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This paper investigates the characteristics of areas with numerous group homes (residential care facilities) that cater to a variety of user groups. An overview of patterns of locational concentration precedes the results of an ecological analysts for the Minor Planning Districts of the City of Toronto. The pattern of ecological correlates among the three group home types analyzed supports results obtained elsewhere, but cautions against referring ecological associations Identified for one sort of facility to other facility types. The conclusion questions the suitability of present areas of locational concentration of group homes as host environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In a recent issue of , a number of key players in the 1960s and 1970s school of quantitative urban geography (called Chicago II in this article) set out some of the approach's key methodological premises and assessed its influence in the wider arena of urban studies. At about the same time, the 1920s and 1930s Chicago School of urban sociology (called the Chicago School in this article) was being reassessed in France ( ), and deconstructed in Los Angeles ( ). In this article, we outline a selection of basic models of urban space proposed by the Chicago School and further elaborated by Chicago II. We then consider certain aspects of three important critiques: humanist/aesthetic, Marxist, and postmodern. We argue that none of these invalidates the Chicago II approach to the study of urban areas, and we demonstrate its resilience and usefulness by way of the empirical example of Montreal. Though the results are of interest in their own right, the principal purpose of the analysis is to illustrate the type of insight that a structured quantitative approach provides and the way this approach rests on a theoretical understanding of processes at work in cities. We conclude by arguing that the humanist and Marxist critiques shed important light upon the possibilities and limits of the Chicago II approach, but that the postmodern claim that the spatial development of urban areas is not structured by at least some general processes is inaccurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the debate on the concentration of social services facilities within North American cities. Application of the location quotient and the coefficient of localization to data on adult services, children's services and psychiatric group homes in Toronto, Ontario; Demonstration of a high degree of localization in all three categories; Placement policies to relieve certain areas of the inner city of the social and economic pressures.