Geographia Polonica (1993) vol. 61
Screening the spatial structure of internal migration flows and their inherent dynamics — demonstrated at Berlin (West)
Geographia Polonica (1993) vol. 61, pp. 219-234 | 
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Abstract
With a newly developed method, the intra-urban migration matrices betweenthe 97 census tracks of Berlin's former Western part for the several years up to 1989 willbe simultaneously displayed in a dynamic sequence. Where needed, the migration flowsbetween the census track will be broken into several groups, both genders or even ethnicorigins. These migration flows can also be adjusted to potential determinants and theirremaining residuals can be graphically analysed again.The underlying concept of our method (similarity structure analysis) is that thereexists a simultaneous transformation of bi-regional migration flows into relativedistances between the regions, i.e., we get a map of the regions with similar regionslocated close to each other and dissimilar regions located further apart. Then thesemaps for the single accounting periods can be rotated orthogonally into eachprecessor forming a path of each region through time.For Berlin — which can be regarded as closed system until the 9th of November, 1989 —we hope to show for the three accounting periods the flux of its people and theirpreferences for the residential areas as well as identifying almost closed migrationsubsystems within the 97 census tracks. Also we will analyse the residuals from a doublyconstrained gravity model to see whether there is any remaining structure in the maps.
Keywords: Berlin, similarity structure analysis, regional migration
, Department of Geography - Urban Studies and GIS Free University of Berlin, GrunewaldstraBe 35, 12165 Berlin, Germany
, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, N2L 3C5