Wayne K.D. Davies

CONSISTENCY AND DIFFERENTIAL IMPACT IN URBAN SOCIAL DIMENSIONALITY: INTRA-URBAN VARIATIONS IN THE 24 METROPOLITAN AREAS OF CANADA

Relatively few factorial ecologies have explored either the consistency of the social dimensionality of urban areas in more than a few cities or the separation of city-specific from general effects. This study of almost 3,000 census tracts in all 24 Canadian metropolitan areas (CMAs) used 35 variables from 198 1 census data to solve these problems. It shows there is a persistent similarity in six of the seven to nine dimensions found in separate analyses of three city size categories: over 1 million; 0.5-1 million; 100-500 thousand people. From this basis a combined study of all the centers shows that 85% of the variability can be summarized by nine dimensions called Economic Status, Impoverishment, Ethnicity, Early and Late Family, Family/Age, Pre-Family, Non-Family, Housing, and Migrant Status. The evidence for several different family-related axes illustrates the increasing complexity of the social dimensionality of modern cities based on family differentiation. F-ratio values and Eta coefficients are ...

Economic Diversification and Group Stability in an Urban System: The Case of Canada, 1951-86

Researchers have shown relatively little recent interest in the study of the economic diversification and classification of urban systems. If we are to understand contemporary urban structures, older studies must be brought up to date. This study of the economic character of towns greater than 30 000 in Canada demonstrates the degree of diversification of the centres between 1951 and 1986 and provides a succinct classification of the centres. The expected decrease in the general level of diversification between the two dates is complemented by the finding that differences in this single summary measure between the regions of Canada can no longer be found. Cluster analysis procedures are used to derive seven groups of places in 1986, which are very similar to the categories found in 1951, even though there has been a transformation in the size and economy of the places. This relative stability in the categories of places is parallelled by similarities in the membership of the groups. However, at the most fundamental level the urban system can be still be separated into service as opposed to production centres, a rather surprising dichotomy in view of the changes in urban economies.

Urban connectivity in Montana

Q mode factor analysis is used to isolate the latent structure of the pattern of telephone calls between Montana towns. An eleven axis component solution accounts for 82.6% of the variance of data set and defines a series of nodal regions in the state. A higher order factor analysis is used to generalize these results into second and third order levels of connectivity. Comparison of the first order regions with results derived from Huffs gravity model demonstrates the utility of this theoretical formulation. The overall spatial structure of connectivity bears close relationships with the hierarchical and reciprocal propositions about urban structure formulated by Friedmann but there are a lot of overlapping connections and local distortions which modify the pattern.

Commercial intensification: the transformation of a highway-orientated ribbon

Abstract The growth of highway-orientated ribbons and planned shopping centres in low density suburban areas of North American cities transformed their commercial structure in the 1950s and 1960s. In the last decade, the addition of new forms of retailing and the trend to commercial intensification in some of the old highway ribbons have completely changed their character, paralleling the densification that has been found in some residential areas. A review of the major classifications of linear commercial areas is followed by a case study of Macleod Trail, the largest commercial strip in Calgary (Alberta, Canada), a city of over 750,000 people. This illustrates how a new form of commercial structure, called a ‘Linear Commercial Complex’, has emerged from a highway-orientated ribbon, with almost 1000 retail businesses and over 500 offices stretching over an 8km strip. The zone has many distinctive features but has some similarities with Garreaus ‘Edge City’ phenomenon. The relative importance of the eight primary features that have transformed the commercial ribbon are described and the effect of planning policy upon the area is evaluated.

How Do Community Associations Vary? The Structure of Community Associations in Calgary, Alberta

The growth in territorial community associations has been one of the major trends in Western cities in recent years, but there are few comprehensive studies of the range of variation of these organisations in a single city. This case study of Calgary, a Canadian city of three-quarters of a million people in 1991, addresses this gap in our understanding by showing the variation in the character of all 118 community associations in the city. The city contained 94 local community buildings; 21 with an insured value of over 1m dollars. Yet membership levels were relatively low with a mean of 18.9 per cent. A factor analysis of 11 key variables of the variations in community association characteristics revealed 5 basic sources of differentiation, summarised as: resources; programmes and organisation; age and rental revenue dependency; membership; and salaries. A further factor analysis of the social structural characteristics of the community areas identified nine axes called: economic status; family status; age-participation; early middle age; mobility; immigrant-Charter Group; each European ethnic; central and southern European ethnic; and Dutch ethnic-old housing. In general, there were few strong associations between the two sets of generalised axes, demonstrating that the contextual effects of the variations in community association activity were not strong. The only exceptions were that membership levels had medium positive correlates with economic status, and old age areas had community associations that depended highly on revenues from the rental of community facilities to non-member groups.

