Crime and Place: Rapidly Evolving Research Methods in the 21st Century

Patricia Brantingham , Simon Fraser University

As with the articles in this issue, this introduction reflects the views of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The symposium in this issue of Cityscape focuses on understanding crime and the urban environ- ment, particularly how people live in and interact with the landscape (buildings, people, roads, and activities) that surrounds them. It advances understanding of crime within the urban landscape. Ronald E.

Exploration of crime and place is a rapidly evolving area of research in the 21st century. Some of my early work in the 1970s examined a topological structure of neighborhoods, identifying a way to measure the permeability of edges of the neighborhood, allowing crime committed by nonresidents to drift away from the usual location along major streets into roads toward the centers of neighborhoods. The computationally intensive simulation loop underpinning this research was possible only in the 1970s because I was working on a very large Cray-like standalone computer. Most people in the social sciences did not have access to such machines at that time. The movement toward personal computers that followed further limited the technical ability of researchers to take geographic ideas of a city and try finely woven analysis. Researchers were forced into data aggregation to census tracts or larger areas or were limited to the use of very small samples of cases primarily based on interviews.