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¶ … Factorial Ecology With Radiocentric Explanations
Factorial ecology vs. radiocentric explanations of urban development
Currently, two popular frameworks of statistical and geographical analysis of human populations offer themselves to students of urban development and planning. According to the sociologist Carl-Gunnar Janson, one of the more popular explanations during the 1970's, regarding particular urban populations' growth and expansion, was to be found through the sociological use of factorial ecology. Factorial ecology is the statistical study of various sociological and economic data, with the attempt to determine the most probable explanations behind the chosen variables that are being studied.
Very often most of the variance in a group of dozens of the factors taken under consideration can be accounted for by three or four possible reasons. (Janson, 1980). This is not necessarily a weakness of the model, however. For instance, a factorial ecology might take into consideration the ethnicity and gender composition of a particular area to determine why a city underwent a particular 'boom' period over the course of its development. For instance, Toronto's explosion in its Asian population after the United Kingdom's agreement to cede that nation back to Chinese ownership resulted in an influx of Asian professionals into particular areas of the city. (Bunting and Filion, 2000). Variables such as first-generation vs. second-generation ancestry, Asian ethnicity, etc. could all come into factoring a factorial ecology to account for the city's professional growth during the period, and specifically in the boom of the professional-class Asian immigrant population.
In contrast, radiocentric explanations...
By studying the physical landscape of the population or map, aspects of urban development may be revealed -- such as, to use the abovementioned example, Toronto's exponential growth in its Asian sector or Chinatown. Radiocentric explanations often involve a long-range simulation of a city, in a map-like structure. (Nelson, 2000)
What are the factors that predict which model is explanatory?
Toronto is a mosaic-like city of ethnic and regional composition, one reason that radiocentric explanations are fairly popular in understanding its development. As with New York, the map-like spreading out of different communities are often instructive to how certain ethnicities have become part of the nation's fabric and to what extent they participate in a city's centrality or sectors of prosperity or poverty. However, once a city grows in age and second and third generation members become more integrated and dispersed within a city's fold, radiocentric explanations become more difficult to offer, unless specific communities continue built around specific urban industries, such as the city's garment district, or, to use another example, the case of Silicon Valley and its outer-lying suburbs, where an hitherto empty area of growth becomes filled because of its location around a certain nexus of the computer industry.
What are the weaknesses of each model?
Factorial analysis of variance has come under some criticism in recent years. Its strength is that it enables sociologists to consider the effects of two or more factors…
Works Cited
Bunting, T. And Filion, P. (2000). Canadian Cities in Transition: The Twenty-first Century. Second Edition. Toronto, Oxford University Press.
Janson, Carl-Gunnar. "Factorial social ecology: an attempt at summary and evaluation." Annual Review of Sociology. 1980. Vol. 6, pp. 433-456.
Nelson, Doreen. (2002). Transformations: Process and Theory.
Pacione, M. (2001) Urban Geography: A Global Perspective, London: Routledge.
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