Placial analysis of events: a case study on criminological places

The contrast of space and place has long been an active topic of scholarly discussions in many disciplines. While spatial analysis enjoys a multitude of quantitative methods, the study of place remains mostly conceptual and descriptive. This paper expands upon the rich concepts of place in the literature to propose a quantitative framework for placial analysis based on events. Central to the proposed framework are three assumptions: (1) human experiences transform space to place; (2) events build human experiences in space; and (3) places emerge organically and may change characters, spatial extent and location over time through the shifts in occurrences and types of events in space and time. The proposed framework consists of three elements: clustering events, decomposing event distributions, and identifying the similarity of event clusters. We applied the framework to identify criminological places in the City of Dallas in the United States and the changes of these places from 1 June 2014 to 30 May 2018.