Committees/Community_Safety/15_June_2009/Item%204_Appendix.pdf ).

The emergence of DICE marked an irrefutable institutional and material instantiation of Coleman’s translation of Newman’s urban design methods. Yet this happened in a sceptical, even resistant, bureaucratic context and most certainly against the advice of the then Secretary of State (George Younger) who, one academic commentator suggests, got ‘handbagged’ by Thatcher (excerpted from interview undertaken by Elanor Warwick, 2011, with Paul Wiles, Professor of Criminology at Sheffield University at the time). Certainly, the final sum to come to Coleman was somewhat short of initial promises suggesting that Whitehall had some moderating effect. Furthermore, although Thatcher had promised Coleman access to crime statistics, so that her science could better replicate that of Newman’s, these were never forthcoming from the Police. As soon as they were able the DoE subjected DICE and its findings to an independent evaluation, conducted by Price Waterhouse (DoE, 1991). That (somewhat political) report concluded that Coleman’s design improvements had only a moderate impact and were neither cost effective nor proven (see also Osborn and Shaftoe, 1995, for a critique of DICE).

Mediating defensible space on the move

We can see in Coleman’s account of her science entering policy that a central role was played by powerful élites, and in Coleman’s and others’ accounting - Prime Minister Thatcher herself. As Thatcher was later to recall:

Unlike much recent work on policy mobilities that positions them as something new and indicative of the contemporary rise in reflexive governance, an accelerated transnationalization of policy norms and practices, and the increased mobility of policy techniques and policy makers, this study shows that policy mobilities are not new. There are urban histories of the transfer and translation of policy (and pre-policy) ideas and these happened during quite different political contexts and at a different speed to the fast policy transfers that now seem to characterize neoliberal urban governance.

Our account of the movement of Oscar Newman’s science of ‘defensible space’ shows that this was not a smooth model of ‘transfer’, whereby one well-formed and immutable concept transferred from one jurisdiction to another. As Peck and Theodore (2010) note: ‘mobile policies rarely travel as complete ‘‘packages,” they move in bits and pieces—as selective discourses, inchoate ideas, and synthesized models—and they therefore ‘‘arrive” not as replicas but as policies already-in-transformation’. Coleman acted as a ‘transfer agent’ (Stone, 2004) for the movement of the concept of defensible space from New York to London, this was not replication though, rather it was non-linear reproduction very much linked to the political medium in which these sciences were in action. For example, by the time Coleman's version of defensible space was attracting interest and investment, Newman's project was as Coleman (interview, 2008) put it "a bit chastened". Although, as Towers (2000:114) notes, Newman’s work was more diminished than eclipsed by its controversial take up by Coleman.

Although an ambivalent and rarely mentioned part of the history of urban geography it has relevance for thinking about the relationship between science and the public sphere, and the growing emphasis under the previous New Labour administration on ‘evidence based policy making’ (Cabinet Office, 1999). This account of Coleman's science in (policy) action shows ‘policy based evidence’ rather than ‘evidence based policy’. Politicians design the policy first, then collect the supportive evidence to support it. Academics are not really in control of ‘impact’ nor is social scientific knowledge transfer simply about the robustness of the social science, rather it is very much about the politics of the time/moment. The concept of defensible space had hegemonic compatibility with Thatcherism and as such was ‘ideologically anointed or sanctioned’ (Peck and Theodore, 2010:171). It moved from science to policy not so much because it was factual, but because it passed through what Kingdon (1995) calls a ‘policy window’. Staeheli and Mitchell (2005) have argued that what makes (geographical) research relevant cannot be separated from questions of why the research should be relevant, how research becomes relevant, the goals of research, and for whom it is intended to be relevant. In this sense, the determination of relevance is a social and political process. We should not then assume that quality (detailed and rigorous empirical work), socially relevant (an unquestioning relevance to the policy realm) geography can (and ought to) influence policy (see also Rogers, 2005).

Arguably Alice Coleman had one of the greatest policy impacts in British human geography in the 1980s and 1990s. She certainly is at the top, or very near to the top in terms of the research income she generated – well over £50 million! Yet her academic reputation was much less influential and in the recent history of geography she barely appears at all. The oft cited academic success stories of the 1980s and 1990s in geography are Marxist critical theorists, yet they were, for the most part, a public policy failure. We can thus contrast academically influential but impact light theoretical work with work that fared poorly in the peer review process but found its political moment and was high impact.

