Socioeconomic topography : inner city economic development and Geographic Information Systems

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.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

1999

Author dc:creator

• Sakamoto, Hideo, 1956-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joseph Ferreira, Jr.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/9327

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/9327