Policies of urban development are developed and come into force in form of laws, planning documents and other legal acts in many European countries. The Declarations of the Rights of the European Human right stresses up the safety and declares the necessity to foster a city, which as far as possible prevents crime, offenses and aggression. Both planners and citizens understand the impact of organization of urban environment to life quality, including safety. The problem is that the relationship between the environment and society is very complex. It is not sufficiently investigated how urban environment changes people who reside and socially interact in that territory and how it affects criminality. Public safety is one of the factors that strongly influence the quality of life. Reduction of crime rate can only be achieved if diverse factors, including characteristics of urban environment, are taken into account. The authors of the paper analysed possible impact of different urban parameters to the distribution and dynamics of crimes in open spaces. A theoretical framework of factors that can influence crimes in public spaces was developed on the basis of the classical 'crime triangle', linking likely offenders, suitable targets and guardians for the targets in time and space. The main initial hypothesis was that functionally homogeneous zones (i.e., 'purely' residential, commercial, or industrial) tend to have significantly higher crime rate than mixed use (polyfunctional) zones. The hypothesis was tested on a densely populated part of Vilnius city-12 districts with similar morphometric characteristics (density, height and fragmentation) of the built-up areas across the residential zone. The authors have been looking for the relationships between homoand heterogeneity of the land use and varying territorial crime patterns based on more than 10,000 registered criminal incidents of 2012. The investigation showed that territories with monofunctional commercial use are exposed to the highest risk of all types of crimes in the open space: murders and assaults, robberies and thefts and minor offenses. On the contrary, in the residential zones, less percentage of mixed use means lower crime rate.
While the need of interactive Internet maps to solve geographical tasks in society is urgently growing and the technologies are constantly improving, research on user interfaces is one tool that can ensure the application of effective functionality, and thus improve the quality of communication. This article introduces and analyses four classic functionality research techniques (monitoring, examination, feedback registration, and experiment) drawn from the scientific literature and suggests two new research techniques (qualimetry and conversion) based on the author's research. The author suggests distinguishing four main indicators that in general would describe the weak and strong features of research techniques: length of research, costs of research organization, objective of research, and applicability of results. The principal aim of the analysis is to help define the most important advantages and disadvantages of functionality research techniques. The article first describes types of interactive maps and their function groups, then proceeds to the analysis of the six suggested functionality research techniques.
Two toponymical maps presented in this paper show 2332 inhabited places of Lithuania that have names (oikonyms) associated with vegetation and animals. The maps and the dataset are the outcomes of a project that is aimed at combining the outcomes of professional onomastic research with an environment that fosters exploration. The oikonyms were extracted from the reference base dataset of Lithuania by means of an automated algorithm. Original cartographic symbols have been designed for depicting categories and species. The multiscale map application, with its exploratory tools, makes it easy to see spatial distribution of geographic names related with particular groups of plants and animals. Analysis of map data enables the assertion that local toponymy reflects a distribution of species that were characteristic to the territory over past centuries. The maps are supplemented by comparative density maps and statistical charts. The reference scale of the main maps is 1: 500,000. ARTICLE HISTORY
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