Analyzing Security Issues Against Pedestrians in Urban Areas: Case Study of Street Crimes in Suginami and Machida, Tokyo

Abstract

Building a safe walking environment in urban areas is significant for future urban development, however, the questionnaire investigations and statistics in Japan showed that people feel unease about the security issues against pedestrians. In Japan the attention on street crimes is not paid enough by previous studies, therefore it’s necessary to analyze the occurrence of street crimes in urban areas further and comprehensively. This study aims to clarify the influential factors of occurrence of street crimes in Tokyo urban areas, covering the influence from topological spatial configuration, built environment, human’s presence and sociodemographic attributes. In the case study of Suginami ward and Machida city, factor analysis is performed on both daytime and nighttime street crime samples, and the results are interpreted with spatial pattern of clustered samples to find out similarities and differences between 2 time periods and 2 areas.