Transforming the mosaic - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 135

5.3 Structure transformed
The inadequately described have moved almost exclusively into the
council sector.
(Hamnett, 1987, p. 548) 4
The most basic changes of population have been painted here simply by
making each block white where population fell and black where it increased. 5
The white holes of the major conurbations can be easily distinguished, as can the
black rings of built-up areas around them. 6 De-urbanisation was uncovered as
taking place in 1970s Britain when the 1971 and 1981 censuses were compared.
Importantly, the truth of this generalisation can be ascertained from just how
clearly this pattern stands out in the images shown here.
There are no woodlands and fields on the population cartogram, just the
'people-lands' of inner cities, suburbs, small towns and villages - all drawn in
proportion to their populations. Some of these have been growing and some
declining. Everywhere there has been great variation, from street to street, sub-
urb to suburb. 7 As the image is progressively smoothed, averaging each cell
of one hundred people with eight hundred of their neighbours, then smoothed
again to average over two thousand, then five thousand, then eight thousand ... a
more and more generalized image of the process of population redistribution is
revealed. This information is perhaps more clear, but less real.
The changing distributions of the sexes and ages can also be depicted with
shading that is then smoothed. For the distribution of the sexes within any par-
ticular place to alter, people must be born, die or move. Age obviously changes
continuously with time, as well as irregularly over space (as people move). These
two attributes are, however, interrelated, for as people age, men die earlier and
4 Textual description of change can also be very elusive as a result of generalisation. There was
a category of people referred to as having their occupations 'inadequately described' in the censuses
of 1971 and 1981 and, by 1981, this group had both grown in number and a large majority of the
group were residing in council owned housing. The sentence quoted above sums up how people
get lumped into intersecting social boxes that often says as much about the designers of the boxes,
boxes both made of bricks and mortar and on paper census forms, as it says about the people who
were boxed.
5 When there was a population change, ward boundaries were rapidly redrawn: 'The most extreme
examples are a new ward in the Isle of Dogs with a zero population in 1971 but 5,400 in 1981; and
a ward in Bracknell district with a population of 3 in 1971 but 8,700 in 1981' (Craig, 1988, p. 9).
6 It should be possible to see the regional pattern through the local picture: 'With the exception
of the South East, in all regions containing a metropolitan county the balance of migration both
in 1971 and in 1981 was outward; and in all the remaining regions it was inward' (Brant, 1984,
p. 28).
7 'The City of London was the only London borough to increase in population during the 1970s
yet it is precisely this district in which a number of tracts experienced some of the greatest decreases
in population in the region during this period' (McKee, 1989, p. 201). The overall increase was due
to the populating of the Barbican estate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbican_Estate.