Chapter 10

Reading the Urban Landscape:
Census Data and Field Observation

A. Logistics

Students’ Time Requirements

Activity 1: Census Tract Data2 hours (data collection) and 1-hour write-up

Activity 2: Field Survey4 hours (field survey) and 1-hour write-up

This chapter consists of two parts.Activity 1 involves the use of U.S. or Canadian census data to develop a profile of an urban census tract and compare that tract to the greater metropolitan area. Activity 2 asks students to do a reality check of what the Census tells us this place should look like. Activity 2 could be considered a “ground truthing” exercise, but it goes beyond merely checking census data in that students discover many aspects of the urban area that the census cannot reveal. Theoretically, you could do Activity 1 alone, but it is the combination of secondary data (collected by someone else) in Activity 1 and primary data (collected by you) in Activity 2 that is the essence of this activity.

For Activity 1, it is absolutely essentialthat youtest the instructions for accessing the census data at your university beforeyou assign this project. First of all, you need to determine whether your area is divided into useful census tracts or not. Do you want students to use census tracts or places for their local “tile” in the larger “mosaic,” and do you want them to use the county or the metro area as the comparison geography? Second, do our instructions work for finding the number of a census tract? Third, have any of the Census instructions become outdated? For instance, since the first printing of the 6th edition, the Census Bureau changed the home page of American FactFinder, and it is now necessary to add an Instruction B-2 between B and C on page 311. The new instruction is to click on the Advanced Search tab before proceeding to Instruction C.We cannot have anticipated all of the issues that may arise in doing this activity in your area or any future changes to the Census Website. This warning is not meant to scare you off from doing this activity—just be sure you know what works best.

Advise students to choose a census tract that they wish to learn more about. Their tendency is to choose the tract in which they live. This is fine if they do not have access to an automobile or are thinking about buying property there. But they will not broaden their horizons if they stick too close to home. Challenge them to choose a census tract in an unfamiliar part of the urban area. Tell them that there is a bit of explorer or discoverer in most geographers and inspire them to look away from the university and away from their homes if they possibly can.Alternatively, you can screen student choices to ensure that all parts of the city have adequate coverage.

Students need some background information before starting to collect data. Tell them that they now live in a world with an overabundance of data. The challenge is in separating the wheat from the chaff—in other words, the information that is important to them from what is extraneous. Have them read the introductory material and get them to appreciate that urban neighborhoods can be characterized in a number of ways. We usually start with the idea that places can be described in terms of their family status (age, marital status, number of children, and labor force participation of women), socioeconomic status (education, income, and occupation), and racial and ethnic status (percent black, percent Hispanic, percent foreign born). Ask them to use the census to describe these three dimensions of urban life in their census tract. Advise them to pick out the variables that are most illustrative of family status, socioeconomic status, and racial and ethnic status.

You can also identify other aspects of urban life such as lifestyle and then ask them to find census characteristics that are representative of lifestyle (commuting time, percent living in the same house five years earlier, persons living alone, etc.). Keep in mind that there are literally thousands of variables available from the census. The trick is in finding a set of variables that creates an image of life in that tract.

There are some poor ways to characterize the neighborhood, and students should be warned against these at the onset. Remind them that percentages and averages are more useful than total numbers. For example, it is not terribly illuminating to say that 435 persons under 18 years of age live in the tract.It is useful to say that persons under 18 represent 15 percent of a tract’s population. That there are 2,642 African-Americans doesn’t convey much about the population of the tract. It is much more valuable to say that African-Americans constitute 75 percent of the tract’s population. Similar generalizations hold with respect to income and education. The reader wants to know that the mean household income is $55,496 and that 90 percent of all adults are high-school graduates, not there are 62 households with incomes above $40,000 or that 59 individuals are high-school graduates.Unfortunately, most students have very little experience in collecting and presenting data, and they need considerable guidance up-front about how to use the census to convey a message about a place and the people who live there.

Stress the importance of placing census tracts into the metropolitan context. The census figures themselves have little meaning if they are not compared to something else. This is especially important for the income figures and housing values. It is not particularly useful to say that the mean value of an occupied single-family dwelling is $80,000. Is this high or low by metropolitan standards? It might be impressively high by the standards of Biloxi, Mississippi but pitifully low by the standards of Los Angeles. It is useful to know that the mean value of an occupied single-family dwelling in a tract is $80,000 compared to $150,000 for the metropolitan area as a whole.

In Activity 2, we want students to critically evaluate the information in the census and to become active interpreters of the urban landscape. Advise them to drive, walk, or bicycle through their tracts and take notes of what they see.

