Mapping Neighborhood Change in Chicago and L.A.

For the better part of a century, the dominant U.S. models for cities and urban areas—handed down from the so-called Chicago School of urbanists—held that cities grow outwardly from their dense commercial and industrial cores and extend into more affluent residential suburbs. It’s only in the past couple of decades that we’ve seen the rise of the so-called “great inversion,” or the idea that wealthier residents have begun to prefer the city center while poverty and disadvantage have been pushed out into the suburbs. But do these two models fully capture the process of transformation that is reshaping our cities and metro areas today?

A new study published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers takes a detailed look at the neighborhood change and “sequencing” that is occurring in two of America’s largest cities: L.A. and Chicago. The study, by Elizabeth C. Delmelle of the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, traces the period of neighborhood growth and decline in these two cities over four decades, from 1970 to 2010.