Abstract:
Crime is a major social problem and always considered to be a predominant urban problem as an attention for urban concern. Crime that occurs on the street is one of the major problems in everyday life. Street crime like mugging and vehicle theft that are usually committed in outdoors are most talked about crime problem in society. Street crime is a problem in every large city in the world. Dhaka city is no exception and is experiencing a worrying spike in street crime. It suffers from a chronically high crime rate and has emerged as a city of crime, insecurity and political violence. Crime has long been thought to be intimately associated with the physical environment. Different body of research focused on exploring the relationship between physical environment and fear of crime or actual crime location. From different study it was found that people feel vulnerable in areas that are isolated from the surrounding environment due to improper physical configuration of the environment. The relationships of crime and spatial planning can be used as indicators for expected crime distribution and other social and economic attributes.
The components of physical environment can act as tool to prevent of crime in a city. In this research the physical environmental aspects is focused and less priority is given on other factors as socio-economic factors, law and order situation. This study is done to examine the relationship of spatial planning aspects and street crime with three objectives from overall distribution of crime in DCC area and focused on detail level in the study area with some physical planning factors like spatial layout, land use, boundary wall, building entry and street light on occurrence of street crime. The research is done with the reported mugging and vehicle theft data obtained from DMP and insecure places identified by the local people through focus group discussion.
From the spatial distribution of street crime it is found that street crime is very much related with the specific urban core with more people’s activity and public movement. Space Syntax methodology developed in the University College London (UCL) is applied to assess the impact of spatial layout in occurrence of street crime with four study area selected from DCC. The study is done and assess with attributes like integration and connectivity of street segment of spatial configuration on crime location. Other impacts of physical planning features on occurrence of street crimes are done through field survey, different maps and focus group discussion on the study area. The local people’s perception on security feelings on the study area is also examined.
