Spatial Profiles of Street Crimes

The capital city of Recife in the Northeast of Brazil is known as the most dangerous city in the country. It not only presents the highest rates of youth’s assassination but is also experienced as a very insecure city due to the presence of street crime. Recife presents also high levels of poverty and social inequality. Nearly 70% of the population lives in shantytowns spread all over the city, it is spatially characterized by islands of wealth among poverty. The presence of fortuity street crime happening at any time, any place puts everyone at risk.

The sense of insecurity and fear, allied with a lack of confidence in the police, drive the inhabitants to adopt measures of individual security. While driving, the car windows are always closed, protected against internal vision and late at night, as a rule, no one dares to stop at a red light. High walls, iron bars, electric fences, armed gatekeepers, video surveillance are the most common features of residential buildings. All these measures make public spaces and the public interface, mainly sidewalks, more insecure, empty of movement and prone to crime.

This work was set up to study the spatial pattern of crime occurred in the city’s wealthier neighborhood: the beach of Boa Viagem, famous among tourists. This study intends to identify the main spatial factors related to different crimes. The different crimes were characterized by the nature of offence as well as type of weapon and strategy of eviction. Each crime is associated to a spatial profile describing overall qualities of the area of the occurrence. The spatial profile compiles eight items related to global and local accessibility, land use and density, visual qualities of the interface and architectural features of the surroundings. The profiles informs the numbers of interfaces (doors, gates), the quality of lighting and the presence of obstacles. Other location features were also considered such as proximities to market places, shopping centers and poor neighborhoods. The mapping of crimes alows the micro description on crime locations. Spatial aspects such as global and local accessibility were described by means of space syntax measurements as well as the quality of vision lines.

The study relies on 3 years of official data regarding crime locations. The spatial profiles were analysed by means of multidimensional statistic analysis. A Partial Scalogram Analysis was useful to describe qualitative and quantitative features of crime spatial profiles. Local results contradict international findings showing different spatial logic for the occurrence of crimes. There is no correlation of robbery with more segregated streets as shown by other international studies (Hillier and Shu, 2000).



The study "Spatial Profiles of Street Crimes" is a part of a research that has been carrying out at Laboratory of Technologies for the City (LATTICE) in the Post-Graduation Program on Urban Development (MDU) of Federal University of Pernambuco(UFPE).

The preliminar results of this study were presented on the 8th National Crime Mapping Conference held in Manchester from 10 to 11 June 2010. They were also presented on a seminar promoted by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) of University College London (UCL) held on 16 June 2010, in London.



On the left: Spencer Chainey, director of Geographical Information Science at the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science, University College London, and chairman of the 8th Crime Mapping Conference. On the right: Mauro Normando M. Barros Filho, researcher of the Lab of Technologies for the City, Federal University of Pernambuco.

New Publication: Scales of Intra-Urban Diversity

The book "Escalas da Diversidade Intraurbana" (Scales of Intra-Urban Diversity)is aimed at learning the effects of scale upon understanding intra-urban sociospatial diversity. In order to attain this objective, the study was broken down into six parts. In the first four, a theoretical approach towards intra–urban models is developed, considering their principles and methods of manipulating spatial data. In the last two, an impirical investigation of the sociospatial diversity of the city of Recife is carried out at different periods and on different scales. In the first part, we seek to address the main intra-urban models that have been used to describe sociospatial patterns considering a single scale of analysis. In the second, we seek to investigate the methods that have been applied for the representation of intra-urban structure. In the third, methods of spatial data analysis are adopted that are based on the hypotheses of self-correlation of geostatistics and self-similarity to the fractal theory. In the fourth, multiscale intra-urban models based on the hypothesis of spatial self-organization are analysed. In the fifth, an historical background to the main actions, plans and information adopted with the aim of controlling and understanding Recife’s sociospatial diversity is studied. In the sixth and final part, we demonstrate how this diversity may be learnt on various scales from the development of a methodology using census data and satellite images. The recomposition of the input developed in each of these parts permits the conclusion that the Recife’s social patterns are spatially dependent and manifested on many scales, there being a tendency for areas with better living conditions in the city to remain smaller and more grouped when analysed on a single scale, and more disperse, when analysed on larger scales.


