How 3D visualization can help us understand spatial inequality: On social distance and crime

Virtual reality environments have created new opportunities for visualizing social spaces in three dimensions, which enable addition of a vertical dimension. This creates a topographical landscape based on socio-economic characteristics of the urban system. Quantification of the socio-economic disparities between city pairs in relation to the spatial distances is the social topography slope, where a steeper slope indicates greater inequality in dense environments. To illustrate the effect of this measure of social inequality, we ask, what is the relationship between the value of the slope (the interaction between social and geographical distance) and the rates of crimes committed by residents of neighboring localities in a major locality? We test the applicability of this new measure to explain spatial discrepancies in social problems and find that high social inequality is significantly correlated with crime (R² = 0.50, P < 0.001) and mean income per capita to measure poverty (R² = 0.36, P < 0.001).