Socioeconomic Topography

Inner City Economic Development and Geographic Information Systems

by

Hideo SAKAMOTO


Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master in City Planning

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

June 1999

 © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All Rights Reserved

Abstract


Targeting project areas and defining the objectives are the most important procedures to plan neighborhood economic development, such as the Boston Main Street Program. Which shopping district is to be encouraged and how? However, this has not been an easy task, especially when the neighborhood is in the inner city, because the inner city is so diversified that planners can not find clear spatial patterns on which to base their decisions.

This paper attempts to extract patterns of socioeconomic phenomena relevant to economic development and map them. The advancing technology of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has made it easier to apply raster (grid cell or bit pattern) analysis to studying urban spatial patterns. A map that shows socioeconomic phenomena via rasterization and smoothing processing is called "socioeconomic topography" here. Just as conventional topography shows us geographical features, socioeconomic topography illustrates the spatial pattern and clustering of socioeconomic features of a given area.

The following maps are created as socioeconomic topography to support planning of inner city economic development: (1) land use allocation, (2) land value, (3) business variation, (4) shopping convenience, and (5) leading industrial clusters. On each map, spatial patterns stand out clearly from the chaos of Boston's inner city. Socioeconomic topography offers a new way of understanding the inner city and illuminates the need of made-to-order projects for each shopping district.
 

Thesis Text

Thesis in Portable Document Format (pdf) [200 KB]

Figures

All the figures linked below are in provided Portable Document Format (pdf). You may need to download the free Acrobat® Reader from Adobe® to view them. Some of these files are large and may take a long time to download over a slow network connection.  In many cases, you will probably find the magnification tool in the Acrobat Reader a great help in seeing the detail in the maps.
 
Figure Title
Page
Size (KB)
2-1-2-1 Inner Cities in Massachusetts
25
84
2-1-2-2 Inner City in Boston
26
41
2-2-1 Median Household Income
30
160
2-2-2 Ratio of Racial Minorities
31
152
2-2-3 Ratio of English is not spoken at home
32
160
2-2-4 Ratio of Immigrants
33
160
2-2-5 Ratio of Lower Educational Attainment
34
160
2-3-1 Income Density
37
66
2-3-2 Expenditure pattern of Inner City Household
38
9
2-3-3 Strategic Location
39
56
2-3-4-1 Density of Job Seekers
40
68
2-3-4-2 Ratio of Job Openings to Job Seekers
40
68
2-4-3 Coverage of Retail Expenditure
46
232
3-1-1 Shopping Strips and Shopping Centers
57
66
3-1-2 Categorized land Use
58
1448
3-1-3 Commercial Land Allocation
59
1424
3-2-1-1 Industrial Land Allocation
62
1400
3-2-1-2 Tax Exempt Land Distribution
63
1432
3-2-2 Commercial land Allocation with 100m range
64
1440
3-3-1 Land Value
67
1456
3-3-2 Median Household Income and Land Value
68
112
3-4-1 Number of Parcels Used for Commercial Purposes
71
1424
3-4-2 Number of Business Firms by SIC Code
72
1424
3-5-1 Commercial Land Use Variation by State Land Classification
75
1456
3-5-2 Business Variation by SIC Code
76
1416
4-1-2 Neighborhood Convenience
82
1384
4-2-2 Industrial Clusters
86
1360