Mapping the Nightclubs and Criminal Behavior in Globalizing Taipei
City—A Geographic Information Systems Approach
Lin, Yee-Zu
MA Student, Institute of Social Informatics,
YuanZe University. EMAIL: ## email not listed ##
C.S Stone Shih ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
Soochow University. EMAIL: ## email not listed ##
Of special interest on the spatial pattern in Taipei’s urban society, this study
focuses on the interaction of nightclubs and criminal behavior by applying geographic
information systems. For mapping the two research targets, we collect the archival
data and field research to review the changing locations of pubs in Taipei’s history.
The criminal data is from official statistics of Taipei City Police Department. In
Taipei’s globalizing process, most of the land uses are increasing transformed in a
mixture type. Now it is easy to find supermarket, offices, or nightclubs located in a
residential area. We find the difficulty to define public area from private area. The
complicated urban space causes potential dangerous for people or man-made disasters
to damage urban environments. To define urban crime as seeking excitement,
self-proofing, or copycat from media, we find the distinctive crimes are mostly
located in the mixture of public-private space.
After 1997, the emerge of the global characteristics of Taipei city, such as
convenient transportation, multi-national corporation, consumer services, and high
population density also reshaped the lifestyles and landscape of the area and in turn
increased the intense correlation of nightclubs and criminal behavior. In this paper, we
use GIS to study the environmental change and to locate the crime spots and
nightclubs in Taipei’s 12 administrative divisions. In this way, we create digital social
maps for understanding the correlations of our variables and develop policy
suggestion for decision.
Key word: globalization, urban space, GIS, nightclub, criminal behavior, Digital
Social Maps, location analysis
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