Abstract
Recent population censuses have brought about arrays of high-resolution explicitly geo-referenced socio-economic data stored in the framework of Geographic Information Systems. Geography and social science are not prepared for these new urban databases, and this paper considers their potential for investigating residential distribution, based on the data of the 1995 Israeli Census of Population and Households. We focus on the methodological problems: understanding the phenomena, formal analysis, and statistical inference. The methods for mapping high-resolution data, establishing spatial relationships between them, analyzing neighborhood structure, and exploring the significance of the results are proposed and illustrated by examples of the cities of Tel-Aviv (pop. 350,000) and Ashdod (pop. 100,000).