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 used to show that all the first-order axes, except Migration and Ethnicity, have much greater variability within, rather than between the cities, demonstrating the general rather than the city-specific nature of these dimensions. An analysis of the highest scoring tracts on the axes demonstrates the way in which some CMAs have relatively high incidences of some of the characteristics, thereby identifying the particular characteristics of many centers.