Transforming the mosaic - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 164

of our social landscape and come in many colours. The colours become more
distinct as society polarises. 16
The changing positions of lifetime migrants show several aspects of economic
restructuring through the movement of people, from where they choose to live
and to where they are perhaps constrained to reside. The living parts of our
landscape, those that change day-to-day, change fastest. The distribution of jobs,
of wealth, of housing and of how people vote depends upon all the other layers
in the overall picture and on each other to an extraordinary extent. 17
How the landscape is changed depends on many forces. It is the flows of
people, like flows of water, that both maintain and alter the picture. Every day,
the flow of people to work links industries to population; then people suddenly
move in a quite different way: they move to different homes - they migrate. It is
the streams of migration that sculpture our landscape, transforming its structure,
depositing a new workforce and eroding the old. These flows of people, which
maintain and change the social landscape, are the subject of the next chapter of
this topic, which is about ways of seeing into the continuous spatial movement
that makes social structure. Humans are always moving.
16 ' ... these trends suggest it is not impossible to envisage the development in the not too distant
future of a socially polarized inner London, divided by tenure, with middle class owner-occupation
juxtaposed with a residualized and predominantly working class public rented sector. Those groups
excluded from this process may be displaced into outer London where many inner suburban areas
may become transformed into lower value ownership mixed with much of what will be left of the
private rented sector. The net result therefore will be a stabilising but polarized inner city and a
declining suburban ring. In the process “inner city” problems may become gradually displaced into
the suburbs' (Hamnett and Randolph, 1983, p. 164).
17 As the former Capital of a long-gone empire London had suffered greatly. A year after the
banks were deregulated to slowly start growing again (but now more on the profits of gambling) it
was being said still that: 'In 1987 London's economy is in deeper crisis than it has been in for a
hundred years. In certain clear respects it is worse than the 1930s. The rigours of those depression
years affected other regions more than London and did not bring quite the same extent of misery
and insecurity to the Capital' (Townsend with Corrigan and Kowarzik, 1987, p. 12).