Debate

Utopia on trial: a comment on P. Dickens’s review

Peter Dickens should read Utopia on trial more carefully before going overboard to stigmatize it as bizarre and dangerous. ‘Bizarre’, I grant him. New ideas are often considered eccentric, and mine usually take five years to become accepted. But ‘dangerous’? Surely not. I urge that future projects should be tested, so that if they fail to make the grade they will not bedevil our cities for 40 years as modern movement architecture has done.

He alleges that I ‘pretend’to attack the ‘spatial fetishist tradition’. What does this mean? Perhaps if his mind was less full of obscurantist jargon he could recognize that pretence is not, and never has been, part of my style. I have said quite simply that modernist housing architecture does not bring the benefits claimed for it, and is not even neutral, but exerts an actively detrimental influence which often results in problem estates. The precise components responsible have been identified, and designs having a more truly beneficial effect are recommended instead. Perhaps this logic is too tortuous for Dr Dickens, as he fails t o see how I can separate ‘beneficial’ from ‘detrimental’ designs without throwing out the idea that design can actually have any influence at all. Since I now advocate [good] design I must have been merely pretending when I criticized [bad] design. Dr Dickens is equally naive when it comes to statistical comment. As a teacher

of statistics I naturally warn first-year students against confusing correlation with causation, but it is surprising that a reviewer of books seems stuck at first-year level

116 Utopia on trial: a comment

and fails to recognize the more advanced safeguards included in Utopia on trial. For example, a coefficient may prove to be significant by sheer chance once in 20 times, so that when there are 90 coefficients, as here, one would expect four or five to be significant without implying that any genuine relationship exists. The pattern here is quite different from chance. No less than 83 or the 90 are significant, and 73 are very hghly significant. The relationship is real, but we then have to go on to discover whether it is causal. This can be done experimentally, and a few examples are quoted, e.g. Oscar Newman’s discovery that design modification actually reduce crime rates (p. 16). In the period since Utopia on trial was published, we have received a great deal of information on British design improvements, all of which seem to have been more beneficial than I would have dared to predict. The best one so far is in effect a controlled experiment. Two neighbouring estates of the same age and design, and the same horrific crime rate of roumy one offence per dwelling per annum, both had the same sum spent on an improvement scheme. Both were reconditioned and equipped with security devices, but in one a small fraction of the cost was diverted into changing five of the design variables as advocated in Utopia on trial. This has produced amazingly different results. The estate which retained its old design has compeltely relapsed to litter, graffiti and vandalism. Its re-landscaped areas have all been trodden to bare earth, its crime rate is still one per dwelling per year, and its residents describe it as disgusting. The design-improved estate has remained completely free from litter, graffiti, vandalism and crime; its gardens are beautiful, and its delighted tenants say they have thrown away their sleeping pills and stopped needing the psychiatrist. Bizarre? Dangerous?

It seems that Dr Dickens sees no way in which correlation can be useful. That does not matter greatly, as it is used only as a minor method in Utopia on trial. He does not make any specific criticisms of our major method. More disturbing is the fact that he does not think geography has anything to offer. Locale, he claims, tells us very little, and he prefers the sociological approach of talking to vandals, etc. However, if we did that, he would still not accept our findings as valid, and would probably condemn us for believing what we are told. This is a line he already adopts in quoting the statement that ‘none of the local authorities in the study area will admit to having ‘sink’ estates’ (p. 89). This sentence is allowed to stand on its own, apparently to condemn us for gullibility. He fails to mention the ensuing two pages of evidence that lead us to believe the authorities were truthful.

He then makes the ultimate criticism for all seasons: value judgements. I believe what I want to believe. This is something he cannot know because he has no independent evidence that I want to believe anything, other than the results yielded by our research. Some of the results were quite surprising, but we certainly did not tamper with them as he claims. There is a psychological mechanism whereby people who will not recognize certain faults in their own character externalize them by complaining aggressively when they encounter similar (real or imagined) faults in others. This has prompted me to wonder what Dr Dickens’s own value judgements are, and his review reveals one possible answer: all the ills of society are genetic. This interpretation is based initially on his support for the view of sink estates as

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caused by problem people and problem children, and it is backed up by his leaping to a genetic explanation for my statement, ‘. . . successive age groups of litter louts are bred . . .’ Bred, as in the phrase ‘born and bred’ means reared or brought up, and if he had read the book seriously he would have found that the environmental impact upon child-rearing is one of its central themes. Children are mentioned on 32% of the text pages, so it is perhaps significant that he picks out one clause that can be twisted into a pretext for sliding down the genetic groove.

All this makes it clearer why he is so vituperative of a book that elucidates environmental influences. I hope he will not have deterred readers from judging the book for themselves.

King’s College, London Alice Coleman

References

Dickens, P. 1986: Review of Utopia on trial, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 10, 297-300.