The (In)Stability of Disorder Across Time and Space? a Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Physical and Social Disorder and Fear of Crime in the Netherlands

Whereas the occurrence of physical and social disorder across the urban landscape and the explanation of the observed spatial patterns have long preoccupied criminologists and urban sociologists, relatively few studies have looked at the stability of disorder patterns and their interplay with fear of crime from a spatio-temporal perspective. Elucidating the (in)stability of spatial patterns of disorder and fear of crime is especially important for the model of urban development known as the Broken Windows Thesis, which posits that physical and social disorder, if unabated, lead to heightened fear of crime, reduced informal social control, and eventually a rise in more serious crime.

The present contribution is a spatio-temporal cluster analysis of physical disorder, social disorder, and fear of crime in the Netherlands based on the Dutch `Police Population Monitor' survey between 1993 and 2005, a large-scale biannual household victimization survey covering every municipality in the Netherlands. By aggregating the individual survey respondents of each commune, we constructed a municipality-level longitudinal dataset spanning twelve years. We perform geovisualization and spatio-temporal clustering analyses of Dutch municipalities in order to determine whether there are significant local differences in physical disorder, social disorder, and fear of crime and whether these spatial patterns persist over time. In addition, self-organizing maps serve to classify individual municipalities into clusters of similar spatio-temporal type across the Netherlands. Finally, we test to what extent this “data-driven” typology of municipalities accounts for the observed shifts in the spatio-temporal patterns of disorder and fear of crime over the twelve-year study period. The study thus produces evidence whether the front end of the hypothesized “developmental sequence” linking disorder with heightened fear of crime and reduced informal social control can be observed across time and different types of municipalities or is a rather transient and exclusively urban phenomenon.