Coleman’s work on defensible space had ‘impact’ because there was nascent support for the idea (driven by political demand) but it would likely never have gotten that far without the transfer agent herself – Alice Coleman. Here we can see that social scientific knowledge transfer can also be associated with the ‘cult of personality’, as we can see with the more recent story of the influential personality scholar, Richard Florida . Coleman is a determined woman who is full of self-belief and who believed wholeheartedly in the concept of ‘defensible space’ and the veracity of her design disadvantagement science. She took great strides to make her science heard and was very successful. The critiques of her work at the time were no less ideologically driven than her work itself.

By situating an urban social science and by charting the way in which personality driven social science develops and travels we have helped to uncouple the assumption that ‘research equals evidence’ (Duncan, 2005) and that the best research gets funded. Furthermore, we advance Pratt’s (2004:736) call for inquiry into the ‘national and indeed specific urban cultures of academic influence within policy debate’. This is important in terms of the UK higher education ‘impact agenda’, where ideologically aligned scholarship will be linked into both research funding and policy contexts.

In a 2010 blog – Alice Coleman wrote:

‘Someone suggested that DICE would be just as illusory as Modernism but there is a fundamental difference. Modernism was untested speculation by people trying to make a name for themselves, but DICE is based on multiple strands of hard scientific evidence. Margaret Thatcher would have spread DICE principles universally but Labour seems wilfully ignorant and one of its methods of increasing crime has been raising the proportion of flats in new dwellings to 55 per cent. As flats come to outnumber houses, they even undermine house-dwellers’ coping ability, and several people admonishing tearaways outside their homes have been killed. It is good that London’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, favours houses with gardens’ (see http://www.singleaspect.org.uk/?p=2363; also cited in Coleman, 2009:12)

She stands by her science, her geography!

[1] This paper draws on specific material from a much wider study we are working on, alongside Elanor Warwick, who was previously Head of Research at CABE and is currently undertaking a part-time PhD in Geography at King’s College London. That wider collaboration focuses on the up take of the concept of defensible space and related, second generation, design-based crime prevention interventions such as the UK’s Secured by Design (http://www.securedbydesign.com/).

[2] Alice Coleman was born in Paddington in 1923, she graduated from Birkbeck with a degree in Geography in 1947 and took up a lectureship in geography at King’s College London in 1948.

[3] We were interested to see Alice’s reaction to the estates she had redesigned over 10 years earlier. We stopped for a while on Alice Lane in Bow, a street in East London named for her.

[4] Alice was also in communication with us via written letters between 2008-2010.

[5] At a later stage in the research we will also be interviewing those who worked with Oscar Newman and Alice Coleman and more of those who were critical of Coleman’s ideas in the UK – including architects and other academics, many of them geographers.

[6] The characteristics on which this business award was made were that the winner be bold, audacious, daring, entrepreneurial, innovative; profitability was important as was benefit to generic industry and the nation as a whole.

[7] Nevertheless, Coleman had to start a petition at King’s College London to get female academics allowed into the male dining and common rooms and Coleman was not promoted to professor until two years before she retired, this she put down to sexism in the academy: ‘That was the anti-woman business, I think, yes’ (interview with Coleman, 2008). The context of gender cannot be ignored but it is not the direct focus of this paper.

[8] The New York City Housing Authority had its own police force tasked with attending to crime in public housing estates and produced a unique, spatially accurate data set on criminal behaviour.

[9] Defensible Space has become a planning best seller and the concept is now common parlance among planners. Newman’s research led to the setting up of The Defensible Space Institute, now The Institute for Community Design Analysis, Inc. - a not-for-profit corporation (see www.defensiblespace.com/institute.htm). In Britain Newman’s defensible space principles have been absorbed into many estate improvement schemes and British design guidelines (Warwick, 2009).

[10] Other members of Prince Charles shifting ''kitchen cabinet'' of advisers included characters such as Lady Rusheen Wynne-Jones, of the preservationist group - The Londoners Society and Jules Lubbock, architectural critic of the left-wing New Statesman (Raines, 1988).

[11] Interestingly Coleman refers to DICE as Design Improvement Care for the Environment (eg. Coleman, 2009).

[12] For example, although Thatcher created many radical housing policy changes, in many cases the course towards these changes – including housing privatization - had been set in earlier Labour government policy (Jones and Murie, 2006).