Property and Personal Crime in Istanbul

In recent studies on urban safety, close relationships between physical and demographic characteristics have been found in crime levels in cities. In many countries social, political and economic turmoil have been the main reasons for the increase in urban crime and violence in the last 50 years. In physically deprived environments, the most important factors that increase urban crime are socially isolated communities, economic discrimination and lack of equality in political citizenship rights. In developing countries, it is difficult to obtain data about crime and safety. For this reason, there are very few studies on crime compared to developed countries. In the research in this paper, the similarities and differences of crime ratios against property and persons in Istanbul are compared with those in other countries. For this purpose, the spatial distribution of crimes committed were analysed on a comparative basis between 1998–2002 in 32 districts displaying different characteristics in terms of distance to the centre, use of land, value of land, physical and demographic features. The research revealed that the crime rates in Istanbul against property and persons were in parallel with developed countries. The districts which have mixed use (residential and commercial, residential and industrial), high population increase, high number of households, high density and high land value, property and personal crime levels are high; when date of becoming a district is recent and the size of the district is large, property and personal crime levels are low.     

Images of buried graves in Bayat,Afyon (Turkey) from high-resolution magnetic data and their comparison with preliminary excavations

Dedemezari necropolis, the site of our study, is located in the west of Turkey near Afyon. Archaeologists think that it belongs to the Middle Bronze age. A high-resolution magnetic survey identified buried material highly accurately. In particular, anomalies, which are transformed by the analytic signal method, clarify the observed magnetic anomalies. Magnetic surveying was applied in three different areas in this study. The map of analytic signal-transformed anomalies presented good results on preliminary excavation in trenches A and B. Two types of graves are found in the study area. One is made of clay and the second is carved in the rocks. Shapes of the buried graves are mainly cylindrical and elliptical. Most of the magnetic anomalies are elliptical and reflect the shape of the buried materials. Future excavations in Dedemezari necropolis will be able to be carried out more easily due to the known locations of the buried graves.