From Chicago to L.A. and Back Again: A Chicago‐Inspired Quantitative Analysis of Income Distribution in Montreal*

Abstract

In a recent issue of Urban Geography (2001), a number of key players in the 1960s and 1970s school of quantitative urban geography (called Chicago II in this article) set out some of the approach's key methodological premises and assessed its influence in the wider arena of urban studies. At about the same time, the 1920s and 1930s Chicago School of urban sociology (called the Chicago School in this article) was being reassessed in France (Huet 2000), and deconstructed in Los Angeles (Dear 2001). In this article, we outline a selection of basic models of urban space proposed by the Chicago School and further elaborated by Chicago II. We then consider certain aspects of three important critiques: humanist/aesthetic, Marxist, and postmodern. We argue that none of these invalidates the Chicago II approach to the study of urban areas, and we demonstrate its resilience and usefulness by way of the empirical example of Montreal. Though the results are of interest in their own right, the principal purpose of the analysis is to illustrate the type of insight that a structured quantitative approach provides and the way this approach rests on a theoretical understanding of processes at work in cities. We conclude by arguing that the humanist and Marxist critiques shed important light upon the possibilities and limits of the Chicago II approach, but that the postmodern claim that the spatial development of urban areas is not structured by at least some general processes is inaccurate.