Irvine discourages crime by design
Window and wall levels at this Portola Springs home demonstrate the use of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design principles. The urban planning theory calls for neighborhood design that promotes high visibility so residents may subconsciously watch for intruders.
ISAAC ARJONILLA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Other planned cities, communities and neighborhoods in Orange County that have employed crime-deterring design principles:
Rancho Santa Margarita
IRVINE As architects and urban planners in the city draft plans for everything from a single building to an entire neighborhood, they also are trying to deter crime.
Developers are using crime-discouraging concepts conceived when planning the city began in the 1960s; now they are refining and applying the tactics in the newer Irvine villages such as Stonegate and Portola Springs.
Their goal: Stay at least one step ahead of would-be criminals.
The approach is called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, an interpretive set of principles applied throughout the design process, from the master plan of a neighborhood to the specific design of a building.
When planning a safe neighborhood, designers stress creating the ability for police and residents to easily scan the neighborhood for shady activity. This strategy is called "natural surveillance."
A detailed design may include making sure vehicles in parking lots are always in view, not only by a passing police patrol car, but by the average citizen, said Irvine police Lt. Julia Engen. Bad guys like to avoid being seen.
"Territorial reinforcement" is what architects call the strategy of expressing ownership by clearly marking the differences between public and private space.
Designers also may place entrances, exits, paths, fences and other barriers to influence where people should go. This is called "access control."
With these themes, planners primarily target crimes of opportunity, which typically are spontaneous crimes committed when, for example, a thief snatches a bicycle from a backyard. Other tactics include keeping bushes and dividing walls below a certain height and making sure street lights are bright enough.
These practices factor increasingly into housing development design.
For example, trees along sidewalks in Portola Springs are trimmed so they don't obscure the view of a resident looking out a ground-floor window. Designers also carefully space out vegetation in parks. Trees and bushes are maintained to eliminate blind spots.
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design also ties in with a relatively new criminological hypothesis called the "broken windows theory," which posits that a disorderly appearance will attract criminal behavior.
The theory can be applied to something as simple as aesthetics. People are less likely to litter on a clean street, Engen said, in the same way a building with broken windows attracts more vandalism and other criminal activity.
Police say criminals avoid places that look well-maintained, knowing that if residents care about their neighborhood, they are guarding it.
Besides the cultivation of the broken windows theory in the 1980s, not much in these crime-deterring principles has changed over Irvine's development, said Roger McErlane, former senior vice president of urban planning and design at the Irvine Co.