THE COMPATIBILITY OF ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES TO THE DELIMITATION OF URBAN SUB-AREAS.

Locating the boundaries of urban sub-areas has been an emerging controversial 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 sub-areas 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. During the past two years a research team at Michigan State College has attempted to attack this problem as part of a long range study in Lansing, Michigan. In the process of setting up a census tract plan, ecological, demographic and social indices were used to derive separate sub-areas for the city. The question this study posed is, What are the various implications for sociological research of subdividing a city according to one or the other of the sets of indices used?"