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Moderator Mark Kleiman, a public policy analyst at UCLA, began by asking Charlie Beck, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, what influence Wilson had had on Beck’s work. None, was Beck’s answer–at least at first. When Beck joined the LAPD in 1977, “the academic side of why I did what I did was totally lost on me.”

Later, though, Beck came across Wilson’s famous essay “Broken Windows,” co-authored with George L. Kelling for a 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly, arguing for the importance of community standards in policing urban neighborhoods. Beck found that much of what he was working on “fell right in line with much of what Jim [Wilson] said.” Beck added that many people misinterpret “broken windows,” thinking of it as referring to a policy of indiscriminate enforcement. It’s not, Beck said. Rather, “broken windows” is about understanding community standards and coming up with policing approaches that uphold those standards.

Pepperdine University economist Angela Hawken noted that several qualities made her former teacher and colleague different from most public intellectuals. For one thing, he was, without feeling the need to entertain anyone, “surprisingly good in the classroom.” He injected students with enthusiasm, partly because “he really wanted to know the answer to the question he was hoping that you would run out and research.” He also had an unusual breadth of knowledge.

But Hawken’s favorite of Wilson’s attributes was his ability to change his mind. “He was really passionate about empirical evidence,” Hawken said, no matter where it pointed, and “even when inquiry led him to interpretations that made him feel uncomfortable in his gut.” That’s why “a man who was such a policy powerhouse would have made such a lousy politician.”

UCLA political scientist Mark Peterson observed that Wilson was, above all, a political scientist, even serving as president of American Political Science Association. No matter what area of policy a student of political science might wish to study–city politics, political organization, regulatory policy–the work of James Q. Wilson was going to be relevant to it. “We didn’t even think of Jim as a conservative political scientist, but as a political scientist who happened to be conservative,” Peterson said.

Wilson also rejected the notion of people as mere creatures of cost-benefit calculation. “He very much believed in community,” Peterson said. “And he was an optimist about human nature.”

Kleiman introduced the topic of the most controversial of Wilson’s legacies: the quintupling of the prison population in the United States, where over 2 million people are now behind bars. Kleiman said that he had first been a supporter of increased prison capacity. But once the prison boom began, he came to feel like the “sorcerer’s apprentice” wondering, “Does this thing have an OFF switch?”

Beck said that there was originally a good case to be made for increased incarceration, but it’s a struggle to know where best to go from here. “I ask that as a question and not as someone who knows the answer,” he added.

Hawken noted that Wilson “never bought the deterrence argument” for prison but felt that “the typical inmate would have committed 15 or 16 crimes that year” had he not been in prison. The problem with this, Hawken said, was that “he failed to identify the age cycle”–i.e. the fact that most criminals get less violent with age.

“Serious crime has about the same age structure as serious basketball,” said Kleiman.

Hawken noted that one of the areas of Wilson’s greatest intellectual discomfort was the question of how to deal with evidence that biology predisposes some people to crime. Ultimately, said Hawken, Wilson’s response was, “We can’t take away the fact that we still get to make decisions.”

Peterson noted that, while the biological dimension to criminal behavior “makes everybody uncomfortable,” what was as interesting to Wilson was the biological dimension to non-criminal behavior. “Why aren’t more people criminals?” said Peterson. “Why do people do the right thing even when no one’s watching?”

The question-and-answer session was lively and varied. One particularly in-depth discussion came in response to a question about Assembly Bill 109, known as the “public safety realignment” in which California is shifting much of the responsibility for incarceration of non-violent offenders from the state to the county level.

“It’s a grand experiment,” said Beck. “I’m not a big fan of it.” While it will be a “huge cost saver for the state,” the costs will hit counties and cities instead. “Will we do a better job than the state?” Beck asked. “I don’t know. We’re trying.” He added, “I hate doing it this way, where we have to learn it on the fly.”

Hawken echoed this view. “We tend to think small and act big” in California, she said. “They should have experimented with small counties first.” She also said that more time is needed before we can effectively measure the program’s effects.

