Transforming the mosaic - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 140

the population into three groups: unemployed, working and the particularly
interesting (and often ignored) remainder, and then show how (in each very
small area) each group changed during the 1970s. This has been done here
to illustrate how people's lives would be affected by changing levels of
employment from 1971 to 1981, which depended greatly on where they lived
(Figure 5.4).
The West Midlands was the largest area to have solidly increased its share of
the unemployed and inactive during the 1970s; more people were working around
London, but within the heart of London more of those deemed economically
inactive were left, perhaps as households containing more members in work more
often moved out to the suburbs. 9 These images show strong patterns, but - just
as indistinct images are not worthless - simple ones are not necessarily true.
Employment is a feature of our social landscape that changes seasonally. If
you like physical analogies it is the vegetation cover. The single change over ten
years hides great swings in the fortunes of places between those dates. Unem-
ployment has been measured for areas the size of towns for every month since
1978, providing what initially appears to be a very hard to understand spacetime
series in comparison with simple 1971 - 1981 decadal change (Figure 5.5).
To show changes most simply we can paint a small image for each year,
showing the deviation in each area from expected levels for that place and time.
Such a series shows us how the spacetime pattern of unemployment deviates from
what we would imagine, given a simple graph of time and a single cartogram of
space (Figure 5.6).
The series of cartograms showing changing unemployment levels between
1978 and 1990 has areas shaded dark to indicate higher than expected levels of
unemployment, moving towards white for lower than expected levels. At the end
of the 1970s a Celtic fringe of high unemployment is apparent; by the end of the
1980s a very distinctive ring of low unemployment has grown around London.
The shading of the areas in this unemployment map is as dependent on
the limits of the time period as it is on the spatial limits of Britain. What is
more, only a few years can be shown on a page, although at least years are a
sensible amalgamation of months for counting unemployment. What these images
illustrate, from the point of view of visualizing social structure, is the beginnings
of a combined picture in space and time of evolving unemployment rates.
The pattern (geology) of industry changes much more slowly than that of
employment, even though the latter follows changes in the former. Detailed non-
population-census information on people working in industry in many places only
became available towards the end of the 1980s and only then for the years that
the census of employment had then covered. The change for wards was shown
earlier, as measured between the 1984 and 1987 employment censuses, and an
9 It is easy to forget that the early 1980s were still a period of economic decline for London,
although people more often moved out than signed on and stayed put: 'The long-term decline in
employment in London - which goes against the national trend - and the even sharper decline in
inner areas has come about without a significant upward shift in London's unemployment' (Buck,
1986, p. 180).