Cityscape Examines Urban Problems and Spatial Methods

Cityscape Examines Urban Problems and Spatial Methods

The latest issue of Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research features a research symposium designed to showcase creative applications of spatial techniques and methods to a variety of urban issues. Guest Editors Ron Wilson and Rob Renner introduce the symposium by explaining that tools for spatial analysis have reached such an advanced stage of development that they are increasingly critical to understanding complex issues and resolving some of society’s most pressing problems.

The articles in this symposium, Urban Problems and Spatial Methods, demonstrate applications of spatial analysis in the study of problems such as crime, vacant land, segregation, and more. In their article, Joel M. Caplan, Leslie W. Kennedy, Jeremy D. Barnum, and Eric L. Piza show how risk terrain modeling (RTM) can be used to diagnose, identify, and predict areas in which crime has a likelihood of occurring. In a practical demonstration of RTM, the authors developed a risk terrain map for burglary in Chicago, using easily obtained data for a number of factors seemingly geographically related to the incidence of crime, such as abandoned vehicles, problem buildings, bars and nightclubs, and broken streetlights. Victoria C. Morckel used a complex model-building process to find that, in stable neighborhoods, house-level characteristics have a greater impact on the probability of a house being abandoned than do neighborhood-level characteristics — but in more distressed areas, neighborhood characteristics matter more. William J. Gribb examines land use and its demand on parking in Laramie, Wyoming. To do so, the author inventoried and analyzed all land uses in the city with the help of 3-D spatial referencing, along with the parking demands generated by these uses.

The other symposium articles provide additional examples of applying spatial techniques to the study of relevant housing-related issues:

“Linking Public Health, Social Capital, and Environmental Stress to Crime Using a Spatially Dependent Model,” Greg Rybarczyk, Alex Maguffee, and Daniel Kruger

“Exploring the Spatial Diffusion of Homicides in Mexican Municipalities through Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis,” Miguel Flores and Amado Villarreal

“A Spatial Difference-in-Differences Approach to Studying the Effect of Greening Vacant Land on Property Values,” Megan Heckert  

“Rethinking Food Deserts Using Mixed-Methods GIS,” Jerry Shannon

“Spatializing Segregation Measures: An Approach to Better Depict Social Relationships,” Masayoshi Oka and David W.S. Wong  

“Increasing the Accuracy of Urban Population Analysis With Dasymetric Mapping,” Jeremy Mennis

“An Integrated Framework To Support Global and Local Pattern Assessment for Residential Movements,” Yin Liu and Alan T. Murray

“Spatial Experiences: Using Google Earth To Locate Meanings Pertinent to Sense of Place,” Nicholas Wise

“Small Stories in Big Data: Gaining Insights From Large Spatial Point Pattern Datasets,” Ate Poorthuis and Matthew Zook

This issue also features a refereed paper by J. Michael Collins, Carolina K. Reid, and Carly Urban, “Sustaining Homeownership After Delinquency: The Effectiveness of Loan Modifications by Race and Ethnicity.” The authors studied a national sample of securitized subprime loans, originated between 2004 and 2006, to analyze racial and ethnic heterogeneity in loan modifications. No significant differences in types of modifications across borrowers were found. A further finding was that, across all racial and ethnic groups, payment reductions consistently lowered the likelihood of redefault and foreclosure one year after a loan was modified.

In addition to the above, this Cityscape includes articles from regularly appearing departments: Data Shop: Data Sources for U.S. Housing Research, Part 2: Private Sources, Administrative Records, and Future Directions by Daniel H. Weinberg and Connecting Address and Property Data To Evaluate Housing-Related Policy by Alyssa J. Sylvaria, Jessica Cigna, and Rebecca Lee; Industrial Revolution: Glass-Modified Asphalt Shingles for Mitigation of Urban Heat Island Effect, by Marwa Hassan, Micah Kiletico, and Somayeh Asadi; and Foreign Exchange: Measuring U.S. Sustainable Development by Eugenie L. Birch.