השוואת שיטות

	Geodemographic Classification	Central Place Analysis
תחום	Human Geography	Human Geography
משפחה	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
שנת המקור	2005	1933
הוגה השיטה	Richard Webber (and the geodemographics tradition synthesized by Harris, Sleight & Webber)	Walter Christaller
סוג	Pipeline that clusters small areas into interpretable neighbourhood types	Theory and analytic framework for the size, number, and spacing of settlements
מקור מכונן	Harris, R., Sleight, P., & Webber, R. (2005). Geodemographics, GIS and Neighbourhood Targeting. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester. ISBN: 9780470864135	Christaller, W. (1966). Central Places in Southern Germany (C. W. Baskin, Trans.). Prentice-Hall. (Original work published 1933). ISBN: 9780131226302
כינויים	Neighbourhood Classification, Area Classification, Geodemographic Segmentation, Neighbourhood Typology	Central Place Theory, Christaller Central Place Model, Settlement Hierarchy Analysis, Central Place Hierarchy
קשורות	4	4
תקציר	Geodemographic classification is the process of grouping small geographic areas into a set of distinctive neighbourhood types according to the demographic, socioeconomic, and housing characteristics of the people who live there. It rests on the principle that 'birds of a feather flock together' — that residents of a neighbourhood tend to resemble one another and differ from those elsewhere — and turns dozens of census variables into a single, interpretable label for every area. Commercial systems such as Mosaic and ACORN and open classifications such as the UK Output Area Classification are all built this way, and the approach was consolidated as a discipline by Harris, Sleight and Webber in 2005.	Central place analysis is the study of the size, number, and spacing of settlements as service centres, grounded in Walter Christaller's central place theory of 1933. It explains why settlements form an orderly hierarchy — many small villages, fewer towns, a handful of cities — and why higher-order centres are spaced farther apart and offer more specialized goods, deriving the famous nested pattern of hexagonal market areas from two economic concepts: the range and the threshold of a good.