Securing Public Space [Awards Jury Commentaries]

Securing Public Space Lawrence J. Vale Self-conscious efforts to design for urban security go back at least to Jericho, but have had a new kind of salience in the last several decades. The situation is particularly prob- lematic today because the perennial questions—Secure from what? and Secure from whom?—keep yielding shifting answers. Those who care about the planning and design of desirable places are being asked to attend to such questions with increased urgency, but the goals associated with security are frequently poorly framed, incomplete, and often contradictory. The response of designers to the challenges of securing public environments demands more attention from the community of researchers who are concerned not only with matters of security, but also with broader social, cultural and political questions about how matters of security are transforming or delimiting public life. 1 This important area of work would seem particularly suited to the EDRA/Places awards. Yet—except for one entry, which provoked lengthy debate among the jurors— questions of security were all but completely absent from this year’s awards cycle. Those who design, plan, and conduct research about places must face up to new kinds of risk and uncertainty. Whether the threat is a potential terrorist strike or a catastrophic hurricane, the forms of public space become altered by the struggle to grapple with external threats. Faculty and students at MIT have launched a colloquium examining such challenges, and this essay sets out some of the directions such an inquiry might take. The Temptations of the Securescape Designers and planners respond quite differently if they are charged with protecting against bomb-laden vehicles than if they are also asked to consider the potential for bombs carried by pedestrians, air attack, or terrorism with chemical or biological weapons. Thirty years ago, in what retrospectively seems a less explosive time, Oscar Newman launched his calls for “defensible space,” rooted in notions of territoriality. This coincided with the birth of an entire movement called Crime Prevention Through Environ- mental Design (CPTED). 2 Both viewed the central task of urban design as deterrence of criminal behavior at the interface of the public and private realms. The focus was less on creating positive and desirable designed places than on the necessity to design secure space as a prerequisite to any such higher aims. This nurturing of informal surveil- lance in dangerous places has indeed frequently been cred- ited with improving the quality of life. Yet designing for Conflicting values in the twenty-first-century city. Photo by author. security now entails matters that go well beyond the fears of assault, robbery, and drug dealing that prompted the earlier calls for defensible space. Today’s new set of threats from within the public realm initially led to public outrage at landscapes littered by crude profusions of hardened planters, concrete barriers, and seemingly random acts of bollarding. This too has led in many places to more considered and considerate efforts to produce a public realm that is both secure and attractive. The recent transformation of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, now reopened to pedestri- ans, stands as perhaps the most successful resolution of a difficult set of problems. The new design is closed to vehicles, thereby rendering the casual notion of a “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” address little more than a quaint vestige of a more open era—not unlike the locked-gate fate of London’s 10 Downing Street. Nonetheless, restoring public access to the perimeter of the White House grounds is surely a welcome development, and has been designed to accommodate a future transit Circulator, as well. More generally, the National Capital Urban Design and Security Plan, developed by the National Capital Planning Commission in 2002, is an exemplary effort to marry increased security and improved design. But it is also a reminder about the great expense of such planning, and it so far stands out as an exception. 3 Elsewhere, unfor- tunately, planners and designers have all too often been defeated by the temptation to construct what may be called the securescape—the uneasy confluence of security, land- scape, and escape from public contact. At a time when urban designers across the globe are seeking ways to retrofit massive modernist superblocks, often by reintroducing the finer-grained networks of premodern streets, the tenets of the securescape work in precisely the opposite direction. Urban designers extol mixed-use developments with street-level retail and enhanced pedestrian connectivity; but the pressures of the securescape push toward street closures, enhanced setbacks, and strict design guidelines for types of buildings that are considered most vulnerable. Both the public and the design community cheered when the plan for redeveloping the World Trade Center site called for opening up the broad boulevard of West Street. But somehow the glaring disconnect revealed by the close connection between this road and the gleaming glass target of the Freedom Tower on its eastern flank was lost on those who moved forward with the design. Only in April 2005—a year and a half after the plans were unveiled—did such “security concerns” surface publicly, calling many Vale / Securing Public Space