Danger zones and hot spots: Traversing Canadian and Australian narratives of urban multiculturalism

The ethnicity of urban space has long been an element in the burgeoning discourse of national multiculturalisms; so much so that spatial theorist Edward Soja uses the term “ethni-city” to speak of so-called postmodern or postcolonial urban geographies (239). In our focus on the urban, we point to both the conceptual and material thresholds of multiculturalism within the borders of the city, as well as the internal urban/suburban borders that delineate belonging. These are often as strongly patrolled as larger national borders. In taking up Sneja Gunew’s call in Haunted Nations for comparative and critical work on multiculturalisms, this paper offers preliminary and exploratory avenues and points of departure, and aims to particularise the multicultural as an encounter and experience that is regulated spatially and corporeally.

Using circular statistics to analyse time patterns in crime incidence

A set of techniques referred to as circular statistics has been developed for the analysis of directional and orientational data. The unit of measure for such data is angular (usually in either degrees or radians), and the statistical distributions underlying the techniques are characterised by their cyclic nature-for example, angles of 359.9 degrees are considered close to angles of 0 degrees. In this paper, we assert that such approaches can be easily adapted to analyse time-of-day and time-of-week data, and in particular daily cycles in the numbers of incidents reported to the police. We begin the paper by describing circular statistics. We then discuss how these may be modified, and demonstrate the approach with some examples for reported incidents in the Cardiff area of Wales. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.