Chapter One
Defensible Space: An Introduction

in the worst estates.you're confronted by concrete slabs dropped from on high, brutal high-rise towers and dark alleyways that are a gift to criminals and drug dealers. The police often talk about the importance of designing out crime, but these estates actually designed it in. (British ex-Prime Minister, David Cameron, The Sunday Times, 2016)1

Social scientific knowledge linking environment and behavior precipitated the British shift away from public housing and was used to promote several types of privatization. (Cupers 2016: 183)

'Defensible space' is a highly contested concept and approach to designing out crime, frequently applied to public housing estates in the United Kingdom, North America, Europe and beyond. It is both an urban idea and a policy concept, arguably the most influential concept in built environment crime prevention to date. In this book we use 'defensible space' as a vehicle to explore how movement/mobility/mobilisation (and we discuss how these three are related but different later in this chapter) changes ideas/concepts. In exploring the movement/mobility/mobilisation of defensible space from the United States to the United Kingdom and into English housing policy and practice2 we extend recent work in geography, and indeed urban studies and urban planning more widely, on policy mobilities in a number of critical ways.

The idea of defensible space was introduced to the United Kingdom through a book by North American architect/planner Oscar Newman and a 1974 BBC Horizon television programme on his ideas. Our book traces in detail the dispersal/embedding of the concept of 'defensible space' in England from the 1980s onwards from the point where geographer Alice Coleman reintroduced and popularised it in the English context. For this we revisit Coleman's critique of modernist council high-rises in England in her 1985 book Utopia on Trial, in which she outlines her conceptual (which she hoped to operationalise) account of defensible space. We look in detail at her research and the sometimes quite vicious criticisms of it from other geographers, architects and planners. We use in-depth interviews and oral histories with Coleman herself, and other housing researchers and practitioners from the time, to piece together the story of how this geographer took Prince Charles on a field trip to look at the problem of defensible space on a public housing estate in London, and how she managed to get a one-to-one meeting with Margaret Thatcher, persuading the then Prime Minister to give her £50 million to pilot her ideas for retrofitting council estates with defensible space principles.

We discuss the pilot projects themselves, moving on from Coleman's conceptual treatise to an operational account of defensible space as demonstrated through her Design Improvement Controlled Experiment (DICE), and how this influenced the wider context of English housing policy and practice at the time. The book explores the multiple ways the concept of defensible space was interpreted and implemented, as it circulated from national to local level and within particular English, especially London, housing estates; illustrating how the transfer mechanisms worked at both a policy and practitioner level. Despite being a concept whose principles continue to underpin design guidance (such as Secured by Design [SBD]), defensible space failed to coalesce into a single formal policy, remaining a cluster of associated disputed elements. How these conceptual elements aided or hindered transfer and take-up of the concept is noted by tracking routes to acceptance, the roles of formal transfer mechanisms, informal information sharing by transfer agents traversing networks, or practitioners' local contextualisation of generic guidance. Our research demonstrates the ongoing resilience and acceptance of 'defensible space' from the 1970s into the 2000s, despite multiple criticisms of architectural/environmental determinism, of being unproven scientifically, and the vague and inchoate nature of the concept. More recently, though, there is evidence that defensible space is beginning to be erased, and expunged, from planning and urban regeneration policy. Nevertheless, we argue for greater trust in practitioner experience and on the basis of its continued usage, that defensible space is positively ambiguous, it has neither been proven nor disproven, and as such is a middle-range theory: 'between the minor hypotheses of day to day research and unified theory' (Merton 1967: 39).

Following Flyvbjerg (2001) we show how the simplified dualisms of theory in academia are helpful for polemic thinking and writing but they 'inhibit understanding by implying a certain neatness that is rarely found in real life' (p. 49). Flyvbjerg notes that policy makers get around this messiness by pragmatically asking: 'will this solution work here?' Leaping to a solution is different from understanding a theory, and McCann (2008) is disappointed by the 'paucity of detailed critical geography knowledge of how policy making works' (p. 4). Our book provides much needed insight into this, and in doing so expels some of the myths that good social science will follow a straightforward route into policy. We develop Jacobs and Lees' (2013) earlier account of defensible space on the move based on three further insights: a) that policy does not move as an homogeneous, fully formed piece, but as disaggregated elements (of pre-policy, sub-policy epistemes or practices); b) these fragments of knowledge are translated into policy only in context (in situ); c) that the relationship between academic research and practice is not a simple linear progression of policy appropriating and utilising university created research. The interplay between academic knowledge and policy we describe is complex, contingent and often controversial.

Peck and Theodore (2010a) recognise that policy transfer is often disrupted by the messy realities of policy making at the ground level, yet little reference is made in the existing policy mobilities literature to the messy realities of practice. Although recent reviews, like those discussed later in this chapter, provide a very useful overview of (conceptual) evolution in the field of policy transfer/mobilities, 'they do not provide an overall explanation of policy transfer processes and outcomes' (Minkman et al. 2018: 224). This book fills that gap by looking at how defensible space was put into practice in England, addressing McGuirk's (2016: 94) request for research on 'the "how" questions of practice'. Much of the policy mobilities literature also only follows one or two mechanisms of transfer; in this book we follow a dozen or so mechanisms, showing a far messier and more interconnected reality than the literature suggests. In doing so we elaborate on the challenges of tracing power and the role evidence plays within the policy making process. This has lessons for the utilitarian turn in social research that happened in the 1990s. We argue that to some degree it does not matter if defensible space is a fundamentally poor idea/concept (which we discuss in terms of both its strengths and weaknesses); what is more important is its mis/match with policy contexts or success/failure due to the personalities involved. That defensible space has moved into the mainstream, without definitive proof or consistent government support, is due in no small part to Coleman's geographical work. Despite the uncertainty surrounding it, defensible space continues to be promoted as a powerful and influential way of salvaging so called 'sink' estates, as the former Prime Minister David Cameron, like other Prime Ministers before him, called them. The ideology of contemporary estate demolition in the United Kingdom has drawn heavily on the US Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOPE VI programme of public housing demolition and renewal which itself draws on defensible space principles to rectify the problems of past failed projects (see Popkin et al. 2004).

In the round, this book makes an important conceptual contribution to policy mobilities thinking, but also to policy and practice, explaining practitioners' handling of complex spatial concepts, through the practical application of an idea that is, as we show, a middle-range theory. We also use a primary transfer agent (a geographer - Alice Coleman) and a concept (defensible space) to reflect on the role and contribution of British geography in English housing/planning policy. Our conceptual framework looks at positionality, context, multiple perspectives, ambiguity and mutability. The irony being that Coleman's positivist, non-negotiable view would totally reject this interpretation as too complex. Although Coleman is the primary transfer agent, we also discuss attendant ones, including one influential individual who acts as a foil to Coleman's views. Nonetheless, Coleman is a useful prompt through which to explore the conflated cluster of sometimes contradictory concepts that are gathered together under the umbrella of defensible space. As an unusual geographer and scholar, known not only for her eclecticism - in Maddrell's (2009) view 'a polymath generalist'- but also for her outspoken views and right wing politics, it is remarkable the extent to which her radical view was applied consistently and rigorously. Like herself, Coleman's take on defensible space was uncompromising, rather than fluid...