This study tests the crime impact of the Boston South-west Corridor parkland, a 5-mile transit and linear park, on its adjoining neighbourhoods 15 years after its completion in the early 1980s. The study responds to concerns of local neighbourhoods during the time of planning and construction, and to evidence of general public uneasiness about the dangers of linear parks to communities. In an analysis of two residential neighbourhoods adjoining the corridor, the study searched ® rst for evidence of crime spill-over from the corridor, and secondly for neighbours' perceptions of corridor safety. To test crime spill-over, police calls from houses adjacent to the corridor were compared with calls from houses further away; interviews with residents investigated perceptions of the corridor's safety. Findings revealed that though police calls were marginally more frequent from houses next to the corridor, these were considerably less frequent than calls from houses next to commercial streets. Interviews with residents revealed generally positive estimates of park safety by day, with low estimates of night-time safety and mixed estimates of its safety during twilight hours. Interviews also revealed heavy reliance on the corridor by the elderly and people with small children. The study concludes with recommendations for the future design of linear parks in cities.

What are suburban technopoles like as places? This article examines the design and planning features of areas developed specifically to promote technological innovation focusing on cases in Japan that have been ranked highly as technological centers: Tsukuba, Izumi Park Town and Kansai Science City. Although different in age and the relationship between public and private sponsors they share a campus style of urban design, with ample green space linking nearby housing, adapting the college or university campus model and combining it with a garden city approach in what we call the international campus-garden-suburb style. Although there are other kinds of environments that support high-technology clusters -for example multimedia areas in central cities -the international campus-garden-suburb is a very flexible model that can be seen in many international examples. It can be used for developments in the thousands of workers and residents to the hundreds of thousands. URBAN DESIGN International (2010) 15, 165-182.

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Compactness and connectionIt is widely agreed that planners should be aiming to create cities that are more environmentally sensitive. Governments, developers, planners, and designers almost everywhere claim to be doing just that. What does this mean, however? Since the 1970s many planners and designers have been promoting a compact and efficient approach to green development. On the basis of a comprehensive yet evolving understanding of environmental systems, planners have developed a workable vision of a sustainable and just metropolis and region.There are alternative approaches, however. For example, a bioecology perspectivè`v iews cities as severely disturbed ecosystems and humans as disturbance agents'' (Wu, 2008, page 43) and puts nature at the center. We argue that another important perspective underlies the work of many practitioners as they plan conservation subdivisions and projects demonstrating low-impact design. Addressing psychological perceptions of nature, this connective approach stresses human connection to the natural world at a local scale. It is often paired with sophisticated solutions to local environmental problems such as hydrological functioning, requiring fine grained analysis of site features and context. While the compact city hypothesis has been criticized or at least questioned (Alberti, 1999;Frey, 1999;Neuman, 2005), this alternative approach is largely absent from academic planning discussions of the environmentally sensitive metropolis (though see Berke, 2008). Where it is mentioned it is as a highly local solution.Physical design is only part of the picture in creating developments that are more environmentally sensitiveöindividual consumption behaviors and choices, social norms, and economic incentives and disincentives are also key (Neuman, 2005). However, the compact approach has proven strengths in solving important environmental issues at the metropolitan and regional level. Several coherent models have proposed how people