Avoiding deterministic thinking [urban planning]

Efforts to reduce crime and improve urban safety frequently falter because of deterministic thinking. Environmental determinists, for example, assure us that they can design out crime with defensible spaces and lots of foot traffic, while ignoring contributory socioeconomic factors. Social determinists call for fairer public policies and doubt that better technologies and urban designs really can make a difference. Technological determinists instead assure us that innovations such as networked video surveillance are imminent and inevitable, regardless of their desirability. Yet they often gloss over unresolved analytical, data sharing, and privacy issues that would delay implementation by years. Advocates of disparate solutions talk past one another. This work presents reasons for avoiding the trap of deterministic thinking in urban safety discussions, and ways to do so. In brief, simplified explanations and specialized efforts are necessary for implementing improvements, but so is a balanced view of the big picture. Integrated and coordinated approaches to crime prevention can help bring that big picture into view. Additionally, we need to focus constructive attention on the limits to our solutions, tempering our enthusiasms without inducing paralysis. The author presents well-established literatures on determinism in social studies of science and technology, in urban planning, and in decision science for additional useful insights.