By Aidan Smyth, Staff Writer

In 1964, Oscar Newman arrived at Washington University in St. Louis following a brief stint at the University of Montreal. Until 1968, he worked at Washington University as an Associate Professor of Architecture. Newman left Wash U four years before his most influential work, Defensible Space, was published in 1972, but his time in St. Louis directly influenced the development of his ‘defensible space’ principles regarding architecture and design. Analyzing Newman’s work helps to illuminate the way in which academia and universities come  to provide the intellectual underpinnings for policies that have outsized impacts on already marginalized communities, serving to further disappear the root causes of their struggles. 

In particular, Newman contributed to a growing trend in the architecture and design of urban spaces that I will call the ‘architecture of fear,’ which is marked by the increased physical privatization of space by cutting spaces off from the surrounding community. This form of architecture and design reflected growing concerns about crime and a fear of the ‘other;’ physical structures could be made to enforce spatial segregation, shutting off certain segments of society from the rest. In fact, in many cases, as in Newman’s, this ‘architecture of fear’ was utilized by local governments like St. Louis’ in the name of crime control and prevention.

In an April 1996 report entitled Creating Defensible Space, a follow-up to the original 1972 Defensible Space-“part of the continuing growth and evolution of Defensible Space as both a criminological concept and a proven strategy for enhancing our Nation’s quality of urban life” -Newman writes about how his time at Wash U influenced Defensible Space. He explains that “[t]he Defensible Space concept evolved about 30 years ago when, as a teacher at Washington University in St. Louis, I was able to witness the newly constructed 2,740-unit public housing high rise development, Pruitt-Igoe, go to ruin.” 

Pruitt-Igoe was a high-density, high-rise public housing project, its buildings a manifestation of modernist architecture that were imposing in their abrasive uniformity. If you look at pictures of the infamous and now-demolished housing project, it is hard not to imagine that they could be the buildings of an Orwellian dystopian future. Construction began in the early 1950s; soon after its completion, the project became synonymous with poverty and crime.

Newman falls in line with many contemporary critics who blamed the particular architectural style of Pruitt-Igoe for its failure. Charles Jencks famously declared in 1977 that “[m]odern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3:32pm (or thereabouts)”-the day that the Pruitt-Igoe complex was demolished. Newman believed that the primary reason for the failure of Pruitt-Igoe was its proliferation of “anonymous public space.” He was highly critical of the way that Pruitt-Igoe was designed with lots of open, communal spaces; he bemoaned that the entrances to the buildings were shared by a large number of families. 

Newman proposed the idea of ‘defensible space’ as an alternative to the open community structure of Pruitt-Igoe and uniform modernist designs. In his 1996 report, Newman lauds the private streets of St. Louis, wondering if it is possible to design public housing so that its inhabitants have as little interaction and shared space with one another as possible. He argued that “the more complex and anonymous the housing environment, the more difficult it is for a code of behavior following societal norms to become established among the residents.” In highly privatized communities, on the other hand, those societal norms would be far easier to establish.

In other words, the reason that crime was rampant in the housing project was because there was too much shared space-too many families shared the same entrances, stairways, yards, and more, so nobody felt any ownership or accountability over the space to ensure that it stayed pristine and safe. Never mind that Pruitt-Igoe’s maintenance and operations were unsubsidized; while the government funded the construction of the buildings, tenants were left to fend for themselves once they moved in. Never mind the combination of a declining city, racial segregation, and invasive and punitive public welfare policies that contributed to Pruitt-Igoe’s demise, to which Chad Freidrichs’s 2011 film, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, provides a deep dive into the project’s history. 

The complexities of Pruitt-Igoe are such that they cannot be reduced to an architectural deterministic analysis. This is not to discount entirely the impact of poor design on public housing projects; it is true that there were features of Pruitt-Igoe’s physical environment that were problematic and provided cover for criminal activity. And it is also impossible to say that Newman’s work had any decisive influence on the decision to demolish Pruitt-Igoe, the demise of which had been unfolding since its inception. But the ‘defensible spaces’ principles that grew out of Newman’s experience watching Pruitt-Igoe’s failure did end up having a significant and detrimental impact on St. Louis as the ‘architecture of fear’ ideology played out both in the city and across the country. 

