This assignment is concerned with urban social problems and urban social spaces. It is a two part assignment that will allow you to explore the causes and effects of poverty in North American cities a

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This assignment is concerned with urban social problems and urban social spaces. It is a two part assignment that will allow you to explore the causes and effects of poverty in North American cities and to create a social geography of a community or city.

Part 1

  1. With reference to the concept of the “sociospatial dialectic,” write a short essay on the main causes and effects of poverty and homelessness in North American cities. (4 marks)
  2. Briefly discuss how these problems might be solved in your essay. (1 mark)
  3. In relation to Part 1 of Assignment #4, Week 21 of the instructional content and Chapter 15 of the textbook should be consulted. The following articles in the online Library Readings and the Readings Package may also be consulted:“ Ghettos in Canadian Cities?” (Walks and Bourne)“Even in Canada” (Smith and Ley)

The length of this essay should be approximately 750-1,000 typewritten words (excluding references).

Part 2 

Write an essay on the social geography of a neighbourhood or a small town. For this essay, you will have to obtain secondary (published) source data that has been collected by an agency such as Statistics Canada (see the instructional content of Week 1 for address of the STATSCAN Website) or by your local town, region, or municipality. If you have problems obtaining the data, contact the government document reference librarians at the Dafoe Library for help.

For this assignment, decide upon the data sets that you will need in order to describe the social geography of your selected area. You should include variables similar to the indicators included in Figure 15.1 in the instructional content, and the variables discussed in Week 15, for describing the social spaces of your selected area.

You should also include data relating to the same variables for the entire community (i.e., city, town, or municipality) in which your study area is located. You may then compare your study area with the entire community in terms of the selected variables. For example, if you chose to examine a neighbourhood in the City of Winnipeg, you should collect data relating to both the selected variables for that neighbourhood and also for Winnipeg as a whole.

Your essay must incorporate:

  • A brief outline of theoretical approaches (based on residential ecology) to the study of the social geography of the city.
  • A description of the variables that you selected for analysis.
  • A brief description of your selected study area including a map.
  • An analysis of the data using descriptive methods only (e.g., frequency distributions, percentages, means, etc.). Your descriptive data may be presented in tables and/or graphs.
  • A discussion of the results of your analysis.

Your essay should be structured as follows:

  1. Introductory section that includes a statement of the objectives of the research and the overview of the theoretical approaches. (4 marks)
  2. Description of the study area (including a map). (3 marks)
  3. Data source(s) and description of the data (variables) that are analyzed. (3 marks)
  4. Description of the method(s) of analysis (tables/graphs) and presentation of data. (4 marks)
  5. Results of the analysis. (4 marks)
  6. Conclusion. (2 marks)

In relation to Part 2 of Assignment #4, Weeks 15 & 16 of the instructional content and Chapter 12 of the textbook should be consulted. In addition, the following article from the Readings Package may be consulted, particularly concerning theoretical approaches:“Urban Social Space” (Murdie and Teixeira)

The length of the main text of this essay should be approximately 3,500 typewritten words (excluding references). The data used in the essay should be included in an appendix.