Communities of the Postindustrial City

Abstract

The authors discern the community structure of the postindustrial city, with reference to Australia. They focus empirically on three major types of Australian urban center: urban regions, metropolitan areas that are not part of urban regions, and other major cities. These three account for almost three-quarters of the Australian population. The authors draw on a conceptualization formulated by Marcuse and van Kempen to guide the analysis, with a combination of cluster analysis and discriminant analysis being applied to aggregate (essentially census) data to identify the communities. Nine major Australian urban communities are identified—four are affluent, four are disadvantaged, and one is a working-class community. The communities found, however, differed greatly from those cited in the Marcuse and van Kempen schema.

Advantage and Disadvantage across Australia's Extended Metropolitan Regions: A Typology of Socioeconomic Outcomes

“…Likewise, others have shown that there appears to be significant changes occurring in the economic and social landscape of Australia's cities and metropolitan regions, with certain areas accumulating a disproportionate share of disadvantage over the past three decades. The more recent work by Stimson et al (2001a) and Baum et al (1999Baum et al ( , 2002, both precursors to the current study, show that across Australian metropolitan regions changes underway in social and economic terms have impacted on the socio-spatial structure resulting in some communities being identified as being communities of social and economic opportunity, while others are identified as communities of vulnerability.…”

“…Where once large working class communities may have been a dominant feature of most Australian cities (Baum et al 2002), the economic and social processes that are characteristic of post-Fordism have resulted in a more complex and differentiated socio-spatial pattern. We see reference to the increasing suburbanization of poverty into Australia's middle ring and old outer suburban areas, the movement of an aspirational class of households to opportunities in new outer suburbs, the dividing up of the old working class communities into several groups of new disadvantaged communities with each being affected by the new economic processes in different ways and the development of new advantaged communities closely tied to developments in the world economy (Stimson et al 2001;Baum et al 1999, 2002, Randolph 2004, O'Connor, Daly and Stimson 2001.…”

“…This approach is not new. Classification schemes or typologies have been used to consider patterns and relationships across several areas including industrial areas (Markusen 1996), rural and regional places (Airola and Parker 1983, Beer et al 1994Stimson et al 2001b) and metropolitan city regions (Massey and Eggers 1993, Coulton et al 1996, Hill et al 1998, Stimson et al 2001a, Baum et al 1999, 2002, Taylor and Hoyler 2000. Such typologies are not explanations of processes per se, but are 'an attempt to systemize classification in aid of explanation' (Marcuse 1997, p. 248) and provide a 'richer understanding of complex phenomena' (Mikelbank 2004, p. 961).…”

“…Initial data selection was undertaken by data mining with principal components analysis, using a smaller sample of observations to identify variables that explained large amounts of variation across localities. These data are associated with individual and household socio-economic characteristics of the resident population and are among those found in research on the economic and social patterns of cities and their communities (see for example Stilwell 1980example Stilwell , 1989Baum and Hassan 1993;Coombes and Wong 1994;Baum et al 1999;O'Connor and Healy 2001;Strait 2001) The final selection of variables was driven by this initial analysis together with a consideration of the conceptual issues we address in this paper. Closely associated with these demographic characteristics, but also associated with income and living standards are measures accounting for housing.…”

Measuring community strength and social capital

“…In Australia the recent literature includes: a study of patterns of community opportunity and vulnerability (Baum et al 1999(Baum et al , 2002Stimson et al 2001a;Stimson et al 2001b) which identifies localities by their level of performance across a wide range of socio-economic transition measures; a study of the changing roles of Australia's metropolitan cities (O'Connor and Stimson 1995); a study of patterns of change in regional cities (Beer et al 1994); and a study of the functional roles of regional urban centres (Beer 1999;Beer and Maude 1995). There are also examples of research focusing more narrowly on more specific aspects of socio-economic performance, including: income (Hunter and Gregory 1996); poverty (Fincher and Nieuwenhuysen 1998); and unemployment (Stimson 1997;Stimson et al 1998).…”