Historian Walter Johnson lays out the consequences of Newman’s Defensible Spaces report, writing that “Newman’s ‘defensible space’ city planning dramatically reshaped the city of St. Louis, beginning in the 1970s, and contributed to both the gating-in of suburban neighborhoods and the privatization of public housing nationwide.” Defensible space in St. Louis largely was created through the use of obstructive ‘Schoemehl Pots,’ named after Mayor Vincent Schoemehl who began the program, and gates to enclose streets and neighborhoods. Johnson writes:

“By the best contemporary estimate, 285 of the city’s streets are closed off in this way, many of these barriers simply reinforcing the boundary between the Black and white neighborhoods of the city. Meanwhile, Newman’s theory was taken up by successive presidential administrations (Nixon, Ford, Carter) as the basis for the future planning of public housing, public schools, street patterns, and public transportation-all of which were to be designed to foster a greater degree of preemptive surveillance.” 

Again, one of the main justifications of defensible space-oriented city planning was that it would ostensibly reduce crime-people would feel more connected to the areas that they live in because they have ownership over the space, and the privatization of spaces would make it physically more difficult for crime to occur. However, a 2019 study from St. Louis University has found that the traffic barriers blocking off hundreds of the city’s streets have actually had the reverse effect. The authors of the study write that “We find that increased barrier density in neighborhoods is associated with higher violent crime rates, which suggests that whatever the past successes barriers may have had in addressing violent crime, they do not appear to be associated with lower crime rates today.” Many of the barriers are on either side of Delmar Boulevard, reinforcing the racial and socioeconomic divide between North and South St. Louis and cutting off much of Black St. Louis from much of white St. Louis. 

As Michael Allen, a current lecturer in the American Culture Studies department and the Sam Fox School at Wash U, writes, the defensible space principles reflected a desire to essentially suburbanize the city: “St. Louis’ grid was severed to replicate the hierarchy of traffic ways and belonging found in the suburbs.” Indeed, the suburban logic of postwar city planning I wrote about for WUPR’s Refresh edition comes into play with the ‘architecture of fear’ and defensible space city planning. The urban historian Mike Davis cheekily remarks on the way that fear plays into urban planning in the case of Los Angeles, noting that “only the middle-class dread of progressive taxation exceeds the current obsession with personal safety and social insulation.” The spatial culture of suburbia, one that “reflected and reinforced the burgeoning racial order of the postwar suburban region,” emphasized predictability, uniformity, and safety in its enclosed theme parks, self-contained housing subdivisions, and freeways.

The fear of the ‘other’-and hatred for the ‘other’-that drove white people into the suburbs in the postwar period also influenced the physical spaces of the city itself decades later. Davis writes about the “radical privatization of Downtown public space” in Los Angeles and the “continuing erosion of the boundary between architecture and law enforcement.” In no other instance is such an erosion more evident in St. Louis than in the case of street closures, ‘Schoemehl Pots,’ and the prevalence of defensible spaces planning in general. More and more, the physical spaces of St. Louis were constructed to enforce racial hierarchies within the urban structure, centered on  the fears of white planners, residents, and suburbanites. The very streets of the city became an extension of the police, ostensibly designed to reduce crime and protect communities but instead doing the opposite, upholding the same white supremacist status quo that American police perpetuate at large. 

Newman’s legacy in St. Louis reveals the power of academia and universities in influencing the character of public policy, lending credibility to policy by providing critical intellectual support. In too many cases, academia abstracts away from the root causes of poverty, crime, and destitution, instead choosing to focus on niche factors that may have had some impact but generally tend to miss the forest for the trees. The consequences are often devastating, with marginalized communities bearing the brunt of the blow of policies like defensible space planning while having their most basic needs and concerns unaddressed.