One audience member asked whether we can credit “broken windows” policing for the drop in crime over the past two decades. “It’s been an important piece, not the only piece,” answered Beck. Other factors included better policing through data, the end of the crack epidemic (“That was huge”), and a large reduction in gang crime.

The question of how Wilson fit into current political disputes was often discussed in one form or another. Everyone agreed Wilson was conservative. But none felt that he would have had much in common with movements like the Tea Party today. “Of all his attitudes,” Kleiman said, “hatred of government was not on his list.” And Hawken noted that Wilson had surprised a conservative American Enterprise Institute gathering by saying that one of the best uses of money for crime prevention would be on social programs for single mothers.

Conservative Wilson might have been. Predictable he was not.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Read expert opinions on what scholar or intellectual of the last 50 years has had the greatest impact on the cities we live in today here.
Read Todd Gitlin’s article about James Q. Wilson’s blind spots here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

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Wilson was a fine teacher who demonstrated in lavish detail that corruption had social functions and reformers had human limits. I was fresh to liberal-radical thought, fascinated by human contradiction, and as yet unaware that the perverse consequences of transformative ideals and the futility of reform efforts were themes in which conservatives specialized. The point wasn’t made so crisply until 1993, by Albert O. Hirschman in The Rhetoric of Reaction. So what? I had no idea what Wilson’s politics might be and no particular interest in them. What mattered was that he evidently knew his stuff, that he had a refreshing skepticism toward the judgment of do-gooders, and that the stuff he knew was deeply relevant to my own preoccupations with how the world could, and could not, be changed.

It turned out, over the decades, that Wilson had a larger intellectual project: to affirm human universals in a skeptical, relativist age. He was right that morality was, in our time, disguised in the language of personality. The same year that the skeptical Hirschman cautioned against the clichés of the conservative impulse, Wilson published his magnum opus, The Moral Sense. Wilson wanted to make morality speakable in a culture abandoned to shallow self-seeking and to proclaim moral universals that transcended cultural difference. He took up one of the great themes of the Scottish Enlightenment, what its frequently misunderstood exemplar Adam Smith called “moral sentiments,” and tried to found, or refound, conservative thought on the lost virtue of virtue.

I have no quarrel with universalist projects and only respect for the view that their costs as well as their benefits must be reckoned with. I have argued myself that the idea of the left is a universalist idea, if a difficult one. But as the skeptical Wilson should have known, in every universalist project there is a blind spot, a territory that goes without scrutiny.

Although Wilson was aware of how behavior can be shaped by the physical environment (this was the point of his famous “Broken Windows” article, with George Kelling, on the importance of policing low-level crime), he seemed oblivious to how behavior can be shaped by the moral environment in a culture dominated by the acquisitive impulse. The moral problems that drew him were reserved for the field of controversy known as the culture wars. “Once,” he wrote in The Moral Sense, “the issues were slavery, temperance, religion, and prostitution; today they are divorce, illegitimacy, crime, and entertainment.”

Really? Why not war, and racial terror, and the unnecessary misery of so much of the human race? Why not the defilement of our one and only earth? Why not the moral ugliness of plutocratic contempt for the lower orders? Why not the destructiveness, creative and not, of an economy predicated on channeling wealth upward and responsibility down?

In a 1981 essay entitled “’Policy Intellectuals’ and Public Policy,” Wilson maintained that the two “most powerful and enduring ideas in American political culture,” alternating in their dominance throughout the nation’s history, are, first, “that part of our Puritan heritage that attached a high value to the rationalization and moralization of society,” and second, natural rights, “expressed today as a desire to maximize individual self-expression and the claims that the individual may make against society.” When I read these words, I don’t recognize the country I live in.

Wilson’s blind spot widened in a 1985 essay called “The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy,” in which he committed this careless sentence: “All that is interesting in human behavior is how it changes in response to changes in the costs and benefits of alternate courses of action.” Here was the Adam Smith of The Wealth of Nations–the human being as nothing but calculator of costs and benefits–minus the Adam Smith of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. At the root of policy failure, Wilson now thought, was bad character–not the bad character of agents of dispossession but the bad character of the undeserving poor.

