REMI CLIGNET and FRANK JORDAN Northwestern University Urbanization and Social Differentiation in Africa Comparative Analysis of the Ecological Structures of Douala and Yaounde Clearly one of the major problems of development is how to extend its advantages to the greatest number of peoples and hence how to minimize the negative consequences of social inequalities and dis parities in life styles.1 preliminary step towards the solution to this problem involves the analysis of the relationships between societal complexity and social differentiation Relevant to this particular concern is the theory of increase in scale which asserts that the extent of social differentiation and the number of its determinants increase as direct function of the scalar position of the social system investigat ed.2 Within society social differentiation should be more visible and its determinants more numerous in urban than in rural areas since cities act as focal points in the development of scalar principles At the international level the extent of the social differentiation prevailing in urban centers and the nature of its determinants should be primarily influenced by the overall complexity of the societies under study The verification of this theory requires that it may be decomposed into series of proportions that we intend to test in this paper