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The article presents a paper that proposes a four step strategy for locating urban population service facilities. Although developed with regard to a specific problem, dealing with a system of public day care centers, the strategy has considerable generality and is applicable to a wide variety of situations and scales. Since population service agencies typically operate under budget, manpower, and other constraints that restrict the number and size of facilities and preclude serving the entire population, particular attention is given to applying the locational strategy to that situation. This includes illustrating the procedure by examining the need for public day care service among the poor in Columbus, Ohio, and locational options for a system of public day care centers in its Model Cities area. The total costs of implementing the locational strategy described in this paper were substantial. Those related to estimating and mapping the demand or need surface for day care service, which in itself would provide valuable information for a service or planning agency, are relatively small.

This paper first reviews the descriptions and structural explanations for variations, in urban population densities in the United States over several decades. The research reviewed focuses on shifts in the technology and economics of travel as being the major influences on urban density distributions. These variables appear to be somewhat less adequate as explanations of the process in recent decades. After reviewing these findings and suggesting several research questions, we attempt to assess the evidence relating variations in population density to several other aspects of human behavior. A review of the research relating high population densities to various "social pathologies" indicates that little of the variance in rates of these pathologies can be attributed to density independently of other social structural variables. Some important consequences of population density have been reported, however, and possible research directions are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the effect of alternative age adjustment procedures on the analysis of urban mortality patterns. Analyses of mortality differences among populations need a single index of the overall mortality experience of each population. The conclusions one draws about the nature of mortality's correlates are a function of the type age adjustment used. In this paper housing was more important than income in explaining variations in the crude death rate and the indirect standardized rate. However, income was more important than housing in explaining variations in the direct standardized rate. Indirect standardization in itself is not necessarily enough to eliminate the compositional effect of age. Attention must be given to the extent to which there is a correspondence between the standard population's age-specific rates and those for the population studied. Census tracts, since their populations are comparatively small, are quite subject to great fluctuations in the number of deaths per year in the different age categories.

The impact of new and improved transportation facilities on urban travel behavior is a topic seldom addressed in transportation-research literature. The paper presents a method for classifying travel behavior of urban residents and suggests a procedure for quantitatively estimating diverted traffic. An application of the method is made to a limited sample of Chicago's residents. Seven groups of residents with similar travel patterns were identified and the impact of a new expressway on each of the seven groups was estimated. The study suggests a reorientation of research activities: in addition to the analyses of aggregate traffic data a greater attention should be directed toward detailed inquiries about the travel patterns of urban residents and the spatial structure of commercial traffic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies of public apprehension about crime indicate that people hold conflicting orientations regarding the nature and extent of the problem (McIntyre, 1967). On the one hand, they feel that throughout the country as a whole and even elsewhere in their own communities, the threat of crime, especially violent crime, is severe and increasingly so. On the other hand, however, they feel that people and property in their own neighborhoods remain relatively safe, this being the case even among residents of high crime risk areas. The issue of crime deterrence, particularly in residential areas, involves a number of dimensions, depending partly on threatened and partly on actual apprehension of offenders by actions of residents and police. The threat of apprehension exercised through informal channels has been demonstrated in the work of Maetoby et al. (1958) which shows that the crucial factor differentiating high from low delinquency areas of the same lower socio-economic level is the shared expectations among neighbors that residents would intervene to prevent the commission of offenses. More recently in a study of ghetto riots, Warren (1969) has demonstrated the importance of actual informal intervention in crime deterrence, finding that the more cohesive the neighborhood, the more likely that residents attempted to prevent looting, burning, and disorder. The significance of formal controls as deterrents to crime is somewhat more problematic. Even though crime prevention is a major manifest function of police (Banton, 1964; Bittner, 1967; Wilson, 1968), one is left to assume the degree to which formal controls do deter crime, and as Blumstein (1967), for one, has stated, "although the question (of what people are deterred from eommitring what crime by what actions of the criminal justice system) is central to much of the operation of the criminal justice system, and especially to police operation, there has been no systematic attempt to answer it." Some light is shed on this issue in studies of police response to citizen complaints which show the mutual dependence of formal and informal structures for the control of crime. Black and Reiss (1970) report that the majority (72 percent) of police encounters (at least with juveniles) stem from citizen calls rather than from police-initiated action, yet the results of victimization studies reveal that this still represents only a limited proportion of all offenses reported by citizens to police (Biderman, This paper is concerned with the issue of how people view the nature and extent of crime in their own neighborhoods, and whether they attribute their area's safety (or dangerousness) to the exercise of formal or informal controls, comparing rural, suburban, and central city residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]