About the “broken windows” and other criminological ideas that Wilson developed, I am not expert, and so demur from judgment. I understand that there is an argument about causes and correlations, and leave it to others to evaluate. But how may we speak about the great crimes of our time without taking note, as Wilson did not, of the commandeering of wealth by irresponsible financial elites? How a prophet of the moral sense could write about the political and intellectual tendencies of the last 30 years without staring straight at the rise of a plutocracy whose high-flying corruptions, self-dealing arrogance, and criminal negligence brought the world financial system to its knees, I do not understand.

As Wilson’s commitment to conservative orthodoxy grew, his critical edge was blunted. Scientists were as dismissible as straightforwardly ideological elites. Corporate elites who underwrote climate-change denial had been transmogrified into sage neutrals devoid of interests. So it came to pass that in later editions of his textbook, American Government (written with John J. DiIulio, Jr.), he was writing passages like this: “Science doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all.” If key political controversies could be reduced equally to conflicts among elites, then what stood in the way of the brainless politics of Sarah Palin?

The James Q. Wilson I studied with would have shuddered.

Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology and Chair of the Ph.D. Program in Communications at Columbia University, is the author of 15 books, of which the latest is Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street.

*Photo courtesy of Gastev.

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When we think of people who shape cities, we often talk of politicians and financiers. But thinking–the work of scholars–can have an outsized impact on the places in which we live. In advance of “James Q. Wilson, Broken Windows and Los Angeles”, a Zócalo event that considers the legacy of the late James Q. Wilson in his native Southern California, we asked four people who think about urban life this question: What scholar or intellectual of the last 50 years has had the greatest impact on the cities we live in today?

Kevin Lynch. Who?

Kevin Lynch was an urban planner and MIT professor who wrote the landmark book, Image of the City, which was published in 1960. The book influenced a generation of urban planners, urban designers and other design professionals. Lynch published the book as a critique of the poorly planned post-war cities (with their urban renewal and urban highways) that tried to compete with the rapidly suburbanizing American landscape. In so doing, he offered a new way of thinking about the psychology of cities. Lynch’s lectures and writings explained how people used mental maps to perceive and navigate through places like cities.

Lynch’s “mental maps” were based on five core elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. You can see those elements in today’s comprehensive plans, master plans and redevelopment plans. Rather than having cities mimic the development patterns of the suburbs, Lynch established a new identity for cities called “imageability”; the term refers to the fact that well-formed objects–and urban elements–leave a strong visual imprint on us. They have imageability. Lynch saw cities as authentic and organic, and argued that they relied more on the pedestrian experience than the driving experience.

Since the 1990s, cities have been making a comeback. Lynch influenced a generation of planners and designers at a time when cities were not fashionable or the preferred places to live. While some may not disagree, I believe New Urbanism, contemporary master planning and placemaking were shaped in part by Lynch. He elevated the role of urban design, city planning and introduced a new consciousness about “sense of place.” Twenty-first century cities owe Kevin Lynch a debt of gratitude for the resurgence of placemaking and good urban design–a resurgence that has been 50 years in the making.

Mitchell Silver is president of the American Planning Association (APA) and Chief Planning & Development Officer for Raleigh, NC.

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Le Corbusier, Wright, and Moses

Answering this question challenges my natural inclination to veer toward optimism. So many of our nation’s cities have been injured by insensitive policies and projects implemented over the past 50 years. Today, communities are mostly built in patterns that lead to stress on families, weak local economies, and an almost unbridgeable divide between the “haves and have-nots.” We as a nation have a problem when working families are spending, on average, 52 cents of every dollar just on housing and transportation; when the American Journal of Preventive Medicine reports that people who commute by car more than 15 miles per day are likely to be obese; and when cities are going bankrupt because they can’t afford to maintain the infrastructure they’ve already built or provide services to sprawling areas.

