From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Aug 12 1998 - 08:48:50 MDT
Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> writes:
> What if we looked at violence as a health problem??
An interesting post by Hara Ra.
After visiting Arcosanti during my trip to the states I began to think
about the up- and downsides of modern cities. I have noted that many
of the problems encountered in city life are to some degree avoidable,
if environments, systems and institutions are designed
properly. Soleri suggested "legislating by design", and I think he has
a point. Instead of coercing people to behave well, make the
environment such that they will behave well.
Vandalism is an example. People vandalize property more often if it
can be done anonymously and especially if it doesn't seem to belong to
anybody in particular - things that clearly belong to someone are less
often vandalized (this also holds for cleaning up common rooms; a kind
of tragedy of the commons). Vandalism is higher in entranceways and
semi-public places, but even a low wall (purely symbolic) can decrease
vandalism by making and entrance or building wall private. Newman
proposed the idea of defensible space: create areas that are clearly
defined and seems to belong to the residents of the area (and not just
some impersonal force like "everyone", the remote landlord etc). Since
this is someone's territory, people are less likely to vandalize it
(both since they might get seen by a resident who might be more likely
to react and since it is someone else's territory - never
underestimate the old primate signals!). This seems to have been borne
out in experiments, where vandalism and crime decreased markedly in
areas where the buildings were designed with this in mind.
Newman 1972, Defensible Space, Macmillan, New York
Fowler, McCall and Mangione 1979, Reducing Residential Crime and Fear:
The Hartford Neighborhood Crime Prevention Program. Government
Printing Officem Washington DC
Wilson 1978, Vandalism and 'defensible space' on London housing
estatesm in R. Clarke, Tackling Vandalism. Home Office Research Study
No 47. HMSO, London
Another simple way of getting rid of grafitti is to avoid having
large, smooth grey concrete surfaces - put up a wooden pallisade or
plant trees or bushes in front, and suddenly there is less interest in
grafitti. This is a simple design solution, and works without much
extra costs (in fact, it has other obvious esthetic benefits).
So I don't see why you can't use similar design solutions against
other problems, including violence. Things are more tricky here of
course, especially since we are now talking about not just physical
environments but social environments and structures.
David Brin and his supporters are essentially proposing making almost
everywhere visible through the transparent society; this would
certainly limit many forms of criminality (although it may weaken the
sense of privacy that makes private and semi-private areas safer
too). The libertarian proposal of privatizing much or everything deals
with the other side of the visibility-privacy pair of defensible
space; this would clearly make it up to the owners to ensure their
properties were suitably marked and delineated. Of these, the later
seems to be somewhat tricky to implement politically and possibly
practically (let's ignore that debate, it is off a tangent), while
the former may or may not come to pass depending on IMHO rather
uncertain predictions of where gnatbots, privacy counter measures and
public policy might go.
But there are likely many other possibilities that can be
explored.
What I saw at Arcosanti and read in Soleri's book about the project
suggests that a cleverly designed community can become very efficient
resource-wise and likely function well socially. However, Soleri's
large scale arcologies seem to me to be too large to be stable
socially, they seem to be too much undefensible space and diffused
responsibility. On the other hand, the more modest Arcosanti
mini-arcology seems to be just of the right size psychologically to
promote a sense of community and shared space, while getting
advantages of scale. Maybe one should work towards developing
Arcosanti-like structures to replace ailing parts of our cities? One
model already exists, the university campus.
There is a lot to be said for approaching violence and other social
problems as health or design problems instead of the usual approaches;
this way we can at least find some new solutions that have not got
bogged down in political trench warfare.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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