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Creating a Blueprint for Safety : Design: A growing number of landscapers are creating plans that are pleasing to the eye, but also help prevent crimes and accidents.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

When Cy Carlberg looks at a dense, flowering bougainvillea, she sees more than shrubbery. The Caltech landscape designer envisions the mugger who could hide behind it, perfectly concealed from potential victims.

“Overgrown shrubs, no matter how nice they look, can pose a problem,” Carlberg said grimly.

Carlberg likes to patrol her turf after dark with a flashlight to spot thick hedges where mashers can lurk, uneven sidewalks waiting to trip unwary passersby or dark alcoves that need better illumination.

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That allows her to translate an architect or designer’s renderings into real-life scenarios. She knows that what looks good on paper doesn’t always comfort a lone pedestrian scurrying home late at night, alert for footfalls behind.

Carlberg is one of a growing cadre of designers who are putting an urban edge on landscape design--planning to prevent crime and accidents as well as to please the eye.

“You look at balance and harmony and texture and color and use and now there’s one more piece of the equation: safety,” she said. “Lots of work goes into making it look open and leafy and natural. When it looks effortless, that’s when the most work occurs behind the scenes.”

Joan Hirschman, an assistant professor at Cal Poly Pomona’s department of landscape architecture, is another adherent of stronger safety measures, particularly for women.

“It’s something that deserves a lot more attention and could become a consulting specialty from a women’s safety perspective,” Hirschman said. “Only recently are people starting to look at some of the tenets of landscape architecture and questioning the ideas that we’ve built good design on and what is good for women.”

Carlberg, a certified arborist, has worked for the city of Fullerton and was the landscape designer at Scripps College--one of the prestigious Claremont Colleges--for four years.

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On a recent day, Carlberg returned to Scripps to show a visitor her handiwork at the private liberal arts college for women built in 1926.

Strolling through the 30-acre campus, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, Carlberg explained how the campus was designed in an era when security concerns were almost nonexistent.

Today, Scripps retains its stately, leafy feel but is beginning to feel the urban problems that plague most of Los Angeles County. Belying the pastoral atmosphere at Scripps are the occasional reports of crime--a total of 21 reported in 1992, the vast majority of them burglaries.

Carlberg says this rustic environment can lull students into a false sense of security. Outside a student dormitory, she points out how she trimmed back the Pyracantha--a shrub with orange, holly-like berries--to deter prowlers.

The luxurious Pyracantha grew 3 feet high and 5 feet across, obscuring part of the dormitory windows and providing ample cover for someone creeping up through the grounds to peer or crawl inside the windows, which young women often left open on hot summer nights.

“Boy, that was an accident waiting to happen,” Carlberg said. Her shears got to the shrubs before any problems materialized.

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The tour continues through a walkway that is now lined with lights encased in eight-paned clear glass lamps atop tall metal posts. Before Carlberg’s arrival at Scripps in 1988, the area was poorly lit, with lights spaced far apart.

“When I moved in,” recalled Nancy Bekavac, Scripps’ president who lives on campus and enjoys nighttime strolls with her golden retriever, “one of the first things I did was fall into a trench.”

Bekavac can now stride safely through the grounds.

“The comfort level has changed, and I think that’s critical to women,” Bekavac said. “It’s very hard ever to explain to men the kind of burden that concern about personal safety puts on women.”

In addition to the antique-looking lamps, whose design was found in the Scripps archives and replicated by a contemporary craftsman, there are wires that snake almost unseen up the trunks of olive trees, connecting to spotlights that cast strategic beams across wide swaths of the campus at night.

In another courtyard, Carlberg planted prehistoric-looking Australian tree ferns under windows. They provide appealing lacy green foliage while allowing for “visual penetration,” landscape lingo that means one can see through it, an important safety consideration.

Scripps is accessible to the street, which means anyone can stroll in. A four-foot stucco wall surrounded one dormitory, but Carlberg thought it could easily be scaled by a determined prowler, so she topped the stucco with iron grillwork to provide better security.

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The grillwork blends in with the Mediterranean hacienda-style building to evoke a lazy, 19th-Century feel.

