"Crime in the city": an analysis of the connections between crime, urban scale, and urban centrality

Abstract

This study analyses the connection between crime and the structural characteristics of mu-nicipalities. The first part compares the concentration of different crime types in the municipali-ties ranked by their population size across eight countries worldwide. The second part anal-yses the relationships between crime rates, urban scale and urban hierarchy among the Italian municipalities. The analysis suggests that both urban scale and hierarchy are relevant for un-derstanding crime rates.