Changing Places: The Science and Art of New Urban Planning

In the early 1990s, a long-simmering urban planning movement finally found its legs. For thirty years, a small group of urban advocates had grown weary of merely expounding the virtues contained in Jacobs’s book and decided to get organized. In 1993, the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) had their first meeting. Its founders included the influential

The results from the study showed that the control parks saw a small decline in the number of observed and self-reported users on the order of 6 to 10 percent, as well as declines in physical activity. In contrast, parks in the treatment group that received the additional $4,000 saw a 7-to-12-percent increase in observed and self-reported park usag

CPTED offers a recipe for reducing crime by shifting the availability of easy targets. This does not mean that an offender’s motivations to commit crime have been erased; it simply means that some offenses won’t occur in given areas because offenders either choose to go elsewhere or to not commit the crime. If one assumes that not all crimes are ea

INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS are deeply rooted in the context within which we live, work, and play. There are meaningful opportunities to change that context in the form of the physical environments of even the most dangerous and blighted areas to produce healthier and safer living. Individual choices make a difference, but many life choices are heavily sh

Note that this model does not address the fundamental motivations behind crime; rather, it tries to make crimes inconvenient. The idea is that there are easier targets elsewhere. Some have criticized CPTED because it does not address underlying root causes that make someone likely to commit a crime in the first place. This misses the point. CPTED i

The study team conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) where 274 children with asthma received a comprehensive intervention that involved an environmental audit of the home, an action plan for helping remediate the home that included the delivery of allergy and pest remediation materials, and four to eight additional visits by community healt

The study compared asthma-related triggers for children who moved into BEHs with a control group of children who had similar baseline asthma levels and whose parents were similar in age, employment, education, race, and ethnicity. The two groups looked much the same, although one group was exposed to their new BEH and the other was not. Recall that

Cities across the country are now thinking about different ways to make walking safer in cities and more attractive for routine daily trips. Vision Zero, a larger pedestrian safety plan with the goal of zero traffic fatalities, is underway. As pedestrian deaths are largely the result of being struck by an automobile, efforts to promote and enforce

Our primary results also confirmed the findings of our earlier quasi-experimental study. Interviews of households living near the different lots and an analysis of crime data before and after the interventions showed that those living near remediated lots (either fully greened or just cleaned and maintained) were less concerned about their personal

The public health challenge of poor-quality housing is not just a problem of the developing world. Exposures to unhealthy housing conditions are also common in poorly constructed and maintained housing stock in the United States and other developed countries. Exposure to lead, for example, has harmful consequences on brain development and is most l