Clusters As Islands

This post is part of the Ecotone Wiki’s joint topic, Islands And Place.

What does where we live say about who we are? A very great deal, according to Michael Weiss, author of The Clustering of America and The Clustered World. His point is that people generally tend to live near people like them. He calls these groupings clusters, and he has divided them into 62 discrete types. They function, for all practical purposes, like islands.

Weiss’s research has been a boon to marketers, who are able to target, say, Kellog’s Pop-Tarts and Domino’s pizza to the cluster “Greenbelt Families,” who are also most likely to drive Mercury Capris. Greenbelt Families are young, upper-middle-class town dwellers, predominantly white, whose ideology is moderate independent. They are found in high concentrations in places like Parkville, Missouri and Hyde Park, New York.

Unlike the members of the “Sunset City Blues,” mostly retired, married white folks who live in places like Battle Creek, Michigan or Merrillville, Indiana, and who buy cigars, lottery tickets, and pain relievers in high quantities.

You can enter your zip code at the Claritas site to find out what clusters are found in high concentrations in your area. For non-US residents, there are similar efforts in the UK, Spain, and Canada.

For the record, Numenius and I fall under the “New Eco-topia” cluster, people described as most likely to have a computer on the kitchen table, eat organic foods, and support recycling. By the wisdom of the clusterers, we should be living in Westminster, Vermont. An island of people like us.