Fuzzy Targeting of Population Niches in Urban Planning and the Fractal Dimension of Demographic Change

Abstract

Measurement of change throughout conglomerates of small geographical areas is of increasing importance in urban planning. Measurement of demographic change in several geographical areas simultaneously is presently not supported by a structured conceptual framework other than the cohort component model. This poses a problem since application of the cohort component model to multitudes of very small populations, such as those in neighbourhoods or census tracts throughout a city, is questionable. Considering the ultimate use of demographic information in urban planning, an alternative reference framework is being proposed along with an application procedure. It is aimed at measuring change between two census dates in four demographic parameters, throughout a conglomerate of subareas. This enables the simultaneous monitoring of demographic change across the conglomerate, listing the subareas by a fuzzy value of change in any of the four parameters. The fuzzy measurement of several demographic parameters compensates for the precision measurement of survivorship, fertility and migration in cohort demography. The degree of fuzziness in the selected parameters, furthermore, allows us to view the record of demographic change in each small area as a fractal relating to the whole city. The degree of fuzziness and the size of small-area populations are related to the fractal dimension of demographic change in the city as a whole.