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2
People, spaces and places
The practices through which social structure is both expressed and
reproduced cannot be divorced from the structuring of space and the
use of spatial structures. Previously structured space both constrains
and enables the reproduction of social practices and social structure.
The social becomes the spatial.
The spatial becomes the social.
(Pred, 1986, p. 198)
2.1 Which people?
I am interested in the lives of the people of Britain over two decades, the 1970s
and the 1980s. This is because I am one of the people who was alive then.
By 1990 I had been counted as a birth in 1968, a child in two censuses, as a
migrant by the Health Service, as a claimant of unemployment benefit, as a voter
in a general election.
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As I have been counted, so have been millions of others.
Surely, I thought, all these numbers can be turned into a picture of the people in
the country in which I grew up?
What is it about these people that we wish to understand? Trivially, it is who
these people were, how old they were, what they did. Fundamentally, we ask
what the relationship between these people was and what was the structure of
the society in which they lived? You cannot have grown up in Britain in these
decades without having felt the weight of this structure, how it affected your life,
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I had only voted in one general election when I first wrote the words that you read heavily
edited here. I have voted in another five since, and my children have been born and filled in their
first and possibly last census form in 2011 (all population censuses after 2011 have been cancelled
in Britain; it is claimed this will save money). My youngest son listed his ethnicity as 'purple' when
he looked at the options, as that year he was set in the 'purple group' for reading at school!
The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure
, First Edition. Daniel Dorling.
2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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