Abstract
Crime is a costly societal issue. While many factors influence urban crime, one less-studied but potentially important factor is neighborhood greenspace. Research has shown that greenspace is often negatively associated with crime. Measuring residents’ use of greenspace, as opposed to mere physical presence, is critical to understanding this association. Here, we used cell phone mobility data to quantify local street activity and park visits in Chicago and New York City. We found that both factors were negatively associated with crime, while controlling for socio-demographic factors. Each factor explained unique variance, suggesting multiple pathways for the influence of street activity and greenspace on crime. Physical tree canopy had a smaller association with crime, and was only a significant predictor in Chicago. These findings were further supported by exploratory directed acyclic graph modeling, which found separate direct paths for both park visits and street activity to crime.
Highlights
Crime is a serious and costly challenge to many urban areas.There is a large heterogeneity in crime rates observed across and within cities
We found that tree canopy, park visits, and street activity all had significant, and negative associations with non-violent crime in each of the models
The model that included all of the predictor variables had the best fit, as indicated by the lowest Akaike Information Criteria (AIC)
Summary
Crime is a serious and costly challenge to many urban areas.There is a large heterogeneity in crime rates observed across and within cities. A growing body of research examines the impact of the physical environment on crime, through such features as climate[6], vacant lots or buildings[7], ambient and artificial light[8], or disorder[9]. Another factor that has been much less studied is the impact of urban greenspace[10]. A potential problem is that these studies have used the static physical presence of greenery, either binary or as a quantified amount, as their independent variable This coarse measure may be leading to equivocal results, as it is uncertain how residents interact with the available greenspace. Doing so is not trivial and requires unique data and analyses that allow researchers to monitor, en masse, how individuals interact with different physical environments in their cities
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