mapping the opposite of urban livability

It seems we can now quantitatively measure urban mass violence without needing to get up-close and impersonal with its results: we can do it from space! A current application is to that most American city of our time, Baghdad, and to the "military success" of our time, the "surge." We know that deaths in a population can decline either because the overall probability of death for the population declines, or because the number of people at risk in the population declines. Mainstream media in the US have claimed that the first hypothesis explains the recent reduction in violence in Baghdad ("the surge is working" because US troops made Baghdad more stable), while geographers at UCLA deploy "nighttime light satellite imagery" in support of the second: "[before] the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left." For a summary, see this press release, or better yet the full (but only 11 pages, and very readable) article.