On the surface - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 220

images would be valuable, but no one appears to have yet worked out how to
draw one. 15

7.7 Surface value

That utilization is not simply a matter of physical availability stands
out with startling and unfortunate sharpness in Cleveland. The high
peaks of hospitals and of physicians are almost literally across the
street from the major Black enclave, yet we know the utilization of
Blacks to be low.

(Bashshur, Shannon and Metzner, 1970, p. 406)

A surface showing hospital utilization in America illustrates some of the
problems caused by assuming smooth continuity - unless very carefully drawn
it makes it appear as if those living next to the hospital have easy access. This
chapter has shown how surfaces can be created and rendered in as yet largely still
to be realised visualizations to depict far more than a series of two-dimensional
heights.
Just as a one-dimensional graph shows slope, direction and distance as well
as vertical value, a two-dimensional surface can show a multitude of aspects, an
entire network of local distances. Other things than travel time or fuel cost could
also be shown. Any pertinent variable that can be transformed into a matrix of
distances or dissimilarities can be projected as a surface, used to determine the
distances between the points on that surface, and then used as a base upon which
to conduct further visualization work.
The inverse propensity to commute between wards could be used to show
where the divides were strongest, the connections greatest. Social cliffs would
appear as real divides, creating between them exposed plateaus and sheltered
valleys. 16

15 The idea of drawing such surfaces was first popularised by Bill Bunge, but he was most
concerned about what they would be drawn of, not whether any would be drawn at all: 'Perhaps
our almost exclusive concern with such space-warpers is due to the disproportionate influence of
economic geography in current theoretical work. We need a grisly “death-miles” distance to explain
human migration of a gross planetary sort' (Bunge, 1964, p. 8). As yet not a single surface drawn
in proportion to 'death-miles' or even the most parochial of economic variables has been created
as far as I am aware, almost half a century after Bunge first publicized them. His inclusion on
Richard Ichord's list of people committing so called un-American activities ended his university
career. On that list he is placed eight places below Muhammad Ali and one place above Stokely
Carmichael. The full list can be found here: http://indiemaps.com/blog/2010/03/wild-bill-bunge/. No
other academic geographer achieved as much notoriety. If the 1970 witch-hunt of radicals had not
been so effective, apart from much else that could have been better, more progress might have been
made in mapping and visualizing societies.
16 Breaking our thinking out of the plane is an issue that was seen to be of growing importance,
especially a quarter of a century ago: 'Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of