"Defensible space was one of the first spatial debates Elanor was consciously aware of as a young architectural undergraduate at the Bartlett. The arguments following the publication of Utopia on Trial in 1985 (and Bill Hillier's critical lectures on spatial analysis logically unpicking the dissonance between theory and application) stirred Elanor's awareness of the extent that architectural design decisions really affect people's lives and experiences. The notion of differentiated public and private spaces remained formative throughout Elanor's architectural and urban design practice, and later professional jobs researching housing design and policy. Directing a Home Office funded study into design and crime on housing estates, provoked a sense of déjà vu. Hadn't Alice Coleman been asking similar questions about natural surveillance and symbolic ownership of public areas 20 years before? Were the spaces around these award-winning high-density new homes at risk of becoming as unloved as the decrepit and run-down brutalist concrete estates Coleman had studied? Elanor's PhD on defensible space (as a geographer not an urban designer) was motivated in part by this sense of long unresolved questions and a fear of repeating past design mistakes. So, when Elanor finally met Alice Coleman, at her 90th birthday celebration at King's College London, surrounded by ex-students and academics applauding her research successes and being King's first female professor of geography, their conversation about the contradictory nature of defensible space was lively and questioning"-- Provided by publisher.