To help students, we have provided a virtual fieldtrip of Colorado Springs that links landscape images from the field to census tracts for 14 different census variables, plus a page with links to images not captured in the census of population and housing. Have students run through the fieldtrip prior to beginning Activity 2 and carefully read the interpretive text. We also provide extensive guidance about what to look for. In addition to who and what they see on city streets, students should be encouraged to visit a local real estate office and find out current housing values, go to the local market and determine what products are being sold, visit the pastor of the local church and ask how the congregation is changing, contact neighborhood associations and visit the local park. Inspire students to use their imaginations to find creative ways of learning about and characterizing their census tracts.

This activity works best for those living in metropolitan areas that are subdivided into census tracts. If your college or university is not in a metropolitan area, you can substitute towns (places) for census tracts and county totals for metropolitan areas (see instructions for accessing data).Ask students to choose a small town and to characterize that town using census data and compare it to county-wide figures in Activity 1. Activity 2 would be very similar to what we have outlined for tracts. Have students visit their target town, read the local landscape, assess the accuracy of their census-based impressions, and determine whether there have been major changes since the last census.

Finally, while you should encourage students to visit their study area at different times of the day and different days of the week, always consider the safety of the students.Some census tracts should be avoided at night or alone. Inform your students on safety procedures and any special conditions they should be aware of. Stress common sense and perhaps encourage students to work in groups. Be aware of your school’s insurance and liability policies in the event that something should happen during field surveys.

B. Lesson Plan

I. Early models of land use patterns in cities

  1. Concentric ring model: Robert Park and Ernest Burgess
  2. Dates back to 1920s
  3. Typical of industrial cities of early-twentieth century, when most jobs were downtown or in the fringe, and whose rapid growth was fueled by arrival of immigrants
  4. Central business district (CBD)
  5. Commercial core
  6. Office core
  7. Social and civic core
  8. Fringe zone
  9. Wholesaling
  10. Warehousing
  11. Light industry
  12. Zone of transition
  13. Encroachment of business and manufacturing from the fringe
  14. Rundown housing
  15. Blue-collar residences
  16. Medium-income housing
  17. High-income commuter zone
  18. Based on concepts of invasion-and-succession and housing filtering from higher to lower income groups
  19. Sector model: Homer Hoyt
  20. Proposed in 1939
  21. Land uses in pie-shaped wedges radiating from city center
  22. High-income areas along fashionable boulevards or rail lines, water, high ground, and far from industry
  23. Industry radiates along river or rail lines
  24. Low-income radiates near industry
  25. Middle-income radiates between low- and high-income sectors
  26. Multiple nuclei model: ChauncyHarris and Edward Ullman
  27. Developed in 1945 during early days of suburbanization of shopping centers
  28. Downtown CBD is not the only nucleus of nonresidential land uses
  29. Also specialized districts like retail, ports, manufacturing, etc.
  30. Urban realms
  31. Functionally tied suburban regions and “suburban downtowns”
  32. Current applicability of the classic land use models
  33. Rings, sectors, and multiple nuclei can still be seen, but overall pattern is far more complex
  34. Family status tends to be distributed concentrically
  35. Families with children with low rates of female labor force participation gravitate towards suburbs
  36. Young people living alone or with roommates, couples without children, working women attracted to multifamily housing near CBD
  37. Socioeconomic status tends to be radial
  38. Occupations, incomes, education levels seem to be distributed in sectors
  39. Ethnic status tends to be clustered

II. Contemporary trends in cities

  1. Modernism
  2. Based on a belief in preeminence of scientific rationality and the inevitability of human progress
  3. Functional, boxy skyscrapers in the CBD, high-rise apartment towers placed throughout the city, followed by mile after mile of ranch houses in the suburbs
  4. Postmodernism
  5. Rejects the worldview that there are universal models for how the world functions or should function
  6. Celebrates diversity and denies that any perspective, style, or subgroup has a monopoly on truth or beauty
  7. Postmodern architecture emphasizes style, aesthetics, decoration, context, and historic preservation—form as well as function
  8. Demographic, ethnic, and family type changes
  9. Social fragmentation
  10. Voluntary segregation based on lifestyle choices
  11. Gated enclaves
  12. Loss of a public consciousness
  13. Urban underclass left behind in old decaying residential zones surrounding CBDs
  14. Characterized by higher levels of:
  15. Poverty
  16. Joblessness
  17. Crime
  18. Drugs
  19. Single mothers
  20. Welfare dependency
  21. Highly concentrated in inner city
  22. Predominantly composed of ethnic minorities (white poor far outnumber nonwhite poor, but white poor are not as geographically concentrated)
  23. Gentrification is drawing nonpoor back into the central city
  24. Rehabbing of housing in older, architecturally significant, once fashionable urban neighborhoods
  25. Stimulated by:
  26. Revitalization of downtowns

  1. Opportunity to make large real estate profit
  2. Road congestion

c. Gentrifiers are mainly:

  1. Upwardly mobile professionals
  2. Young
  3. White
  4. Childless

d. Negative side effect is displacement of previous residents who cannot afford higher real estate taxes.

