Community Change: A Stochastic Analysis of Chicago's Local Communities, 1930-60

Two different urban ecology perspectives, the static one emphasizing uniform spatial distributions, and the dynamic one emphasizing stages of community change, are compared. More recent syntheses of these two perspectives are discussed. A number of propositions and implicit assumptions from the two perspectives are explored by factor analysis of census data for Chicago from 1930 to 1960. When community changes in the two dimensions of economic and family status were interrelated in a two-attribute stochastic model, the following were found: (1) rates of community change are increasing, but not "uniformly"; (2) society-wide and historically specific contexts must be onsidered in explaining different types and rates of community change; (3) four empirically derived stages of community change are delimited that show an ordering with respect to family and economic changes; (4) the four stages of change are arranged in "concentric zones"; and (5) the four stages of change are not mere spatial indicators of processes occurring over time but are sequentially ordered.

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