An analytical study of urban space and crime case study-Bambalapitiya

Abstract

It is predicted that the Sri Lanka's urban population will be around 55% to 60 % from the total population in year 2020. This is not a phenomenon only for Sri Lanka; entire Asian region particularly developing countries will get the same. At the same time it is predicted that the economic power will also be shifted to the Asian region from the western hemisphere. As a result urbanization will play crucial role regarding economic, social and cultural aspects in these countries. Therefore it can be assumed that urbanization will reshape and change dimensions of these factors while people will decides those changes in the course of good and bad.

Crime which remains in urban areas as a hazard also can be spread further as a residual in the wake of these developments. When reviewing the literature it can be understood that study of crimes rather more close to sociology. However a lot of research endeavors can be found regarding crime and urban space in the last three decades by famous western scholar such as Barry Poyner, Jane Jacobs and Newman etc. However it can be noted that different studies envisages different outcomes hence it is still wide open for further studies. Therefore this study is also an attempt to envisage the existing situation of the occurrence of crime in relation to urban areas as well as their relationship with urban attributes in the perspective of the Sri Lankan cities. Therefore this research is devised through an analysis of the urban morphology attributes and crimes. For this three crime categories such as house breaking and theft, robberies and vehicle theft were employed which is known as opportunistic crimes. Through a literature review it was identified main attributes in urban space which more likely induced crimes and applied those main urban attributes to an urban area in city of Colombo to identify the crime pattern with the urban space. For this purpose the study areas was selected based on the frequency of above said crimes as well as crime per population.

By the analysis it was map out that the some of the crimes were occurred due to the reasons of both macro and micro level urban attributes. However it also observed that first it required to saturated macro level of urban attributes at first and within that space micro level of urban attributes required to fulfill for the occurrence of crime. Thereby it was model the macro level of attributes to generate a crime risk areas in the study area and compared it with actual crimes to evaluate the possibility of the occurrences of crimes in macro level urban attributes.