Crime and Green Space
I became interested the relationship between crime and green space when a professor pointed out his experience with areas of Chicago where parks are seen as places to avoid rather than relax. If mental health and proximity to parks is positively correlated, then how do we confer the benefits of green space upon residents without adding negative factors? Upon learning how to use GIS software in the Spring of 2020, I decided to try tackling this issue by looking at first whether there was a spatial relationship between urban parks and crime.
Chicago, Illinois
This is the crime heatmap I created in ArcGIS 9.2 showing the prevalence of all crime in Chicago in the summer of 2019 and its spatial relationship to citywide parks. These are the largest parks in Chicago and were chosen because of their larger area and the fact that they were distributed throughout the city.
Upon reading literature on the subject of urban parks and crime, I also eventually included tree canopy coverage in each park as an additional variable as there was some evidence that the amount of vegetation increased crime.
The results of this map are inconclusive as this was more of an exercise in learning to use data and mapping, but it is the beginning of research that would be interesting to continue.
Your can read the full paper at the bottom of this page.
Dublin, Ireland
After finishing my map of Chicago, I decided to see if I could create something similar for another country. I wanted to see what were the differences in available information and types of spaces between the two. I chose Dublin, Ireland because the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at UIC has a relationship with University College Dublin.
While Chicago has crime statistic data by geographic coordinates, the same statistics for Dublin were only available per Garda (police) Stations. Furthermore, creating buffers between the Garda Stations and local parks to assess a spatial relationship meant I ran against the modifiable area unit problem as I could find no firm data as to the size of an area one Garda Station might serve.
Overall, creating this map was a great lesson in how to find data from other countries and the differences and limitations in types of data available.
Crime & Green Space.pdfDublin Project.pdf