Death of Alice Coleman: landuse mapper and advocate of ‘defensible urban space’ design
4th July 2023
Paraphrased from the Guardian obituary: in the 1960s Alice Coleman led the work on the Second Land Use Survey of Britain, the first comprehensive attempt since the 30s to record the use of land, using volunteers to map urban and rural areas (see illustration). Later in 1976 she came across the work of the American architect-planner Oscar Newman, and his book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (1972). Her research increasingly focused on identifying the lack of defensible space in many housing projects in Britain, with large communal areas militating against any sense among residents that their immediate surroundings belonged to them. This, she argued, often led estates to become semi-derelict, unsafe spaces, havens for crime or anti-social behaviour and strewn with rubbish and detritus. She studied instances of “social malaise” such as littering, graffiti and vandalism, leading her to write Utopia on Trial, which soon became a major source of debate in the housing world.
