Oscar Newman’s 1972 book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design is widely credited for illustrating how the design of public housing influenced criminal opportunity.18 Newman focused his case studies on NYC public housing complexes, where, he pointed out, robbery rates were much greater in high-rise buildings, even when the actual

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Public parks are part of the community planning model in most cities, and 70 to 75 percent of Americans report that they live within a short walk of a park.33 Parks are even plentiful in some of the most disadvantaged cities, like Detroit, Michigan, where 74 percent of the population lives within a ten-minute walk of a park.34 In Los Angeles, by

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A basic analysis of the changes in BMI and physical activity before and after the opening of the transit line found that using LRT was associated with reductions in BMI. Light rail users reduced their BMI by an average of 1.18 kg/m2 compared to similarly situated car commuters over a twelve-to-eighteen-month follow-up period. For a person who is

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Imagine a downtown area with small-scale parks, nice shops, clean and safe streets, and signage that encourages exercise. This is the kind of place where a family wants to bring kids, where retirees and college students alike want to socialize, and where street entertainers naturally gravitate to perform and get paid. These places exist in many

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The vacant-lot greening treatment costs a little more than a dollar per square foot to install and about a nickel per square foot to maintain each year.21 The grass planting takes only an hour and is in the form of a seed mixture of resilient grass applied with leaf blowers. The trees selected for these lots are the heartiest species to survive

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Evidence also suggests that when average incomes tend to rise in a neighborhood relative to its surrounding areas, the racial demographics of the areas are slower to change. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey, for example, finds that the lessening of poverty in US neighborhoods between 1970 and 2000 is not associated with white residents displacing

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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

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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

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the largest and best-known example of this to date is the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) study. The MTO study is a five-city RCT started by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1990s. Some 4,600 very low-income families in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: an

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