Lab rats in a maze, that's all we are

A new book on urban design argues all we do is give burglars an endless set of Rubik's cubes to play with:

We meet an anonymous Canadian burglar — now working in home security — who confesses to memorizing his city's fire code to figure out the internal layouts of apartment buildings he robbed. Because every unit was required to have a fire escape outside, he could tell how many units were on a given floor. And he even knew which floors had mandatory unlocked fire exits, giving him a perfect way to enter undisturbed.

Another criminal, nicknamed Roofman, knocked over a series of McDonald's across the U.S. by figuring out the franchise-regulated daily routines of workers. He knew exactly when people would be emptying cash registers and when the fewest workers would be around. He even knew what the typical layout of each restaurant would be, so he could easily drop into exactly the right place from his hidey hole in the ceiling. He is believed to have stolen from as many as 40 of the fast-food restaurants in nine states.

Eventually he was caught but almost immediately escaped from prison. After months of freedom, Roofman was caught for a second and final time. Officers discovered that he'd tunneled behind a bicycle display in a Toys R Us and from there into an abandoned Circuit City next door, where he built a secret apartment under stairs.

Characters like these reveal the often strange psychology of burglars, but they also underscore how burglary is knitted into the routines and regulations of cities. Of course, crime prevention is part of the urban landscape too. At one point, Manaugh introduces us to British law enforcement agents who have built a "burglar trap," a fake house with obvious entries that is designed to lure burglars into the arms of local police, especially in high-crime neighborhoods.

As the book goes on, Manaugh gradually draws us into a vision of the urban landscape as something to be reverse-engineered, used against itself. Decorative structures on the outsides of buildings become handholds, and service stairwells become "architectural dark matter" to be explored for fun and profit. Even transit systems are hackable, as thieves plan their getaways with instruments that can give them the green lights they need to weave their way through congested city streets.

Though he clearly admires the way burglars turn cities inside out, Manaugh is careful to remind us that most of them are jerks who leave their victims feeling violated.

He spends weeks shadowing detectives, flying with police in helicopters over Los Angeles, asking them what architectural features would make it easier to fight crime. Mostly, their answers involve better ways to identify addresses from the air; they also wish for easier-to-navigate hallways in the warrens of public housing mega-structures.

Burglary is a peculiarly spatial crime, as Manaugh puts it. One cannot be a burglar without breaking into a structure, and the law goes to almost absurd lengths to define what these structures might be. Construction sites with no walls can be "broken into," for example, even if they are completely open on all sides. Because "breaking and entering" is used as a sentence enhancement for other crimes like theft or rape, lawyers have invented arcane ways to define a built space, calling into existence what Manaugh calls "fictional architectures" made of nothing but legal webs...