Defensible Space on the Move: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice
Loretta Lees & Elanor Warwick
The geographical concept Defensible Space, influential in designing out crime to date, has been applied to housing estates in the UK, North America, Europe, and beyond. Fellow urbanists Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick critically examine the movement/mobility/mobilisation of defensible space from the US to the UK and into English housing policy and practice. Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories and in-depth interviews, they explore the multiple ways the concept of defensible space was interpreted and implemented as it circulated from national to local level and within particular English housing estates, especially in London. Critiquing, and pushing forwards, work on policy mobilities they illustrate for the first time how the transfer mechanisms for this complex spatial concept worked at both a policy and practitioner level.
This important book reveals defensible space to be ambiguous, uncertain in nature, neither proven or disproven scientifically. The idea remains a cluster of significant but disputed elements. Built environment professionals continue to espouse the concept, but the detailed evidence presented in this book, and its reflections on the future role of shared space post the Covid-19 pandemic, should urge them to think again.
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