Do you ever look at a wall and say: that could be a door if I just throw my entire body through it? Yeah, I don’t either. But that’s because we’re not burglars! Retelling stories of thieves, shadowing law enforcement, training for a zombie apocalypse, and thinking through the ‘defensive’ built environment, Burglar’s Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh (the man behind BLDGBLOG) provides a new way to look at architecture and urbanism. The book’s scope starts big. We look at cities and their infrastructure, and then we zoom into buildings. Eventually, we asses the tools that both assist and fight burglars.
Image Courtesy of burglarsguide.com
I’m biased because I have an obsession with Los Angeles, but one of the more fascinating parts of this book is the light that it sheds on LA and its crime scene. Manaugh joins in a helicopter patrol flight, surveying the vast landscape, noting the noodled network of highways and the countless dead-end cul-de-sacs. LA is urban sprawl. It’s a huge group of smaller neighborhoods that are well connected. Racing in a getaway car, burglars use that to their advantage.
The location of a building greatly impacts its vulnerability. If you’re a burglar, looking to rob a convenience store or break into a house, you want a quick means of getting away. You look for a place that is close to a highway on ramp. But even in a denser, more urban city like Chicago or New York, you search for a potential target that is close to a public transit stop. Rob the place, hop on the subway, blend into the crowd, and never be seen again. Yet, it’s counterintuitive. As a prospective homebuyer, you want access to these transportation stops. But your desire to be connected runs parallel with a burglar’s desire to be able to get away.
On a more positive note, Jason Bourne (my favorite movie character) gets a shoutout. Manaugh mentions Matt Jones’ essay explaining why Jason Bourne is the “ultimate urbanist.” Manaugh notes: “Bourne’s superpower is simply that he uses cities better than you and I,” (258). I think that Jason Bourne is better than me at everything, not just using cities, but hey maybe that’s just me.
Ultimately, there’s a legal dialogue in what defines burglary. Burglary is the invasion of space. So, there needs to be a clear distinction of the boundaries of that space. This begs the philosophical question: what are those boundaries? Where does architecture start and end? Is it your property line? Is it the exterior edge of the cladding on your house? Is the center line of the threshold of your door? If you live in a multi-unit building, does it start in your lobby? I don’t have any answers here. I am scared of lawyers, and I don’t want to trigger a personal existential crisis. But these are important ideas to think about as we continue to shape and create buildings and urban landscapes.
Continuing on our enlightenment coffeehouse talk, we can look at our view of burglars that Manaugh brings up near the end of the book. He said that he approached the book with the hope that he could be a cheerleader for the person who flips architecture on its head, the person who keeps you on your toes, the person who stretches the ideas of architecture, the person who writes their own script. But, you can’t. Burglars are “assholes.“ They physically break architecture and emotionally destroy people’s sense of security, often scarring people for years to come.
I agree. Nobody wants to root for the bad guy (unless you watch Breaking Bad or Ozarks). But, as Manaugh shows throughout the book, there’s still an opportunity to learn. One of the big takeaways for me is this idea that burglars are some of the few people that create architecture, well after construction has ended. Most of us are purely consumers of architecture. We take the finished product and live with it. No doubt, we surely take advantage of it. It becomes a home. It becomes a place of productivity. Whatever it is for you, it becomes a collection of memories. But there’s a beauty to endlessly creating and changing architecture. Architecture shouldn’t be static, nor should our interactions be with it.
We, the normal people, approach a building and allow it to tell us what to do. Burglars are creators. They use a building to do what they (the burglars) want to do. Most people see walls as walls. The twisted few make walls into doors. Maybe we can all look at walls as more than walls. No, not as doors, but as a blank canvas, waiting to be painted.