ABSTRACT
While hailed in the popular press (Time magazine gushed that Defensible Space was ‘Astonishing. It explodes just about every long-accepted rule on the way we build’, which was also the blurb pasted across the paperback cover), it was received with much less enthusiasm by academics and by architects. The New York Housing Authority research was criticised as lacking statistical and research design rigour, particularly because control groups were not used when projects were compared. Architects bristled at the possibilities of further restrictions to their freedom to design, while social scientists characterised the findings as too simplistic – disturbed by the architectural and environmental determinism they perceived – even though Newman went to pains to note that ‘crime is caused by a multiplicity of factors – economic, social and governmental as well as physical – and it is extraordinarily difficult to isolate one sort of characteristic and discern its particular influence’ (Newman, 1973, page 210).2
