Some problems, such as climate change and accessibility, can be mitigated with better architecture, but others evade architectural problem-solving. This essay was prompted by a conversation around the May 24 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, but it could as easily apply to numerous vivid incidents of violence perpetuated on vulnerable, unsuspecting humans in public spaces that should not be militarized but are. For many liberal commentators, the obvious answer is gun control. Those on the right looking to scapegoat culpability for Uvalde found other targets. Some even singled out architecture as culpable for the horror.
Lt Governor of Texas Dan Patrick blamed the design of the school, just as he had done after the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School. Speaking to reporters outside the Uvalde school, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas identified “unlocked back doors” as the culprit and even suggested that the shooting could have been prevented by “having one door that goes in and out of the school [and] having armed police officers at that one door.” Taking up these arguments, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif, proposed that any remaining Covid-relief dollars be used for “enhancing safety” of schools. Now, it is absurd and beside the point to suggest that a perceived design flaw invites a mass shooting. Yet this particular red herring—that the right building can overcome social failings—has appealed to many politicians and administrators for at least one hundred years. Blame the open doors, not the society and its policies.
Turning an unlocked door, or on an excessive number of egresses, into a palpable threat does several things. It distracts from contemplating the violent death of children. It distracts from the many factors at play in a mass shooting, ranging from racism and a reckless gun culture to social ties severed by Covid restrictions. It distracts from the ongoing and complex conversation about how police responded to this particular gunman and the one who shot up the Buffalo grocery store in May and, consequently, distracts from the similarity of such racially motivated violence with other acts of terrorism. Lastly, it distracts from the increasing militarization of everyday life.
And yet it seems somewhat reasonable to at least look at the school’s design. If I were teaching in a public school today, I would be all the more attentive to the architectural features of my classroom and its doors and windows. Already, routine active-shooter drills keep the threat present in the minds of teachers and students. There may be some best practices that could be adopted, and surely, we have “hardened” schools—to use psychologist Robert Sommer’s term for buildings that use hard materials such as concrete, resist modification by the user, and restrict the view from outside—to the extent that no administrator wants to hear about a door propped open. But in seeking to respond to threats as wide-ranging as school shootings and the Covid pandemic, have we locked down our social institutions too much? After Uvalde, can parents hear the ongoing conversation about banning cell phones in schools and not conclude that this safety measure would produce the opposite result? Might the hardening of schools, if not all of society, contribute to the spread of domestic terrorism?
If the discussion arising from Uvalde is any indication, it might be futile to try to identify the precise reasons for a shooting. It seems that we can at least agree that mass shootings of humans going about their day is more than unacceptable—it’s horribly wrong. Despite the recent legislation, the national conversation about gun control and gun violence remains superficial, as is the confrontation with the effects of racism fueled by access to assault weapons. We can ask why the police respond in the way they do. We can gaze at green shoes and we can pursue the conversation on gun control that seems to only fuel the election cycle with no reduction in mass shootings. But maybe a longer historical perspective can open a different conversation about a larger problem inherent in the way violence and architecture operate in contemporary society.
The most common theory of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED, has its origins in Defensible Space, a quasi-criminological study written by Oscar Newman in 1969. Using data from the New York City Housing Authority police, he argued that large open spaces around residential high-rises are less safe because no single resident is clearly responsible for policing them; by contrast, in low-rise housing, shared public space is clearly under the control of residents. Defensible Space was heralded by the popular press as proof that high-rise (read: public) housing contributes to urban crime. Newman drew on popular ideas from Robert Ardrey and others studying human aggression and explained that humans have a “natural territoriality” and will defend spaces with clear boundaries. In a way, he was simply adjusting Jane Jacobs’s argument about “eyes on the street” to fit a new era of urban fears following the murder of Kitty Genovese.
But academics were highly critical of Defensible Space, finding insufficient evidence to back up its claims. The same evidentiary deficit characterized CPTED more broadly: instead of preventing crime, studies showed that implementing CPTED policies fractured community and produce smaller, enclosed spaces more like isolated suburban homes. Nevertheless, these ideas were carried forward through even more overtly racially targeted variants in Broken Windows theory. That CPTED continues to be popular is mostly due to the emotional appeal it makes on a fearful society, particularly those persons worried about crime in the abstract sense and not the fear that they personally be attacked.
The events of September 11 paved the way for the militarization of spaces and person-to-person interactions. Acknowledging this, a 2013 report by the National Rifle Association (NRA) erroneously compared CPTED to the national defense strategy of deterrence, which dates back to the Cold War. We can certainly question whether the strategy of deterrence, with its origins in geopolitical concerns about aggression and mutually assured destruction, should be applied to civil defense of an elementary school, as the NRA report suggested. But we may find greater resonance in the more recent strategy for civil policing outlined by anthropologist Joseph Masco, who argues that deterrence is no longer the primary mode of domestic militarization. Rather, he claims that “excitability is now the foremost duty of all citizens,” who are kept distracted (and somewhat afraid) by a stream of threats that never resolve with a single cause. But lacking a real target of the fear, the easily excitable, hopelessly distracted citizen never learns how to respond, only to follow the threads of red herrings away from potential sites of action. To see the mass shooting of children as a spectacle, as a problem of an unlocked classroom door, instead of the sign of a militarized, massively unequal and unjust society is to be dangerously distracted.
So how does an open society keep its citizens safe? I am convinced that fear and control are the motivators for hardening society to the extent that we have. Seeing everything through the lens of defense is the product of fear of change and the desire to control financial risk in support of a landscape where form follows real estate speculation. The path to false security is by locking the doors, but the path to peace in an open society is through the social. We should endeavor to keep social ties healthy, while reducing addictive behaviors and feelings of isolation. To get there, we need look at the records of what happened and trace the structural sources of violence in our society and its economy. Instead of refusing to talk about guns and what they mean to the United States, we would start to find ways to feel safe in a world that is far from safe. Is that possible? Maybe, maybe not. But sending the next generation to school in buildings that are increasingly more like prisons is not the answer.