Welsh Journals

Migration in industrial decline: an analysis in a South Wales setting1 G. M. REES Lecturer, Dept. of Town Planning, U. W.I.S. T., Cardiff It is remarkable that although population change is one of the most critical factors in determining almost every aspect of policy-making, the level of our understanding of the processes which underlie this change remains extremely low. Whilst this theoretical poverty is most marked in the area of natural change, the gaps in our know- ledge of population movement have also frequently been remarked (for example, Welch, 1970; Willis, 1974). The research study described here is concerned with the analysis of that aspect of popul- ation movement about which, it is arguable, we know least: namely, internal migration. The major body of literature on migration has been concerned with attempts to explain the volume, direction and distance of migration streams, almost wholly at the regional or sub-regional level of analysis. Theoretically, the origins of this work can be traced to the social physics approaches of, for example, Zipf (1946) and Stouffer (1940, 1960) and to the labour mobility theories of the economists (Lind, 1969). Accordingly, explanation has most frequently been couched in terms of the ecological characteristics of the places of origin and destination and the physical distances between them. One factor that has clearly contributed to the domin- ance of this sort of aggregate level approach is that the most readily available data on migration are published on an areal basis; as, for example, in the Census. However, for present purposes, the central point is that within this literature, migration has been viewed as a direct function of the physical, economic and, to a lesser extent, social structure within which the migration has taken place. The partial nature of this sort of analysis (and, indeed, the data on which it has been based; Welch, 1971) has led some researchers to direct their attention increasingly to the process embodied in migration and, thereby, to analysis based upon the individuals who make up the migration streams. More specifically, attempts have been made to understand the social and psychological factors which may explain people's decisions to move. Hence, for example, Wolpert (1965, 1966) has suggested a conceptual framework for the