Urban Planning Blog

I remember visiting Chandigarh and being saddened by the level of security at the Capitol Complex. Le Corbusier’s sculptural buildings were sandbagged and protected heavily with machine-gun toting security guards. The vast expanse of the central plaza between the Assembly Building and the High Court was interrupted by a barb wire fence that looked not only ungainly but reminded you of a turbulent past. Punjab was hit by a period of insurgency that has now totally disappeared but such remanants of architecture tainted by security measures have now remained as a permanent fixture like almost an unseperable appendage.

I had participated in a design competition that asked for a reconceptualization of the unbuilt Governor’s Palace. We had integrated the adjoining plaza as a gathering place to represent the exuberance of Punjab and its jolly people. We wanted the re-use of the feudal structure to be as democratic as possible. But I bet this was looked down upon purely from the perspective of security. The city could not trust its own citizens.

Bruce Schneier writes on a similar theme about architecture and security. His examples are a stark reminder of the cautious nature of man protecting the people against a threat that might not even exist:

When Syracuse University built a new campus in the mid-1970s, the
student protests of the late 1960s were fresh on everybody’s mind. So
the architects designed a college without the open greens of
traditional college campuses. It’s now 30 years later, but Syracuse
University is stuck defending itself against an obsolete threat.Concrete building barriers are an exception: They’re removable. They
started appearing in Washington, D.C., in 1983, after the truck bombing
of the Marines barracks in Beirut. After 9/11, they were a sort of
bizarre status symbol: They proved your building was important enough
to deserve protection.

It is indeed sad to see security triumph architectural aesthetics or even functionality. Vulnerable countries like India and Israel have often lived with a constant threat and such security-first architecture is almost expected and taken for granted.

Technorati Tags: security, architecture, threat, 9/11, Chandigarh, Le Corbusier

The Orlando Sentinel [link not available] finally reported on what most of us already know – gated communities are not any safer than non-gated communities [via Governing.com]. Although vandalism and smash-n-grab incidences were relatively lower in gated communities, home burglaries and car theft incidences were about the same. This definitely underlines the oft-cited sense of security value concept that real estate developers hobnob about. People are willing to shell out extra for that sense of protection that they are safe in their little haven even though they really aren’t.

I had always lived in gated communities in Atlanta until I moved to College Station. My personal experiences tell me that the gates were only a psychological barrier in the minds of the residents and not the potential criminal. The first community I lived in, visitors could mention any random apartment number that we were supposedly visiting and the guard would let you in. The second one was controlled by access codes that any Tom, Dick, and Harry seemed to know. Pizza delivery guys, Fedex/UPS delivery employees, local Chinese takeout guys, etc knew the code and the codes were never changed; at least the two and half years that I lived there. Anyone could easily tailgate if they were quick enough and if you could not, residents would offer their card just because you were blocking their way. If anyone happened to ram into the gate while it was in motion, it would instantly stop function and just because gate repairs are extremely expensive, they never got repaired until it was move-in season.

Gated communities thus offer only a sense of security that doesn’t seemingly exist although, the location of your community matters. It will not help installing gates on your community if your neighborhood is in a high-crime locality. What do gates do? They slow down cars and make it slightly safer for children. Honestly, I can’t think of anything else.