Crime occurrence and spatial patterns of Urban Poverty. Evidence from the case study of Milan (Italy)

Peripheral urban areas are often the focus of crime-related news reports, which highlight their social distress and degradation—a perspective that has also become widespread in the academic literature. However, urbanization trends and increasing poverty have radically reshaped the geography of urban deprivation, making cities as a whole susceptible to these phenomena, not only their peripheral areas. While pursuing the principle of deprived areas regeneration, not informed urban planning choices may unintentionally increase crime. This work investigates the potential spatial relationship between the occurrence of crimes in some places in the city, and urban poverty, understood as a multidimensional phenomenon given by the combination of several factors, related to the socio-economic hardship of the resident population and the degradation of buildings and homes. A GIS-based methodology is proposed aimed at Mapping Urban Poverty (I) and Crime (II), in order to investigate their possible spatial relationship through analysis techniques: crime distribution (III); normalized crime density (IV); the spatial concentration of crimes, using the Kernel Density Estimation technique (V). Urban poverty is measured using a composite index (UPI), whose increase corresponds to higher levels of criticality. The application to the case study of Milan reveals that the areas with highest UPI values are mostly peripheral, while crime incidence is higher in the more central areas, rich in attractors and flows of people. However, there are no substantial differences between the various UPI levels in the percentage distribution and overall density of the categories and types of crime. In addition, it was possible to identify critical areas where both urban poverty and the spatial crime density are high, in which integrated urban regeneration actions are necessary.