Carlberg has an eye for landscape features that look perfectly innocent to most people. For example, overgrown, luxurious foliage may look wonderful at high noon, but security guards making their rounds at night want to be able to see through them to make sure no one is hiding.

During the day, narrow walkways create an intimate feel. At night, they can turn into ominous traps for ambush. Even the issue of where to put public bathrooms and bus stops has safety repercussions.

Planners now try to situate them in a high-traffic area near other pedestrians. And they realize that common-sense attention to safety issues costs less money in the long run than hiring scads of security guards--who can’t ensure safety on a sprawling campus or park anyway.

“Have you ever seen how isolated some bus stops are in downtown L.A., where working-class women are standing alone in large industrial areas after dark?” asked Sylvia White, a professor of urban and regional planning at Cal Poly Pomona who teaches a class on gender issues.

“That’s crazy,” White continued. “They’re unsafe. I don’t think men who do the designing think about these things. It’s just very recently that some educators have been talking about this as an issue.”

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Hirschman sends her students to Scripps each year to walk the campus in daylight, then asks them to return at night to record their impressions and see how different a landscape feels under different conditions.

In her gender class, White has students survey potential trouble spots at Cal Poly Pomona. For instance, she says, five years ago several women were accosted at dimly lit Cal Poly parking lots.

With their consciousness about safety issues heightened from class discussions, White’s students made a number of recommendations that she handed over to the school’s head of security. Eventually, Cal Poly installed better lighting, put in an emergency phone and trimmed back hedges.

“They sound like minor changes, but they’re major in terms of cutting down crime for women students,” White said.

White and Hirschman say the growing awareness among designers is partially a response to the public, which is demanding that safety and security issues be addressed. The issues surface at homeowner hearings, planning commission meetings and even student council meetings.

At Scripps, a student named Karen Wren in 1988-89 was instrumental in raising safety awareness as a member of the Buildings and Grounds Committee so that students, faculty and staff could work together to identify and address security concerns.

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Equally important, the number of female architects, landscape designers and urban planners has also mushroomed. Rod Tapp, a landscape architect at Cal Poly Pomona who specializes in lighting, says women made up only 10% of his classes when he started teaching in 1966. Now it’s at least 40%.

Tapp says women are more safety-conscious than men. So are urbanites.

“I’ve done projects in Utah where there’s little or no concern for safety and security,” Tapp said. But in Southern California, “(in) maybe 90% of my jobs, people consider lighting and security as a major concern.”

That is gratifying news to Carlberg, who as Caltech’s manager of grounds services spends at least three hours a day walking the campus examining landscape, trees and safety issues.

She reviews all new landscape designs, makes suggestions for changes and works closely with the safety manager to keep Caltech, which is also an open campus, as safe as possible, especially since students often work late into the night in their isolated labs.

The landscape designer opted to work at colleges instead of a professional firm because she says she wanted to spend time outdoors each day instead of being stuck in an office. Besides, she says with a rueful laugh, she hates to draw.

Now she sports an even tan from her hours outdoors and wears tennis shoes on the job. But there are also hours in dim archives, researching which plants the original landscape architect envisioned for the campus and which will do well in the Southern California climate.

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Carlberg grew up on a two-acre estate in Claremont, and remembers tagging along behind her father as a child while he gardened. She traces her passion for landscape design to a moment in her teens when she noticed a tree that had just been pruned. She made her father stop the car so she could examine the handiwork.

“It was beautiful,” she recalled. “I bugged my dad and told him that we have to find out who did that because I want to learn how to prune trees.”

After high school, the budding arborist tracked down the trimmer and wangled a job from him. She learned how to climb, prune and pronounce the multisyllabic Latin names. Eventually, she started her own tree-trimming business. She quit to attend Cal Poly Pomona, where she earned a degree in landscape architecture.

Carlberg says that as an urban woman, she has always been conscious of safety and security issues. But she credits the Scripps students with opening her eyes wide to the special problems faced by women, and the small and often inexpensive steps that can be taken to make campuses safer.

“I make punch lists: Oh-oh, this is getting too tall, this is too opaque, that should be thinned out,” Carlberg said.

“It’s always on my mind.”

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