"This book stands out, at the same time, for its theoretical deep and methodological rigour, intrisic qualities of the homonimous thesis (which I had the honour to be a member of the examination board) and the characteristics of the author as a researcher. At the same time, it preserves the necessary didatic posture, which anables the almost natural conversion of the thesis into a book of public interest that will welcome those (academics or not) attracted for the mutiple faces of the social and urban diversity, and its physical and spatial effects in cities, particularly in Recife. The first part of the book synthetizes, in a descriptive and dissertative manner, the theories and representation (idealization) models of the cities, preparing the readers to a precise diving into the reality of a city whose socio-spatial diversity is at the same time its richness and historical problem. The theoretical synthesis of the four initial precised and well referenced chapters discusses about a still little known issue which has been revealed little by little on urban studies, based on the recognition of the complexity, descentralization, non-linearity, and multiplicity of city scales as a phenomenon and object of study. This initial theoretical rigour added to the dissertative rigour and analytical precision at the final part of the book is translated into a work which already occupies an enhanced place on the contemporary thinking about the urban development in Brazil."
Dr. Fabiano Sobreira, professor UNICEUB.

"The city is the greatest and most complex human artefact. It is a expression of economic forces; it is a product of empirical sciences; but also it is locus of the social living and interaction. It is not possible to syncronically understand all social processes that operate inside it; neither those that constitute the relation between closer and remote urban spaces. Maybe this is one of the reason why the urban object interests so many knowledge fields and being permited the required integration of researchers from different scientific and artistic underground. Mauro Normando Macêdo Barros Filho is one of these researchers who investigate this fantastic human creation through a multidisciplinary prism, searching for new questions that reveal new answers (or new answers to reveal new questions)in order to comprehend much better its socio-spatial dynamics. He arguments that studies based on multiscale models permit a much better identification, representation, description, and analysis of urban phenomena, in particular they help on the understanding of the dynamics in diacronic studies and the sociospatial intra-urban diversity. This book should attract students and researchers who search for new question or answers (or new answers and questions) about the city. Here they will find approaches and analytical procedures to enrich their understandings."
Dr. Luiz Amorim, professor UFPE.

The book has 340 pages, 65 illustrations,34 graphs, and 16 tables. It was written in Portuguese and is available on Brazilian bookshops such as Livraria Cultura, Livraria Imperatriz , and Livraria Jaqueira. For more information about how to purchase it please contact me by email.

Urban space and image: converging configuration and texture analysis

The article presents the results of an investigation that aims at integrating different approaches to the analysis of the urban form. The proposed methodology integrates two lines of investigation: a) texture analysis of high resolution satellite images using fractal and lacunarity measures to describe the spatial distribution of pixels with similar gray levels; b) Visual Graph Analysis (VGA) that describes visual and access properties of urban open spaces. A second order analysis is proposed in order to describe the texture of VGA maps and investigate to what extent the underlying configurational and texture patterns are correlated.

The figure below shows the visual connectivity of 4 urban fragments from the city of Recife, Brazil. The light areas in each fragment correspond to the most visually connected public spaces.



This article was published on the annals of the 16th International Seminar on Urban Form held in Guangzhou (China) from 4 to 7 September 2009.

Detecting intra-urban morphological patterns through interpolation by Ordinary Kriging of lacunarity values from VHR satellite images

This paper describes a method for detecting intra-urban morphological patterns through interpolation of lacunarity values generated from high spatial resolution satellite images. This method was applied in an area with 1,500 x 1,500 meters, located in Recife, Brazil, which is comprised of two informal settlements separated to each other by a formal urban area.


Figure 1: Location of the study area and its subareas

Firstly, lacunariry values were extracted from 168 QuickBird image samples of this area, with 75 x 75 meters in size and 0.60 meters in spatial resolution. Then, these values were assigned to georeferenced centroid points of each image sample and interpolated by Ordinary Kriging. Finally, the generated image was classified through a K-Means algorithm. The lacunarity analysis was run considering 5 different box sizes, and the classified images with each box size were overlaid to describe the morphological pattern through several scales.


