Safety and sustainability in a city in transition: The case of Vilnius, Lithuania

Urban experts have long recognised crime and fear of crime as dominant challenges to sustainable cities. A sustainable community is a place free from the fear of crime, where a feeling of security underpins a wider sense of place attachment and place attractiveness. In this article, we follow the recent strand of Western research and suggest a framework for assessing safety, which includes the analysis of the geography of crime, fear of crime and crime prevention. Empirical evidence is based on Vilnius, Lithuania. Findings show that whilst Vilnius’ geography of crime shows patterns similar to those found in Western cities, fear of crime shows a complex pattern, playing a minor role when citizens judge their residential quality. Crime prevention incorporates top-down features as well as approaches previously adopted by Western cities. The article concludes with an assessment of the proposed framework and directions for future work.

Research highlights
► This is the first study using geo-referenced crime data for Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.
► The article summarizes the main strengths and constraints of using the geography of crime, the perceived safety and the initiatives of crime prevention as a general framework for assessing urban safety in a city in transition.
► Findings show that spatial patterns of crime in Vilnius are similar to those identified in Western European cities. Theft, robbery and to certain extent, drug-related crimes in the inner-city areas are expected to be related to the daily routine activity of these central areas.
► Findings also show that the spatial distribution of reported crime differs from victimization reports, which is a very interesting result from a theoretical and practical point of view. There is a risk that inferences might be wrong if we are making use of police reported crimes alone to test theory and develop policy when data are not representative of the actual distribution of offences.
► So far, we know that crime prevention in Vilnius has been following approaches previously adopted by North American and Western European cities. Although there are similarities, comparisons between Vilnius and cities in the US or the UK should carefully be made since their historical backgroundsare different.
► Crime prevention has kept and/or incorporated some traditional, top down features by those involved in the prevention and fear of crime.