The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Criminology

The study of how the environment, local geography, and physical locations influence crime has a long history that stretches across many research traditions. These include the neighborhood effects approach developed in the 1920s, the criminology of place, and a newer approach that attends to the perception of crime in communities. Aided by new technologies and improved data-reporting in recent decades, research in environmental criminology has developed rapidly within each of these approaches. Yet research in the subfield remains fragmented and competing theories are rarely examined together.

The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Criminology takes a unique approach and synthesizes the contributions of existing methods to better integrate the subfield as a whole. Gerben J.N. Bruinsma and Shane D. Johnson have assembled a cast of top scholars to provide an in-depth source for understanding how and why physical setting can influence the emergence of crime, affect the environment, and impact individual or group behavior. The contributors address how changes in the environment, global connectivity, and technology provide more criminal opportunities and new ways of committing old crimes. They also explore how crimes committed in countries with distinct cultural practices like China and West Africa might lead to different spatial patterns of crime. This is a state-of-the-art compendium on environmental criminology that reflects the diverse research and theory developed across the western world.

Gerben J. N. Bruinsma is the former Director and current Senior Researcher of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) in Amsterdam, and Professor Emeritus of Environmental Criminology at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology of the Faculty of Law of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His current interests are environmental, theoretical, and historical criminology.

Shane D. Johnson is Professor and Director of the Dawes Centre for Future Crime at University College London. His current research interests include understanding the changing nature of crime, and the application of multidisciplinary approaches to urban crime problems.