Ewa Pytel —Tafel

Abstract

Studies of the demographic differentiation of the Polish urban system demonstrated (Pytel-Tafel 1984) that migration has been the factor which contributes most to such a differentiation.The aims of the studies on demographic structures in towns were to present a generalized picture of the demographic differentiations in all of the Polish towns, to explain the causes of some demographic phenomena, as well as to empirically confirm the existence of the processes known from theory. The study encompassed the set of the 803 Polish boroughs which existed in 1977.Geography involves a number of classes of spaces, among which socio-economic spaces form a distinct group. According to K. Dziewoński (1967), general socio--economic space is a totality composed of partial spaces. This space contains various elements, subsets and interrelations. In the analyses of demographic space, being a subset of the general socio-economic space, three partial spaces were a priori distinguished, referred to further on as subspaces: the demographic, the socio-occupational and the migratory space. These subspaces constitute segments of reality; they are interdependent, but not identical. Each of them was defined by a set of possibly homogeneous diagnostic features — variables. In order to determine the main dimensions of the subspaces distinguished, three detailed principal component analyses had been performed, and thereafter a joint analysis was carried out for the set of all the 47 variables (see Table 1) in order to provide for a comparability of the partial and summary results.