CLOSE‐UPS AND THE SCALE OF ECOLOGY: LAND USES AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CONTEXT AND CRIME

• Author: JOHN R. HIPP,ADAM BOESSEN
• Date: 01 August 2015
• Published date: 01 August 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12074

CLOSE-UPS AND THE SCALE OF ECOLOGY: LAND

USES AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CONTEXT

AND CRIME∗

ADAM BOESSEN1and JOHN R. HIPP2

1Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri—St.

Louis

2Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California—Irvine

KEYWORDS: neighborhoods, crime, aggregation, spatial effects

Whereas one line of recent neighborhood research has placed an emphasis on

zooming into smaller units of analysis such as street blocks, another line of research

has suggested that even the meso-area of neighborhoods is too narrow and that the

area surrounding the neighborhood is also important. Thus, there is a need to examine

the scale at which the social ecology impacts crime. We use data from seven cities

from around the year 2000 to test our research questions using multilevel negative

binomial regression models (N =73,010 blocks and 8,231 block groups). Our results

suggest that although many neighborhood factors seem to operate on the microscale

of blocks, others seem to have a much broader impact. In addition, we find that

racially and ethnically homogenous blocks within heterogeneous block groups have

the most crime. Our findings also show the strongest results for a multitude of land-use

measures and that these measures sharpen some of the associations from social

characteristics. Thus, we find that accounting for multiple scales simultaneously is

important in ecological studies of crime.

Building on the seminal work of the Chicago School in the early twentieth century,

a substantial body of literature has examined the ecology of crime. These studies often

have focused on the potential of social control in geographic areas and most frequently

have used “neighborhoods” as units of analysis. One well-known challenge in ecologi-

cal studies is choosing a unit of analysis (Hipp, 2007a). In an effort to minimize within-

unit heterogeneity that could result from using larger units such as tracts (or groups of

tracts), recent scholarship has suggested that the ecology of crime is best captured with

a microspatial scale/unit of analysis, including street blocks, street segments, or hot spots

(Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger, 1989; Weisburd, Groff, and Yang, 2012). As this line of

neighborhood research over the last decade has drilled down to smaller and smaller units,

one risk is that researchers might adopt too narrow of a geographic lens and therefore

could miss important processes that occur at a broader spatial scale (or at least outside of

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the Wiley Online

Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2015.53.issue-3/issuetoc.

This research is supported in part by NSF grant BCS-0827027. Direct correspondence to Adam

Boessen, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri—St. Louis, 531

Lucas Hall, One University Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63121 (e-mail: boessena@umsl.edu).

C2015 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12074

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 53 Number 3 399–426 2015 399

400 BOESSEN & HIPP

one street block). For example, the ethnic heterogeneity of a street block could provide

too narrow of a lens and might miss broader patterns in the surrounding area. Studies of

micro-areas rarely simultaneously consider the more mesoscale of neighborhoods or the

social context surrounding these micro-units.

Another body of research has focused on the mesogeographic scale of “neighborhoods”

as “urban villages.” Two particularly strong assumptions of this approach are that social

processes that produce crime are entirely contained within a neighborhood, and that the

amount of crime is homogeneous across the smaller units within the neighborhood. Stud-

ies commonly include various measures of spatial processes to take into account how

nearby neighborhoods might affect the level of crime in a focal neighborhood, and re-

searchers almost always find evidence of some type of spatial effect (e.g., Mears and Bhati,

2006). This is all to suggest that a “neighborhood” as a unit of analysis seems unsatisfac-

tory both because it is too large and because it is too small.

Understanding the spatial scale of social dynamics is important not only when mea-

suring sociodemographic characteristics posited to impact crime but also when assessing

the effects of physical characteristics. The environmental crime literature has posited that

land-use features impact levels of crime by creating opportunities and situating where

guardians might provide informal social control (Brantingham and Brantingham, 1984).

The extant research in this area has usually only focused on one land-use characteristic

in the local environment. Nonetheless, it is unclear whether such effects are very locally

situated (at the actual location) or whether they have a broader spatial impact.

Thus, there is a need to assess the varying scales of ecological processes that produce

crime, and in this article, we begin by highlighting the different scales used in the ecology

of crime literature to measure neighborhood processes. We begin to address this need

by incorporating crime and land-use data at the block level for seven cities, and then by

computing ecological measures at three geographic units of analysis: 1) the local block,

2) the mesoneighborhood (the block group or tract), and 3) the 5 miles surrounding a

neighborhood with a distance decay. We assess the relative impact of these measures on

various types of violent and property crimes. Our results suggest that different neighbor-

hood processes do not all operate on the same scale as routinely assumed in the literature,

and different conclusions are possible depending on the scale of analysis. The findings

suggest that different crime processes could operate simultaneously at different spatial

scales, and we show that land uses are particularly important for understanding crime

patterns.

SOCIAL ECOLOGY OF CRIME

THE PROCESS WITHIN NEIGHBORHOODS

A key theme of several criminological theories is that residents can provide social

control through guardianship and that this can impact levels of crime in the environment.

This idea is present most prominently in social disorganization theory, but it also exists

in routine activities theory. Social disorganization theory posits that certain sociodemo-

graphic neighborhood compositions enhance the possibility of crime inhibiting behavior

on the part of residents (Bursik, 1988; Sampson and Groves, 1989). Neighborhoods with

more social interaction are expected to have more cohesion and, hence, more willingness

to confront offenders and others engaging in disorderly behavior. For example, the