Theories promoted in the past 50 years have been instrumental in shaping both the built landscape and our quality of life. Think of Le Corbusier’s vision of the White City neatly defining separate places for working and living. Or Frank Lloyd Wright’s fantastical drawings of freeways swooping above the ground and reinforcing the notion of individuality over community. Or Robert Moses’ catalogue executing Eisenhower’s National Defense System (a.k.a. the Interstate Freeway System) encircling virtually every downtown in America. All three were instrumental in reversing what had been centuries of wisdom about the design and development of communities. These 20th century theories, meant to stimulate new ideas, were embraced with such gusto that we now have a phenomenally effective system of policies, codes and financing systems that make it all but impossible for communities to provide other options and adopt alternatives.

Through its Sustainable Communities Initiative, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is seeking to change the way the federal government engages with communities, and to support alternatives to the visions of Le Corbusier, Wright and Moses. We believe that people in communities should drive the vision for their future. And, with data, tools and support, the people will make practical decisions about moving forward into the 21st Century.

Shelley Poticha is director for the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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Jacobs? Or Wilson?

I would like to say that it would be that well-known proponent of density and diversity, Jane Jacobs, but it would be more factually accurate to say James Q. Wilson. Since the publication of his landmark article on the “broken windows” theory almost three decades ago, his work has found its way into the daily operations of dozens, yea hundreds, of police departments around the United States. Police officers, like teachers and other civil servants, have a tremendous influence on the character and tenor of urban communities. And Wilson’s work has given local law enforcement agencies the intellectual rigor and scholarly backing to engage in a carte blanche type of selective enforcement of certain violations, often leading to a continued marginalization of inner-city communities, most frequently those containing people of color.

If you are a city booster, place promoter, or public official, Wilson’s policy prescriptions provide the type of gold standard for those seeking to gain acceptance for these ideas. Everyone wants to be “tough on crime”, and this has been a major talking point in just about every municipal and national election over the past thirty years. But looking beyond this mantra of street-level policing, there is much else that has been ignored in the debates about how to solve the ills of urban America. We are only now starting to think about how urban agriculture, community art projects, and so on might weave back the frayed and often completely tattered threads of our urban neighborhoods. It’s about time.

Max Grinnell teaches urban studies at Boston University and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His writings on cities can be found at www.theurbanologist.com and you can follow him on Twitter @theurbanologist.

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Le Corbusier, And Not For the Good

Over the course of his 20th-century career, the Swiss-French architect and designer, Le Corbusier, may have influenced the form and composition of contemporary urbanism more than any other singular person. Unfortunately, I would argue that while his intellect and professional work were marked by sincerely humanistic aspirations and inspiring brilliance, his legacy has guided humanity toward destructive policies and projects that threaten our ability to live productively as an urban species.

Le Corbusier is widely regarded as one of the foremost pioneers of the modernist movement in architecture, and his writings and built projects paved the way for huge leaps in creative and technical thought about how humans construct and inhabit space. However, his vision was marred by a misguided love for automobiles, dehumanizing building scales, and top-down planning.

He worked to build revolutionary modern cities all over the world, like the “Radiant City” of Chandigarh in India and the housing blocks of Marseilles, and indeed these prototype projects served as the model for the massive social housing blocks erected to house the poor in cities all across the U.S., Europe and South America. Within one or two generations, these monolithic “slabs” almost always turned into vertical ghettos, disconnecting their inhabitants from vibrant urban street life and discouraging the formation of strong community ties.

The truth is that since the heyday of modernism in the 50’s and 60’s, urbanists have learned that cities are infinitely more complex than designers like Corbusier thought. Top-down, highly formal design of urban space does not allow for the interconnectedness, in both material and social terms, that healthy cities exhibit.

As a student of modernism and a great believer in many of the aesthetic and ethical contributions Corbusier made, it has been tragic to see how he failed so dramatically with his urban theories of tabula rasa and in favor of the car. But it is only with recognition of his mixed legacy that we can do what he so desperately sought to accomplish, which is to create better environments in which we can live, work and play.

Alfredo Brillembourg is co-principal of the international design and architecture firm, Urban-Think Tank. He also teaches and conducts research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich).

*Top photo courtesy of ernest figueras. Photo of Max Grinnell by Lynne Fallo.

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