  1. Creative class
  2. Search for neighborhoods that provide meaning, identity, diversity, and excitement
  3. Economic growth tied to new ideas rather than production
  4. Knowledge-based professionals, 1/3 of the workforce today
  5. Cities that cater to this search for active, exciting lifestyles are more competitive
  6. Population rebound of central cities since 2000
  7. Downtowns have reinvented themselves
  8. Reemerged as nerve centers for postindustrial information economy
  9. Corporate headquarters
  10. Advertising
  11. Accounting, finance
  12. Legal services
  13. Government
  14. Secondly, downtowns are entertainment and retail centers
  15. Convention business and hotels
  16. Museums, theaters, and sports stadiums
  17. Nightclubs, brew pubs, and restaurants
  18. Mixed-use development and festival centers
  19. Suburbanization of shopping and industry
  20. Edge cities
  21. Shopping malls
  22. High-tech light manufacturing
  23. Corporate headquarters
  24. White-collar firms
  25. Entertainment and hotel complexes
  26. Airport complexes
  27. Frequently located at intersections of major freeways
  28. Refocusing of commuting on suburb-to-suburb and city-to-suburb “reverse commuting”
  29. Summary of urban changes
  30. Density gradient curves through time: 1900, 1950, and 2000
  31. 2008 economic crisis hit suburban housing market harshly
  32. Increased popularity of central downtown areas, but also much growth in exurbs that provide long-distance access to cities

III. Give detailed instructions on how to do the activities

  1. Example census variables to use
  2. Definitions of urban areas
  3. Instructions to access census data
  4. Discussion of field observation, with virtual field trip activity

C. Answer Key

Activity 1: Census Tract Data

1.1–1.3 Every answer will be different. The so-so answers will use exactly those variables listed as examples in the activity. Some students forget to compare their census tract to metropolitan area values, or they offer no interpretation of the comparisons, even though Question 1.2 specifically instructs that they make a comparison table. The poor answers will use raw numbers instead of percentages, means, and medians, and they will fail to place their tract into the metropolitan context.

The average papers will be very mechanistic. They will state that 5 percent of their tract’s population is black compared to 30 percent for the city as a whole, etc.

The better essays will choose a completely unique set of variables, compare their tracts to the metropolitan whole, and then indicate what each variable means. For example, finding a tract with 5 percent black in a city where the percent black overall is 30 percent says something about the residentially segregated nature of the city’s social geography. You find tracts that have a very small number of minority residents, and others with a very high number. There are few, if any, tracts that contain the city-wide average. Good essays have clear tables comparing the students’ tract to the city, with well-written observations, and a good interpretation of what these numbers mean (as instructed in Question 1.3).

Activity 2: Field Survey

2.1–2.2The poor-to-average answers will say that their tract looks exactly as they would have expected based on the census. More insightful answers will note that there is a surprising amount of variation within the tract, and this variation is not captured well by census averages and percentages. Students might note, for example, that a tract is dominated by older families living in single-family detached homes but point out that there are several apartment complexes with young singles in one corner of the tract. Some students are very scrupulous about enumerating changes since the census date. Their emphasis usually is on new construction which brings in new residents, but some students might also recognize demographic change in the form of the aging of neighborhood residents, the turnover from white-Anglo to black or from black to Hispanic, or the replacement of lower- and working-class persons with professional singles and childless couples, a common pattern in urban gentrification.

You will receive an astonishing range of responses to this request for students’ firsthand impressions of their census tract. Some students do the bare minimum. They make one visit to the tract, drive the main streets, and conclude that the census provides all they really need to learn about the population of their tracts. At the other extreme, students write compelling and impressive essays of their impressions of the people and life in the area. They visit the neighborhood at different times of the day and night, they walk the streets, they talk to local residents and business owners, and they form impressions of the characteristics of the people who live there and of the cultural landscape that they create. A good student will follow at least a portion of our suggestions in identifying landscape clues and in characterizing residents. An exceptional essay will find alternative ways of describing the people and the place and weave these together to form a portrait of life in the census tract.

2.3Students should note areas of new construction or recent change not captured in the static picture captured by the decennial census.These changes will be most evident in rapidly growing cities.Some places may have little change since the census numbers were generated.