Spatial Pattern of Urban Crime Occurrences and Urban Activities in Osaka City

Static and time-serial analysis

Abstract

Social geographers have extended their research frontiers into urban crime problems which have previously been studied by both criminologists and sociologists. They have tried to explore spatial dimensions of crime problems by associating their findings with the research results of social area analysis conducted by factorial ecologists, and have tried to propose policy implications for improvement of problem areas. However, there remain some critical points so be carefully examined, as is generally admited in the studies carried out by criminologists and sociologists as well. They are as follows;
1) Ambiguity in the definition of urban crime: In the present paper, urban crimes are defined as those which are highly concentrated in urban areas. As typical urban crimes, we select murder and burglary, theft, and violence.
2) The nature of crime data used for analysis: Most of the previous studies conducted in United States and Western Europe rely on the available crime data which are compiled from the places of residences of criminals, rather than places of occurrences of crimes. The data based on places of occurrences are more desirable for map pattern analysis of urban crimes and urban activities.
Crime statistics appropriate to geographical analysis are not available in Japan, for they are tabulated by larger areal units than municipal wards in for example Osaka City, the present study area. The data on the places of occurrences were collected by refering to newspaper articles on crimes commited in Osaka City every five years from 1960 through 1980. Crime data thus obtained were plotted into 1, 010 meshes (500×500 meters) covering the whole city.
The present article has three major research objectives as outlined below;
[A]Detecting spatial patterns of crime distribution and pattern comparison of crime occurrences and urban activities.
[B]Time-serial analysis of spatial patterns of crime occurrences from 1960 through 1980 with particular reference to the changes of demographic and socio-economic structure of the city.
[C]Comparison of the results secured by the above analyses with ‘crime area’ studies of American and European cities.
The results obtained are as follows:
[A] In explaining the concentration of urban crimes in particular areas, we pay keen attention to the socio-economic characteristics observed in daytime and nighttime activities in those areas. (i) The spatial pattern of murder and burglary is characterized by the contrast between a blank zone in the C. B. D. area and concentration in downtown quarters with amusement facilities and railway terminuses, slums, and mixed land-use areas. Thus, the spatial pattern of murder and burglary has closer relations with that of nighttime residential activities than that of daytime economic activities. (ii) The spatial pattern of theft shows strong concentration in the downtown quarters mentioned above and mixed land-use areas on the periphery of the city. (iii) Violence is clustered around the downtown quarter located in the southern part of the city.
[B]For the time-serial study, we confined our analysis to murder and burglary which provide the most reliable data, for we can pick up nearly all of their occurrence through newspaper articles. Their spatial pattern has drastically changed during the last two decades. Their changes can be summed up as a sharp decrease in both numbers and their concentration in the particular meshes. Especially, the decrease in the mixed land-use area is remarkable. It began in 1965 and has continued since then. Some of the afffecting factors are: 1. decrease of the total population of Osaka City, particularly in the central zone, 2. decrease of mixed land-use reflecting separation of residence and working place, 3. increase of per capita incomes following the rapid growth of the Japanese economy