zone of transition

an area of the city, according to the perspective of URBAN ECOLOGY, which borders the central business district. Although its socioeconomic makeup is constantly changing due to the processes of urban growth and relocation, it is characterized by high levels of migration (as poorer people and newcomers to the city move into the area and as well-off people move away to the ‘better areas’ of the suburbs), by social heterogeneity, multioccupation of dwellings and a high incidence of reported social problems such as crime, mental illness and alcoholism. The coincidence of social problems with the decline in housing stock and the spread of slums resulted in the recent past in programmes of slum clearance and the building of high-rise accommodation. Although the material fabric of the environment is regarded as important, urban ecology argues that the lack of social ties and sense of community found in these areas are the chief cause of social pathology.

More recently the term has been superseded by INNER CITY to denote the growth of settled communities of people of minority heritage backgrounds, people who emigrated to the UK for work during the phase of decolonization, and their descendants who experience discrimination, relative deprivation and low socioeconomic status and can be regarded as an UNDERCLASS in capitalist society. See also HUMAN ECOLOGY, URBAN SOCIOLOGY, URBANIZATION.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

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References in periodicals archive

The Bermuda Weather Service said 'Bermuda lies within a rather listless zone of transition between high pressure ridging to the east and Tropical Storm Erin to our distant west.

BERMUDA-WEATHER-Tropical Storm Erin gives Bermuda wide berth

In the interior zone of transition, squinch arches are resting on wooden beams.

Shah Hussain Sadozai's tomb likely to be restored with Rs8.3m

(5) Conversely, 1C margins are poorly defined or indistinct, described as having a wide zone of transition. This indicates a fast-growing lesion, which is more suggestive of a malignant or aggressive process.

Pediatric bone imaging: Differentiating benign lesions from malignant

Caption: Figure 1: Frontal and lateral radiograph of elbow shows an expansile osteolytic lesion with a narrow zone of transition and surrounding sclerosis in the proximal metaphysis of the right ulna.

Proximal Ulna: A Rare Location for Solitary Intraosseous Hemangioma

Sixteen patients (38%) had narrow zone of transition and 26 patients (62%) had wide zone of transition on Radiographs whereas on MRI 20 patients (48%) had narrow zone of transition and 22 patients (52%) had wide zone of transition (52%).

MRI evaluation of musculoskeletal tumours

The typical radiographic appearance is a lytic lesion without matrix; CT shows a mostly narrow but sometimes wider zone of transition. Margins are usually nonsclerotic and the location is eccentric extending to the subchondral bone.

Giant Cell Tumor of Bone: Documented Progression over 4 Years from Its Origin at the Metaphysis to the Articular Surface

And the paintings are strongest where the division between the two halves is most understated (for example, Green, Orange and Mica or Naples Yellow and Mica), weakest where the division is most marked, as in Colors Without Names--even aside from the too-overt invocation of Barnett Newman's zip-where the division of the canvas becomes a definite and, as it were, imposed element rather than a zone of transition, a place where mixtures are recalibrated.

Pat Steir: Cheim & Reid

There was an underlying multiloculated lytic lesion with a narrow zone of transition. There was endosteal scalloping with thinning of the cortex but no bony expansion.

Echinococcal disease of the bone: an unusual cause of a pathological fracture

In the poem "Stiletto," we read: "Why does each evening up here / always, in summer, seem to be / The way--as it does, with the light knifing low from right to left-- / It will be on the next-to-last one?" Here, the speaker is perched on the edge of change, in the evening zone of transition.

Charles Wright. Sestets

Surrounding the buffer is a zone of transition or zone of cooperation.

Canadian biosphere reserves: idealizations and realizations

This zone of transition that constitutes the tree line in the southwest Yukon plays a critical role in landscape structure and wildlife habitat, marking the lower and upper limits of many species' distributions and acting as important habitat for other species in its own right.

A multiscale study of tree-line dynamics in southwestern Yukon