Abstract
The study of “urban context” was specifically born of a concern surrounding the inequalities that, in an urban setting, become visible and obvious. The sociological tradition of this type of study goes back a long way. It began in the Chicago School in the 1930s with Park and his disciples. These studies received a significant methodological boost in 1955 with the Index of Dissimilarity (Duncan and Duncan in Am Sociol Rev 20: 210–217, 1955), as a basic indicator for measuring any type of urban residential segregation. The development of both one-dimensional and multi-dimensional measures led to a set of strategies that had the ultimate goal of creating socio-residential maps that would allow the urban reality to be quantified, qualified and explained. Therefore, after the segregation indexes, Social Area Analysis and Factorial Ecology made use of newly developed powerful statistical tools for handling large amounts of data, opening a more multi-dimensional line. In the analysis of urban structure, this analysis—Factorial—is used to isolate the principal dimensions that define the differences in the urban area. Currently, the application of the factorial analysis in urban investigation is common and helps us to understand the way in which the city is divided according to variables such as economic status, age, housing conditions or immigration. This paper aims to present the results of this type of analysis, combined with another such as Cluster or K-Means, for the metropolitan area of Bilbao, considering its benefits and limitations.
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Notes
- 1.
In Spanish, sección censal, a sub-unit of a municipality with a population of between 1000 and 2500, unless the population of the corresponding municipality is less.
- 2.
Of the 36 variables initially included, 24 were selected for the final factorial solution.
- 3.
The most recent census available, which did not become accessible until 2014.
- 4.
Due to the size of the resulting dendrogram, it is not possible to reproduce it here. We based our decision on the conglomeration history, which shows the performance of the coefficient. It was decided to detain the classification at Stage 702, where the coefficient jumps from 1,725,473 to 1,936,364, thus giving 5 groups or strata.
- 5.
A distrito is an administrative sub-division of the city. Bilbao is comprised of 8 distritos.
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Fernández Aragón, I., Lavía Martínez, C. (2020). The Use of Factor Analysis in Urban Research: The Case of the Metropolitan Area of Bilbao. In: Smagacz-Poziemska, M., Gómez, M., Pereira, P., Guarino, L., Kurtenbach, S., Villalón, J. (eds) Inequality and Uncertainty. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9162-1_12
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