The Compatibility of Alternative Approaches to the Delimitation of Urban Sub-Areas

Abstract

TOCATING the boundaries of urban subareas has been an emerging controver~-~sial issue among sociologists over the past decade. Before that time, traditional ecologists dominated the scene by presenting rather simple and direct means of isolating sub-areas or census tracts. More recently some urban sociologists have contended that the distribution of social phenomena may not be directly dependent on variations in land use, natural barriers, and other ecological factors. They contend that the social integration of areas should be considered as important in this regard as ecological criteria. Demographers have also suggested that population indices are very sensitive to differences among the social subareas of cities. Other interested students have adopted a synthetic approach-suggesting that ecological, demographic, and social criteria are equally important in deriving a set of urban sub-areas useful for sociological investigations.' Yet, almost no research has attempted to show the relations among these criteria.2