Transforming the mosaic - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 130

5
Transforming the mosaic
Yet within any town as in the region as a whole there is a pattern.
The poor housing, schools and levels of unemployment will tend to be
concentrated in certain districts - as they are concentrated in inner
city areas of the large conurbations of this country. At the level of the
region, too, there is a pattern, increasingly clear and changing.
(SEEDS, 1987, p. 6)
5.1 Still images of change
Counts, measures, votes and all the other figures we use to build a picture of our
social landscape are collected regularly because it is recognised that the picture
changes. 1 People's positions, locations and aspirations alter. Compared to the
static picture, much less research has been addressed to looking at change. Areas
are classified as being rich or poor, but hardly ever as becoming richer or poorer.
It might be said that they are gentrified, or are now a slum, but not that that is
the direction in which they are heading.
Areas being classified by what they are, rather than what they are becom-
ing, may be partly the result of the change generally being slow and also very
uncertain, but much of the reason is the difficulties of displaying change. These
difficulties range from simple problems of gathering the information (temporal
1 'Our maps are in one sense diagrams of geographic systems and their evolution. Many of them
are - or were - cartographically communicated theories about global or regional geographic systems
of resources and settlement. Many time series of maps are in one sense statements of theories, in
cartographic language, about geographic development processes, about the functioning and the past
and future evolution of some global or regional geographic system' (Borchert, 1987, p. 388).