Wednesday 4 March 2009

Simulation case studies in Vancouver

In January - February this year I was able to visit the Institute for Canadian Urban Research Studies (ICURS) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, to work with expert criminologists Pat and Paul Brantingham. I was able to run a prototype of my simulation on Vancouver to see how crime rates might change if a new rapid-transit rail line was built.

There is a short presentation which has lots of information about how I used the Vancouver data to configure the model and the results of the case studies themselves. As an example, the following figure illustrates how space syntax analysis can be used to estimate how busy a road might be and therefore how easy it would be for a burglar agent to gain access to a property without being seen by passers-by.

1 comment:

Alan Penn said...

Nick,

nice blog. By the way there is a load of stuff on the relationship between burglary and other forms of crime and antisocial behaviour coning out of the UrbanBuzz programme at UCL/UEL. The key projects are iValul and SEDUC. Bill Hillier has various working papers and a book chapter in press, and it would be worth getting in touch with him to ask if he could let you have a sight of them.

Second point, in Depthmap there are the EVAS agents, as well as an SDK to allow you to tweak. Since the agents have long distance forward facing vision of their environment (ie they can see down streets, but not round corners) they have emergent properties that might be useful in the kind of simulation you are constructing. Nobody has tried them on crime yet so far as I am aware...

Alan Penn