Re-defining Transport for London's strategic neighbourhoods from spatial and social perspectives.

Neighbourhoods are fundamental spatial units to present social phenomena in urban studies. Many studies use administrative boundaries such as census tracts as representations of neighbourhoods, but such boundaries may poorly represent the underlying social structures and physical attributes which might help define more vernacular conceptions and dialectical evolution of these zones. In this paper, using the goal of creating a new set of 'Strategic Neighbourhoods' for Transport for London (TfL) as vehicle for analysis, we evaluate two contrasting spatially and socially focused methodologies of neighbourhood generation. In comparing the outputs of a tertiary-communities (T-Communities) method and a combined Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) cluster analysis method with an earlier iteration of Strategic Neighbourhoods defined by TfL, indices including neighbourhood size, intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC), and the number of community centres are calculated to evaluate their relative performance which demonstrate that both methods create neighbourhood boundaries that can better capture intra-group social homogeneity and are more suitable for analysis than the original SNA boundaries. These results are discussed in the context of the dialectic relationship between neighbourhood outcomes, spatial structures, and social characteristics, leading to more widely relevant conclusions that neighbourhood boundary delineation should combine spatial structure, social attributes, and experimental knowledge to effectively sub-divide urban activity. • We apply two methods to derive new neighbourhood systems of London from the spatial and social perspectives. • We find that the new spatial neighbourhood system has increased internal social homogeneity and external heterogeneity. • We find that the new social neighbourhood system is more homogenous in size and better spatially contiguous. • We discuss the dialectic relationship between space, society, and neighbourhood formation. • We prove that the social variation of the neighbourhood can be deduced through its spatial structure, and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]