Communities of the Postindustrial City

Abstract

The authors discern the community structure of the postindustrial city, with reference to Australia. They focus empirically on three major types of Australian urban center: urban regions, metropolitan areas that are not part of urban regions, and other major cities. These three account for almost three-quarters of the Australian population. The authors draw on a conceptualization formulated by Marcuse and van Kempen to guide the analysis, with a combination of cluster analysis and discriminant analysis being applied to aggregate (essentially census) data to identify the communities. Nine major Australian urban communities are identified—four are affluent, four are disadvantaged, and one is a working-class community. The communities found, however, differed greatly from those cited in the Marcuse and van Kempen schema.