Introduction: Urban Change and Crime

Abstract

Many criminological researchers have turned their attention to the urban context of crime over recent years. In the United States a long tradition of research has focused upon neighbourhood change and its criminological consequences. For many the housing market was, and remains, pivotal to their undertakings (see Skogan 1990). In this context, of course, the private housing market is pre-eminent and the public sector highly residualized (Harloe 1995). British writers have drawn upon these traditions; identifying processes that are common to both sides of the Atlantic, and others that are not clearly reflected in the UK, in large part because of the relatively large social housing sector in this setting.