ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Brantingham and Short apply the concept of emergence, discussed more broadly in Chapter 2, explicitly to crime. They argue that routine activity theory is particularly applicable as a framework within which to study crime emergence, largely because it attends to the physical interaction of individuals and their environment. In this way, they provide a very instructive chapter for readers by taking a theory with which criminologists are well acquainted and demonstrating how it can structure inquiries and explanations of crime that are sensitive to the principles of emergence discussed in the first chapter. Brantingham and Short then provide an example of how this framework can be translated to an empirical model that allows for an understanding of “real” crime patterns.
To substitute an ill-understood model of the world for an ill-understood world is not progress.
(Boyd and Richerson 1985: 25)