Urban Social Area Analysis – Geography – UGC NET – Notes

In the contemporary world, societies have become diversified and heterogeneous. From the second half of the 20th Century, internal, regional and international migration increased manifold due to expansion of capitalism, new power equations, and decolonisation. The outcome was ethnic diversity in most parts of the world. Urban Sociologists attempted to understand and assess diversity of various kinds in the population especially of large cities. Social area analysis was one of the techniques evolved to study diversity in income, status and ethnicity and mobility in urban population. This technique was a part of the methodological developments under the rubric of ecological school. Social area analysis is used more by urban geographers than sociologists.

The Ecological Approach was the most dominant and popular approach in urban sociology from the 1920s to the 1950s. Also known as the Chicago School, scholars belonging to this school studied urban populations by using biological principles like succession, competition, expansion and so on. You will learn more about the Chicago School, in Block 4 of this course. Robert Ezra Park, the most well known scholar of the school believed that the principles in the human world are similar to those in the biological one.

Concept and Technique of Social Area Analysis

Since the Concentric Zone theory could not be applied to many American and non-American cities, other theories of land use developed as stated earlier. Due to their limited applicability, urbanists tried to offer new explanations of patterns of city expansion and growth.

Eshref Shevky and Marilyn Williams (1 949) pioneered ‘Social Area Analysis the identification and description of areas according to their social characteristics. They argued that urban land use could be explained in terms of social characteristics alone. They examined social rank, family, status and ethnicity. This technique was based on using a statistical procedure to identify selected important variables from a very large database of economic and social variables. Using census tract information prepared by the American government, they argued that the variance in all the census information could be explained in terms of two or three chosen variables which were arrived at after combining several other variables. First, Shevky and Williams applied it to Los Angeles and later to Angeles studying San Francisco city data.

Social Area Analysis thus signifies a statistical procedure of analysing available large-scale data of diverse populations. It became popular as statistical processing of large databases was commonly attempted during the 1950s. Some scholars have noted that this approach was very popular in the 1970s. From then on it is referred to and used from time to time, but there seems to be very little theoretical development in this direction. Social area analysis and factorial ecology have also been quite important in marketing research.