[1] After working as a secondary school teacher, Coleman became a lecturer at the geography department of King's College London, eventually becoming professor in 1987 after other posts in Canada and Japan.
[1] As head of the Land Use Research Unit at King's in the 1980s, Coleman built on the work of architect Oscar Newman on the concept of defensible space.
The findings published as Utopia on trial (Coleman 1985) were controversial, with Newman suggesting that insufficient attention was paid to social factors interacting with the physical.
[5] Bill Hillier of the Bartlett School of Architecture argued that many of Coleman's findings on the link between large scale housing and social problems were a statistical artefact: simply put, large blocks have more litter than small because they are larger.
As a teacher in secondary modern schools in the 1940s prior to her career at King's College London, Coleman claimed to have encountered only one pupil in 1200 unable to read.
[citation needed] The Royal Geographical Society presented Coleman with the Gill Memorial Award (1963) and Busk Medal (1987).