Liquid City

CHAPTER NINE

URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS

Although the census place data provide a finer-grained grid than the county-level data, they are still aggregated. The entire city of Baltimore, for example, is identified in our cluster grouping classification as Underclass while the whole of Washington, D.C., is classified as Immigrant Gateway. Both are large cities with substantial neighborhood variations that transcend the singular identity of this place data analysis. There is a scale below census places, the census tract, that provides an even finer-grained net to identify different places within Megalopolis. These tracts are the basic collection unit used by the U.S. Census Bureau. They are small, with populations ranging from 1,200 to 6,000, and are ...