The relationship between urban form and perceived security; an empirical analysis(The case of Shiraz city)

Many urban communities are conflicting different social issues including crime and in a general statement, lack of security. The issue can be related to socio-demographics, on the other hand, there is an undeniable relationship between crime incidence and geography. The study of urban crime is part of criminology discipline named “the environmental criminology”, in which crime patterns are explained by the characteristics of built environments. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the correlations between key aspects of urban form (i.e. density and land use mix) and the perceived level of security for residents at the scale of urban block in seven neighborhoods of metropolitan Shiraz. The data required for this study have been collected from the national census database, Geographic Information System (GIS) datasets and household questionnaire survey. The urban physical indicators are measured objectively. The perceived security is defined by five variables, extracted from the literature, including fear of crime, experience of crime occurrence, having reliable neighbors, social cohesion and incivilities. According to the one-way ANOVA analysis outcomes, there is a significant relationship among different blocks developed in three different historic eras (i.e. lower median for newly developed neighborhoods) in terms of the fear of crime and crime occurrence. The results from correlation analysis show that more crimes are associated with the blocks having higher amounts of residential density. The results also reveal that higher levels of crime occurrence and the perceived fear of crime are correlated with the higher share of non-residential land uses across the investigated block.