Back to the Yards: Revisiting the ASC 1988 "Criminological Tour of Chicago"

• In Event: Posters I

Abstract

One of the six tours held in the 1988 annual meeting of ASC was titled "Back of the Yards, or the 'Criminological Tour of Chicago.'" The bus tour went through the areas that had been studied by the Chicago School criminologists, guided by Professor. Robert J. Bursik, Jr.
When I participated in the tour, I was carrying a small camera and a portable tape recorder, with which I recorded the explanations of Dr. Bursik throughout the tour. Also recorded were my own "tweets" of the street names as I saw them displayed at street corners. Using these and other pieces of information in the recording, I was able to identify the shooting locations of most of the pictures I took during the tour. By mapping these pictures and the tour route, together with Dr. Bursik's explanations, we reconstructed the 1988 "Back of the Yards" tour on 21st. Century GIS. This GIS map further enabled to compare the 1988 scenes with today's scenes of the same locations, using such contemporary technology as the Google Streetview. The poster illustrates the reconstructed criminological tour and discusses its implications in both academic and practical terms.

Author

• Yutaka Harada, National Research Institute of Police Science