Figure 2: Image generated through the overlay of the 5 classified images

The results showed that the lacunarity values were very sensitive to the texture variation of the selected images. Image samples with high lacunarity correspond to intra-urban areas composed of relatively big buildings and large roads, whereas image samples with low lacunarity correspond to denser and more compact intra-urban areas composed by small buildings, narrow and tortuous alleys. In the end it was possible to detect different intra-urban morphological patterns between the formal and informal areas, but within the informal areas as well.

The paper was presented on the 11th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management - CUPUM which was held from 16 to 18 June 2009, in Hong Kong.

Urban texture and space configuration: analyzing Recife’s urban fragments

This paper reports the first stage of an ongoing research which main interest is to integrate two distinct approaches to the analysis of urban phenomena – image texture analysis and space syntax –, aiming at a better description and understanding of complex intra-urban socio-spatial patterns. On the one hand, satellite image texture analysis distinguished morphological patterns from urban areas with different inhabitability conditions, as previous studies have are already demonstrated. On the other hand, the constitution map texture analysis revealed distinct patterns according to different social and urban dynamics, according to urban form, size and land use, in such way that compact, highly parceled and constituted patterns tend to present low levels of mean lacunarity, whereas disperse, non-parceled and poorly constituted ones tend to present high levels of mean lacunarity. Such findings show that the texture analysis combining satellite images and interface maps is a very promising research for understanding the relationship between morphological and social patterns, and deserves future investigations.



This paper was published on the annals of the 7th International Space Sintax Symposium held on 8 to 11 July in Stockholm, Sweden.

Informal real estate market for housing at Recife Metropolitan Region: an initial approach

The book Producción inmobiliaria y reestruturación metropolitana en América Latina was published by Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile and Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo da Universidade de São Paulo, and edited by Paulo Cesar Xavier Pereira and Rodrigo Hidalgo. The book aims to inquiry about the different influences on the real estate re-struturation that models present Latin American metropolises. Moreover, it intends to give a broad picture of the discussion among researchers, professionals, and academics from several disciplines which are interested on urban studies in different Latin American countries. It is an expression of the necessary debate between the Iberic American world that speaks Portuguese and Spanish, in order to comprehend Latin American reality, which differences and similarities need to be urgently addressed to construct a theory for explaining (not excluding what happens in the rest of the world) its own reality.


The chapter Funcionamento do mercado de habitações nas áreas pobres da Região Metropolitana do Recife: uma primeira aproximação, written by Norma Lacerda, Júlia Morim, and Mauro Barros Filho, aims to contribute on the discussion about the operational mechanisms of the informal real estate market in a set of poor areas of Recife Metropolitan Region (RMR), based on the preliminary results of a questionnaire applied in such areas. These results were presented and discussed considering the similarities and specificities of the informal real estate market in relation to the theory which fundaments the formal one. In this context, the investigation presents: (i) the reasons why to invest on the understanding of informal real estate market; (ii) the dimensions of the poor areas in RMR; (iii) the criteria which help on the selection of the poor areas; (iv) and the interpretation of the answers to the questions address to their inhabitants. The results permit the identification of the main elements which delineate the operational mechanisms of the informal real estate market.

The city and its cartographic representations

Maps are models for representing cities, primordial on the development of urban studies, projects, and plans. The production of maps requires technical and artistic knowledges. Otherwise it would lead to a distorted reading and interpretation of urban phenomena and processes, as well as to non-adequate urban proposes. This paper aims to present and discuss the limits and possibilities of Cartography to represent cities. Initially it is done a brief review of the concepts of maps, considering their types and applications. Then it is analyzed the characteristics of four basic cartographic elements applied in the representation of cities: coordinate, symbol, scale, and projection. In the end, it is made some comments about the relationship between representation and reality.


For more details see the complete version of this paper published on the new edition of the online scientific journal HUMANAE.