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Territories of Social (Dis)Order: criminal landscape and spatial dynamics of St. Petersburg ‘neighborhoods’
Problems of social order, improvement of territories and social organization have been always acute all over the world. Scholars have provided enough evidence to talk about signi cant correlation between cues of social disorder and deviance and crime contextualized within certain historical and spatial environments. In this paper we will focus on the transformations of social (dis)order in connection with crime and landscape over time using St. Petersburg as a case-study.
Using empirical data from police reports and various characteristics of municipal ter- ritorial units of St. Petersburg we would like to verify the main hypothesis of the theory of social disorganization theory, that is, that the environment, in which the individual lives, has a signi cant impact on their behavior contextualized within normative models of so- cial order. The paper analyses the spatial distribution of crime by GIS and environmental determinants of deviations in various areas by OLS.
The paper consists of two parts. The rst part deals with historical landscapes of crime and social (dis)order in St. Petersburg (1703-1990) to highlight historically inherent models of spatial dynamics of crime characteristic of St. Petersburg as a “regular” city and a capital of the empire descended into a provincial town after 1924. The second part of the paper explains how these historical models (dis)continued in the 1990s and 2000s due to changing environments and advances in urban planning.