Planned Paranoia

There’s a reason why urban housing developments and suburban subdivisions can seem threatening and unwelcoming to outsiders: they’re planned that way, in order to “design out crime.”

Defense was always built into cities. From Beijing to Lisbon, cities throughout history were reinforced by castles and ringed with protective, turreted stone walls to secure them against hostile outside forces from outside. But it was only in the nineteenth century that their rulers decided to protect them from the majority of the people inside […]

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