Edmonton Over Time

Income disparity is becoming an ever increasingly important issue that is relevant in the daily lives of Canadians. Numerous reports have pointed out the concern of a shrinking of the middle class and that there is an expanding gap between the rich and poor. There have been a number of potential solutions proposed as a response response to the income disparity problem, such as increasing taxes in an attempt to close this gap in income (Fitzpatrick, 2012).

There have already been a few interesting reports on income disparity in different Canadian cities which include a geographic focus. One of which, written by J. David Hulchanski, highlighted the changing wealth demographics of Toronto (Hulchanski,2007). In his report, he investigated income polarization among Toronto’s neighbourhoods between 1970 and 2000. Ley & Lynch (2012 - unpublished), used a similar method to analyze the changes in income disparity over time for Vancouver, B.C. We decided to use these papers as a guide to our own analyses of the temporal and spatial distribution of income in the City of Edmonton in this time period.

For our project, we wanted to discover what sorts of changes took place between the census years 1971 to 2006. Seeing as how Edmonton is one of two major cities in a province where oil resources and city expansion are creating a huge amount of deurbanization and suburban sprawl,   a study on the quantitative changes in income distributions across the city could be vital in seeing how average income as well as income gaps changed over time, as well as what variables could possibly explain them.

One member of the group lived in Edmonton from 1998 to 2006 and saw the significant changes firsthand. During this time period, and continuing to this day, there is constant construction of developments in the outskirts of the city. This includes the Anthony Henday ring road that is being built through farmers fields around the entire city as well as the high income acreage subdivisions that are continuously sprouting up beyond the city limits. Every time he returns to visit family and friends, he needs to reaquaint himself with the changes in roads to accomidate this large scale suburban developments.

When doing this sort of analysis for a city there are key questions that need to be asked. Where are the shifting income demographics in the city happening? Are there any trends in demographic shifts? What did the city look like 30 years ago and how does that compare to what it looks like today? It is these kinds of questions that can be answered through the use of census data and the application of GIS. It is clear when driving around the outskirts and then heading back into the city that the resources have been almost exclusively focused on high income areas suburbs. It is our hope to quantify these changes and analyse just how much the city changed between 1971 and 2006

This project uses spatial statistics, including hot spots, spatial autocorrelation, and geographically weighted regression, to visualize some of the trends that developed over 1971 to 2006 in average household income in Edmonton, Alberta.