Compare methods

	Risk Terrain Modeling (Criminology)	Routine Activity Theory
Field	Criminology	Criminology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2011	1979
Originator	Joel Caplan & Leslie Kennedy	Lawrence E. Cohen & Marcus Felson
Type	Spatial risk-factor aggregation model for crime forecasting	Theoretical framework for explaining the occurrence of predatory crime
Seminal source	Caplan, J. M., Kennedy, L. W., & Miller, J. (2011). Risk terrain modeling: Brokering criminological theory and GIS methods for crime forecasting. Justice Quarterly, 28(2), 360–381.	Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44(4), 588–608.
Aliases	RTM, Risk Terrain Analysis, Environmental Risk Factor Modeling, Spatial Risk Factor Modeling	RAT, Routine Activities Approach, Crime Triangle Framework, Cohen-Felson Theory
Related	4	4
Summary	Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) represents crime risk as a function of the environment: it identifies the features of a landscape — bars, bus stops, vacant lots, pawn shops, schools — that attract or generate crime, maps each one's spatial influence as a separate risk layer, and combines those layers onto a raster of place to produce a relative risk surface. Introduced by Joel Caplan and Leslie Kennedy around 2011, RTM 'brokers' environmental criminology theory and GIS methods so that crime forecasting rests on the qualities of places rather than on the history of crime alone.	Routine activity theory explains predatory crime not by the supply of motivated offenders but by the everyday structure of legal activities that brings offenders, targets, and the absence of guardians together in space and time. Proposed by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson in 1979, it argues that crime rates can rise even when offender motivation is constant, because changes in how people work, shop, and spend leisure time alter the opportunities for crime.