Honeycomb structure - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 117

the households whose heads belong to the categories blue, yellow and red, you
can then see one of the most basic divisions of the social landscape 12 -the
geography of class (see Figure 4.14). In this case it is obvious which colour goes
with which class.
The colours do not mix. The blue professional band threads its way, lace-
like, around the city suburbs; it is strongest in the South. The red supervised
masses mark out the centres of major settlements, while the yellow intermediate
patches show the distribution of relatively well-paid workers between the other
two groups; in the coalfields of Wales and the North, for example (this map is
drawn of a time before most of the miners lost their jobs). London is a city split
between the most and least rewarded workers, with little room in between, a city
of high and rising, but not yet extreme, inequality.
Smoothing the picture makes it easier to form some generalisations. Gener-
alisation can be justified, in this case, because the information on occupation is
only available from a sample of one-tenth of the population. Smoothing, when
done evenly over population space on the cartograms, averages people with their
nearest neighbours. However, the technique must be used sparingly if it is not to
provide false conclusions. It should also be remembered that it is only the use of
the population cartogram that allows the most poorly paid third of the population
to appear in the picture other than as pinprick marks (Box 4.3).
Particular industries and those who are concentrated into urban areas to work
in them, such as in high finance, can be pinprick sized on a conventional map.
Graduates become attracted to certain areas and repelled from others; women and
men find it more or less financially essential to work depending on what work
there is in each area and what roles men and women are most expected to play
at each time - in how they are expected to partake in industry. Like everything
else, industry is geographically distributed, that distribution being important to
the fundamental infrastructural geology of the social landscape.
Industry can be divided in many ways, for example into primary, secondary
and tertiary, or into public and private sectors, and the voluntary remainder. Its
distributions can then be painted. If this were done these images would now
be the distributions of where people work, rather than where they live, a point
addressed later in Chapter 6.
Instead of mixing three primary colours, a stratified geological type classifi-
cation can be adopted, showing which industry has a majority of the workforce
in each area. This industrial - geology colour schema has the advantage of fur-
ther possible subdivision into dozens of industrial classifications, using subtle
shades of the basic hues. It is also appropriate because one industry tends to
be deposited upon another over time, but industry also becomes tilted, folded
12 In the early 1980s class structure was not thought to differentiate cities much, although the
following words were written before the 1981 Census results had been released: 'In only one of
the largest cities (Liverpool) did the proportion of semi- and unskilled exceed the national average
by more than 4 per cent. If concentrations of the most disadvantaged have occurred as a result
of selective decentralization then it would appear to exist at a more localized level within cities'
(Goddard, 1983, pp. 12 - 13).