ABSTRACT
In organizing a collection of classic works in environmental criminology, we obviously feel that there is an existing critical mass of work that takes the built environment as a key element in understanding crime and its distribution in our communities and can be recognized as the beginnings of a field within criminology. Further, this pioneering literature provides the foundation for future advances in the scientific understanding of criminal events. We, of course, make many assumptions and value judgments regarding the “inclusion set” of this collection and acknowledge that other authors’ works could have been incorporated. We hope though that our selection provokes healthy debate about the roots of environmental criminology. It is in this vein that we would like to conclude with a few thoughts about the pedagogical value of these earlier works, and underscore some, but by no means all, of the connections to contemporary research and future directions in environmental criminology.
