Archinect - News

A brief history of designing secure spaces

2018-04-10T15:44:00-04:00

Can design keep you safe from crime? Architects and urbanists have been making that claim since urban crime — or the threat of it — reached crisis proportions in the 1960s. [...] But with scant evidence to support those claims, at what cost do we build “defensible space”? Architectural historian Joy Knoblauch looks back at sixty years of attempts to secure space and asks whether safety lies in the design of the built environment, in our social structures, or in our heads.

The architecture of burglary is increasingly virtual

2016-03-31T18:29:00-04:00

Buildings and burglars are intertwined in the mind of Mr. Manaugh, whose nonfiction book arrives Tuesday from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fascinated by bandits who smash through walls, crawl up air ducts and tunnel through floors, the author wanted to explore their singular approach to architecture as a force to be abused, outsmarted and escaped.

In an era of cybercrime, do burglars miss the architectural beauty of the traditional brick and mortar break-in? Well, yeah, according to author Geoff Manaugh. In an era where break-ins are more about clearing digital walls and hacking into people's identities than using diamond-tipped drills to penetrate hidden vaults, the bad old-fashioned vocation of physical burglary is the latest casualty of digital disruption. Ironically, many of the contemporary light-fingered must now worry about carpal-tunnel syndrome.

For more on the intersection of crime and architecture:

What are the world's most violent cities?

2016-03-30T13:11:00-04:00

The thorny task of comparing crime rates across the world is tricky because legal interpretations vary. Sweden's definition of rape is not the same as America’s, for example. Murder however should be easier to record because there is an identifiable victim, something that can be counted. But the way in which this is done in poorer, often more corrupt countries makes truly comparable statistics hard to pin down. Where there are inefficient public health systems or police, it is even harder.

"Latin American and Caribbean countries suffer disproportionately compared with elsewhere, mainly because of inequality, poor rule of law, impunity and corrupt institutions that are infiltrated by drug cartels. Only two countries outside the region feature on either chart, South Africa and the United States (the list’s only rich-world country)."

The article notes the difficulty of accurately ranking cities based on crime statistics; this chart is a revision of an earlier one. But the overall picture remains the same: the world's most violent cities are in the Americas, with the one notable exception being Cape Town, South Africa. The statistics exclude war zones.

For more on crime and the city, take a look at some Archinect articles from the archive: