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Housing in-affordability is a growing problem within Canadian urban areas. This research asks an as-yet unanswered spatial question: where do those suffering high rates of housing affordability stress reside and what do the spatial patterns imply about policies intended to address this housing problem? This paper tabulates and maps the spatial distribution of households that pay excessive amounts of their income for rent in order to identify locations within metropolitan regions where housing affordability stress is greatest. It is found that significant unevenness characterises the spatial distribution of housing affordability problems in major Canadian census metropolitan areas (CMAs). Only a minority of places conform to the North American stereotype that concentrates this problem near the city centre. Where some CMAs have concentrations of the problem in the inner city or, alternatively inner suburb, other metropolitan areas exhibit a more diffuse pattern of housing in-affordability. The locus of the problem is also variable depending on whether the household is of the family or non-family type. The interpretation of the uneven patterns relates broadly to features of supply and demand that have been identified in previous research. From both a policy and theoretical perspective this work demonstrates that greater attention needs to be paid to the spatial aspects of housing affordability and to the related, economically-induced risk of homelessness in Canadian metropolitan areas.

The paper portrays three aspects of urban dispersion: urban structure, residents' location and land-use preferences, and social ecology. To explain the dynamic inherent in this form of urbanisation, it suggests an explanatory model concentrating on shifts in the respective importance of space, place and proximity associated with the passage from traditional monocentric to dispersed urban form. The paper draws its empirical substance from the Kitchener Census Metropolitan Area, one of the most dispersed metropolitan regions in Canada. The Kitchener case study highlights the defining characteristics of a dispersed urban structure: high automobile dependence, a scattering of origins and destinations, and a resulting absence of pronounced accessibility gradients. The paper also reports the results of a survey which indicates a harmonisation of residents' preferences with the main features of dispersion. The case study ends by mapping the residential location patterns of two groups with a disproportionate influence on new urban development: high income households and families with children. Their concentric distribution is consistent with survey results. In the light of the prevailing transport-land-use relation and of residents' location choices and expressed preferences, the paper foresees a further entrenchment of the dispersed urban structure. The paper closes by explaining the limited success of most intensification policies and by exploring the possibility of injecting more diversity into the dispersed landscape in order to accommodate a growing variety of lifestyles.

The Children's Environmental Response Inventory (CERI) is introduced as a means of measuring environmental disposition, or what has been termed "environmental personality." This test is shown to have sound psychometric properties. It has been administered to a large sample of school-age children in the age range 9 to 16 years. Differences are found among responses to the eight domains: Pastoralism, Urbanism, Environmental Adaptation, Stimulus Seeking, Environmental Trust, Antiquarianism, Need Privacy, and Mechanical Orientation. Associations are found between individual dispositions and extracurricular activities. Differences related to personal status characteristics-age, sex, and geographic place of residence-suggest that there are important variations in the acquisition of environmental disposition.

The results of behavioral and perception research are of little value in the explanation of real-world human geographical activity. The idea behind behavioral and perception geography that people behave in the real world on the basis of subjective images, not objective knowledge, is not new. A strong quantitative and theoretical dimension and interdisciplinary orientation distinguishes recent research from earlier work. The main thrust of modern research has been on the composition of images and their relationships to socioeconomic and other attributes of subjects. Behavioral and perception geographers have assumed that environmental images can be measured accurately and that there are strong relationships between environmental images and actual behavior. These assumptions are questionable and so is the status of research based upon them. A new emphasis on actual behavior is needed in behavioral and perception research as a first step towards the investigation of the behavioral consequences of images in real-world geographical contexts.N the 1960s behavioral geography and en-I vironmental perception were recognized widely as important new themes in human geography. The basic idea behind these approaches, nevertheless, was not new. Sauer, Wright, and Kirk, among others, had all emphasized that people behave in the real world not on the basis of objective knowledge, but in terms of subjective images of it.l Most of the leading behav-

C e n t r e f o r U r b a n a n d C o m m u n i t y S t u d i e s • U n i v e r s i t y o f T o r o n t o • w w w. u r b a n c e n t r e. u t o r o n t o. c a U r b a n D e n s i t y i n t h e G r e a t e r G o l d e n H o r s e s h o e C e n t r e f o r U r b a n a n d C o m m u n i t y S t u d i e s • U n i v e r s i t y o f T o r o n t o • w w w. u r b a n c e n t r e. u t o r o n t o. c a C e n t r e f o r U r b a n a n d C o m m u n i t y S t u d i e s • U n i v e r s i t y o f T o r o n t o • w w w. u r b a n c e n t r e. u t o r o n t o. c a U r b a n D e n s i t y i n t h e G r e a t e r G o l d e n H o r s e s h o e C e n t r e f o r U r b a n a n d C o m m u n i t y S t u d i e s • U n i v e r s i t y o f T o r o n t o • w w w. u r b a n c e n t r e. u t o r o n t o. c a

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Examination of household as well as population datasets is the distinctive feature of the research presented in this paper, in which I consider trends in distance-decay gradients and zonal rates of growth and decline in Canadian metropolitan areas (CMAs) over the 25-year period 1971^96. My primary interest is with trends witnessed across the entire system of cities, rather than with interurban differences per se, though wherever possible factors associated with more salient between-place differences are identified. In the main body of the paper I report on empirical findings, beginning with population change assessed by density gradients and enumeration of geographic subzones defined as core, inner city, and suburban. A subsequent set of findings relies on household, instead of population, statistics. In the final discussion I attempt to reconcile considerably different population and household trends and relate them to previous findings. Recommendations are also made about new avenues for research suggested by changes identified but not fully accounted for in this research. Background literatureAlthough work by Mercer (Goldberg and Mercer, 1986;Mercer, 1999;Mercer and England, 2000) identifies features such as more compact metropolitan form and higher densities as distinctly`Canadian', there is considerable evidence that trends towards decentralization, widely documented in the USA (see, for example,