Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
exemplify some of these. Two examples are taken from human
geography and two from physical geography.
The geography of crime
One might perhaps not expect the face of one of the world's most
notorious criminals (Figure 26) to grace a topic on geography
but, over the last two decades, a strong interest has developed
in the geography of crime and what has become known as
'environmental criminology'. Studies often begin with spatial
patterns - there are clear concentrations of crimes in space, and
there are crime areas characterized both by large numbers of
criminal events and the residences of many known offenders.
The Chicago where Al Capone thrived in the 1920s and 1930s
became an early laboratory for studies of this kind, and spatial
descriptors such as zones, gradients, and delinquency areas
emerged from these studies. Chicago was divided into clear
gangland territories where different groups, often ethnic, held
sway in the years of 'prohibition' in particular. Spatial patterns
were only a starting point as it soon became clear that offences
and offenders had different geographies aligned to opportunities
in the environment or targets, on the one hand, and the social
condition of the neighbourhoods, on the other. There are links
between poverty, deprivation, and many offences: crimes of
violence typify places of confl ux and entertainment; white-
collar and corporate crimes have different geographies. Urban
geographers have explored the incidence of specifi c offences such
as burglary and have shown which kinds of neighbourhoods are
the most vulnerable. There are several hypotheses to identify most
vulnerable areas:
•
The 'offender-residence' hypothesis suggests that places where
many offenders live are vulnerable (burglars tend not to travel far
to offend).
•
The 'border-zone' hypothesis suggests that the edges of
neighbourhoods are the most vulnerable.