The Survival of Commercial Hierarchies: Rural Service Centres in Western Victoria, Australia

Container assembly comprises a plurality of containers having similar externally ridged caps and a carrier bar provided with holes bordered by internally ridged sleeves which are a force fit onto said caps.

Festive Cities: Multi-Dimensional Perspectives

Until recently there has been limited attention paid in urban studies to features that relate to sensory, not material features, to consumption not production, pleasure not work, and to episodic rather than permanent characteristics. However festivals, episodic events lasting a few days, do provide such functions. They take people outside their routine behaviours of work, leisure and family, providing joy, excitement and new experiences, sometimes linking to historical traditions. Although such events have always been part of the life of the bigger places, new valuations of their utility have led to an enormous growth in such activities in recent decades, both in numbers within cities, and many other urban places, adding to their vitality and often providing major economic returns. A review of the variety of festivals shows that most fall into six main types, linked to temporal or cyclical, religious, political, tradition-heritage, new cultures and lifestyle functions, although some may overlap the categories and others have morphed from one type to another through time. A multidimensional model of the nature of festivals based on eight components provides a basis for assessing their varied character and reveals their often contradictory nature and conflicted consequences.

Theme cities : solutions for urban problems

Chapter 1: Introduction Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 2: New Urbanisms: From Neo-Traditional Neighbourhoods to New Regionalism Wayne K. D. Davies and Ivan J. Townshend.- Chapter 3: Progress Towards Just Cities Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 4: Green Towns and Cities Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 5: Background to Sustainable Cities Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 6: Sustainable City Policies Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 7: Transition Towns and Ecodistricts: Local Sustainable Initiatives Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 8: Winter Cities Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 9: Resilient Cities: Coping with Natural Hazards Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 10: Creative Cities Niamh Moore-Cherry.- Chapter 11: Developing Knowledge Cities Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 12: Safe Cities and Communities Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 13: Healthy Cities: Old and New Solutions Wayne K.D. Davies.- Chapter 14: Festive Cities: Multi-Dimensional Perspectives Wayne K. D. Davies.- Chapter 15: Slow Cities Susan Ball.- Chapter 16: Conclusions: Creating More Liveable and Sustainable Urban Places Wayne K. D. Davies.

Safe Cities and Communities

The rapid rise in urban crime rates in western countries from the 1970s to early 1990s led to increasing concern about the safety of urban places. A review of the causes of these trends and their resultant drop is followed by summaries of the way that crime should be seen as a socially constructed system which means there is a difference between actual crimes and those that end up being investigated. The major deficiencies in traditional crime-fighting approaches are reviewed before summarizing the key requirements of creating and implementing crime reduction policies in a Safe City strategy. These include the need for widespread recognition of the crime problem and willingness to act to solve problems, the development of a vision to reduce crime, followed by a plan that has several crucial foundational features. Policies adopted under the Safe City banner are not only based on improvements to the existing crime detection and punishment system, but also in changing the urban environment as well as modifying criminal behaviours or predispositions to reduce crime events. Crucial changes involve replacing the silo-like approaches of existing crime fighting and social welfare organizations with more co-operative practices, and adopting policies that have been empirically tested.

Developing Knowledge Cities

There has been a new valuation on the importance of knowledge in creating urban economic development in recent years. This is not knowledge for personal development, or in making things, but in creating the new intellectual capital which leads to inventions and innovation. After a review of the alternative meanings of knowledge, the study shows how inventive and innovative activity is concentrated in a limited number of urban centres. This can be explained by the varied locational imperatives that create such concentrations, linked to: innovation characteristics; uncertainties to solve; support and encouragement; and access to knowledge, in which tacit knowledge is especially important. So the old paradigms explaining the location of economic activity based on differential access to land, labour and capital is no longer enough. Instead a more comprehensive approach to understanding a city’s capacity to create knowledge comes from the use of an adapted Capital System Inventory model, which views each city as a system of past and current activities and characteristics. These conditions provide the seed bed of value elements that can aid or repel new knowledge-based development in an area. A review of these various elements is followed by a summary of the stages necessary to create a knowledge economy in urban places, although there cannot be one path to success.