{"id":1148,"date":"2012-03-31T09:44:32","date_gmt":"2012-03-31T15:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2018-08-20T10:59:59","modified_gmt":"2018-08-20T16:59:59","slug":"did-the-built-environment-kill-trayvon-martin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1148","title":{"rendered":"Did the Built Environment Kill Trayvon Martin?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Or, help<\/em> kill him?\u00a0 So asks Planetizen<\/a>, in advertising an article by Robert Steuteville<\/a> in Better! Cities and Towns<\/em>.\u00a0 Steuteville\u2019s argument is that gated communities like The Retreat at Twin Lakes<\/a> create \u201ca fortress mentality\u201d replete with paranoia and suspicion of anyone who looks out of place within its walls.\u00a0 Steuteville notes the development\u2019s very low Street Smart Walk Score of 26<\/a> and suggests that \u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine this kind of tragedy playing out today in the same way on the block of a walkable city or town.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The Retreat at Twin Lakes, Sanford, Florida (Reuters)<\/p><\/div>\n

Others have made similar arguments. Chris Turner<\/a>,<\/strong> writing for the Mother Nature Network, suggests that Trayvon\u2019s death was \u201caided and abetted by a failed urban design model\u201d tragically lacking in what Jane Jacobs described as \u201ceyes on the street.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The Twin Lakes model is a \u201cdrain on social capital and robs neighborhoods of the rich interplay of random, multivalent activities that breeds\u2014and protects\u2014healthy community.\u201d\u00a0 Turner suggests that among the many sad aspects of Trayvon\u2019s tragedy was \u201cthe way that the street failed him.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s Rich Benjamin<\/a>, writing \u00a0in yesterdays New York Times<\/em>.\u00a0 Benjamin echoes Steuteville by arguing that gated communities\u00a0 produce a \u201cbunker mentality\u201d and attract \u201clike-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion\u2026worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders.\u201d\u00a0 The gates \u201cexacerbate biased treatment against the young, the colored, and the\u2026poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

I certainly think there\u2019s an element of truth to these analyses.\u00a0 This blog is predicated on the idea that the built environment actively shapes human psychology and behavior, and that our explanations of particular events can suffer unless we consider the materiality of human existence alongside political, economic, and other institutional forces (e.g., the case of Pruitt-Igoe<\/a>).\u00a0 But we can also push things too far, as one commentator on the Planetizen announcement<\/a> noted.\u00a0 People are killed and assaulted in inclusionary\u00a0 places, too.\u00a0 They\u2019re also killed and assaulted in highly walkable places, including those designed and\/or infilled along New Urbanist lines. Denver\u2019s Central Business District has a walk score of 96. The Union Station area\u2014which includes our regenerated Lower Downtown (\u201cLodo\u201d) and the famous Larimer Square\u2014has a walk score of 87.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet according to denvergov.org<\/a> data, in the last year assaults in the Central Business District were up 64% and forcible sex offenses were up 73%.\u00a0 In Union Station assaults were up 43%. Explanations<\/a> for these findings include the struggling economy, cutbacks in social services, and the availability of fewer civic resources to deal with violent crime.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Eyes on the Street in Larimer Square, Denver<\/p><\/div>\n

Thus, it\u2019s a bit unseemly to imply that if The Retreat at Twin Lakes had only been more walkable on a New Urbanist model the Trayvon Martin tragedy might have been averted. As Philip Langdon<\/a> noted in another Better! Cities and Towns<\/em> piece dealing with death by vehicular accident at Denver\u2019s Stapleton development, \u201cNew Urbanists cannot claim that safety is a problem only in conventionally designed [or, we would add, gated] subdivisions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Or, help kill him?\u00a0 So asks Planetizen, in advertising an article by Robert Steuteville in Better! Cities and Towns.\u00a0 Steuteville\u2019s argument is that gated communities like The Retreat at Twin Lakes create \u201ca fortress mentality\u201d replete with paranoia and suspicion […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-placemaking","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-iw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3770,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions\/3770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}