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| A REVIEW OF STUDIES ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ENVIRONMENT AND CRIME IN CHINA |
| MAO Yuan-yuan, DAI Shen-zhi, SHEN Zhi-lian |
| Department of Urban Planning, School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China |
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Abstract Urban crime is one of the most important issues affecting people's life. The relationship between physical environment and urban crime interests the researchers of the disciplines like criminology, geography, urban planning and architecture. This paper reviews 83 papers of the past 23 years in China. The paper consists of four parts. The first part is a brief introduction to this paper. In the second part, the sources of these papers are introduced. This is followed by an introduction to the ways these papers are categorized, especially by discipline and study type. In the third part, the authors analyze the quantity of researches of every year which appears an ascending trend especially in the past eight years. The distribution of the researches in different disciplines is that the papers of the urban planning account for 38 percent, the papers of criminology occupy 28 percent, the papers of geography occupy 22 percent and the papers of architecture occupy 12 percent. The analysis on study types indicates that 17 percent of the researches are empirical studies conducted in the cities of China. The remaining of the literatures are mainly the reviews of theories and/or applications overseas, and policy suggestions are not based on any basic or empirical studies. In the fourth part, all the papers are divided into three groups according to their content, including the spatial distribution of crimes in urban areas, the relationship between urban environment and criminal behaviors, and the prevention of crime through urban environment planning and design. The analysis of the first group indicates that empirical studies are scarce and most of the studies focused on the macro levels of a city or country instead of the micro level of urban environments. Both comprehensive factors in macro urban areas and concrete factors in different types of micro urban environments, such as residents, parks and industry areas are involved in the second group of studies. The analysis on the third group indicates that CPTED is the basic theory of the studies. Although this theory is introduced twenty years ago into China, few urban planning or designing projects have been conducted based on it. In the last part, the authors also put forward some suggestions for the future researches.
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Received: 16 January 2009
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2010, Vol. 25 
