Newswise — Giving city squares a makeover could offer a surprising benefit — reduced crime rates and improved relationships among neighbors, a new study suggests.
"The majority of Americans live in cities, where the social cement that holds people together is declining," said lead author Jan Semenza, Ph.D. He said this situation leads to a weakening of communal ties and relationships, and a feeling of alienation.
Semenza and colleagues at Portland State University compared a Portland, Ore., community that participated in a neighborhood intersection repair project to two nearby neighborhoods that did not.
The project involved painting street murals, installing information kiosks, planting hanging gardens and building water fountains and benches.
The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Health Promotion Practice.
When the authors investigated crime rates two years before and after the project, they found a 15 percent reduction in burglaries, assaults, vehicle thefts and robberies in the improved community, compared to the two unimproved communities nearby. Problems with graffiti also declined in the intervention community.
Calls for police assistance decreased significantly in the improved neighborhood from 1,029 calls in the two years before the intervention to 922 calls in the two years afterward. In contrast, the two unimproved sites experienced an increase in service calls.
Semenza said that city residents might have little control over the demographic composition of their neighborhood or over transient populations that could be involved in drug trafficking and crime.
However, "once a more-inviting place has been created that is aesthetically pleasing, friendly and safe — such as the public squares described here — social interactions are facilitated, which in turn increases the sense of community and participation in community efforts," he said.
Improvement projects do tend to promote social relationships among community residents, agreed Ethan Berke, M.D., assistant professor at Dartmouth Medical School.
"I think just having that presence and having people actively visible in the community means they feel more responsible for the community. They take care of the community and that reduces crime," Berke said.
However, Berke said that the study lacked details about how the authors identified the control groups used to compare crime and graffiti rates, "making it difficult to walk away from these results with some kind of causal statement."
Health Promotion Practice: Contact Sarah Leonard at (202) 408-9804 or [email protected]
Semenza JC, Krishnasamy PV. Design of a health-promoting neighborhood intervention. Health Promot Pract 8(3), 2007.
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