Coined by the architect and urban planner Oscar Newman in 1972 in his influential book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (1972), the concept of defensible space stems from his mainly New York-based research on crime in high-rise public housing.


 This highlighted the relationships between the occurrence of crime and housing project size, scale and Layout. In order to reduce crime in dense residential settings, his basic strategy was to help residents establish more appropriate feelings towards their physical setting than the alienation and those sentiments of fear and anger that many people often hold in public housing.




According to Newman, through mutual surveillance comes the ability to monitor and ‘defend’ territorial spaces. A place would be safer because residents and other people could observe what was going on within their perceived ‘sphere of influence’. Newman’s notion was that through subdivision, the insertion of eyecatching features such as billboards and trees, and the clear articulation of the physical environment, public and private space could be designed to be naturally overlooked and monitored by its occupants.

Despite ensuing criticism of what, for some, smacked of environmental determinism, Newman’s ideas not only changed housing policy in terms of design in the US, but they also underscored the power of postoccupancy evaluation methods and their resulting benefits.